A Sacred Pause

There's a passage from T.S. Eliot that has been circling in my mind lately as I witness the weight of the world pressing down on so many:

"I said to my soul, be still and wait without hope, for hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love, for love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith, but the faith and the love are all in the waiting. Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought: So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing."

These words feel particularly salient as we witness the multitude of crises unfolding across our world – political divisions, environmental catastrophes, economic uncertainties, and the general unraveling of systems we once believed unshakable.

I'm noticing a pattern in conversations – a mirroring between the personal crises many are facing and our larger collective challenges. Career upheavals, health diagnoses, relationships unraveling, death and loss – all of which seem to be microcosms of the dissolution playing out on the global stage. There's a resonance between these individual happenings and our shared experience – as though our personal pain and collective suffering are not separate phenomena but different scales of the same evolutionary process. This recognition doesn't diminish individual suffering, but it might help us hold it within a more meaningful context – seeing our personal chrysalis moments as part of humanity's larger metamorphosis.

Eliot's wisdom suggests we invite a patient stillness that doesn't deny the darkness but waits within it, knowing that transformation emerges not from our frantic doing but from a deeper place of being.

Einstein once remarked that "We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them." This insight feels relevant to our current moment. The mindsets and patterns of thought that have brought us to this precipice of multiple global crises cannot be the same ones that lead us through them. We need something more – a new level of consciousness, a different way of seeing and being in the world.

My “shero” Lynne Twist often describes this time we’re living in as humanity's "evolutionary leap" in consciousness. She speaks of these times not as the end of something, but as the messy, disorienting middle of a metamorphosis. Like a caterpillar dissolving into liquid in its chrysalis before emerging as a butterfly, perhaps we too are in a necessary dissolution. The old structures, both within and around us, are breaking down to make way for something new. And if the caterpillar could think inside that chrysalis, I can only imagine it would believe it was dying rather than transforming.

The snake is another symbol of transformation. A snake sheds its skin not because there's something wrong with the old one, but because it has grown beyond it. The old skin becomes stretched, no longer able to contain the life expanding within. Before shedding, a snake's eyes become clouded over as new skin forms underneath the old. During this time, they often seek a safe place to hide until the process begins.

I can’t help but think that many people personally, and the world at large, are experiencing a collective shedding moment. The structures and systems that once seemed to fit now feel constrictive, no longer able to contain the evolutionary potential stirring within our collective body. And boy, is it f*$#ing uncomfortable.

For me, it helps to see the discomfort as the birthing pains of that new level of consciousness Einstein pointed toward. Our hierarchical, extractive, me-centered ways of thinking, driven by scarcity and fear, have created problems they cannot solve.

When I sit with clients and friends who are navigating personal pain alongside this collective suffering, I sometimes encourage them to look for the breadcrumbs – those subtle intuitive nudges that appear when we're quiet enough to notice them. But also, when the pain feels overwhelming, we may need to first practice what Eliot suggests – to "be still and wait." Not with passive resignation, but with active presence. With the willingness to sit in the discomfort without trying to fix or escape it. To allow whatever is trying to dissolve within to complete its work. To create space for the new skin of a more expansive consciousness.

"So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing." Eliot's words remind us that sometimes we must fully inhabit the darkness before we can recognize the light it contains. That sometimes we must be completely still before we can join the dance of becoming. Perhaps this is the most important work we can do right now – to wait without hope for the wrong thing, to wait without love of the wrong thing.

In this waiting, this stillness, we might just find ourselves participating in humanity's evolutionary leap – not through our doing, but through our being.