Can you feel your sacred time burn inside you?
You’ve likely heard these words in a song by Adele:
There's a fire starting in my heart
Reaching a fever pitch
and it's bringing me out the dark…
For many it’s a haunting song about broken hearts and a passionate love that could have been, but for me these words bear a deeper meaning.
Our soul has a fire, and it’s a fire that will not be put out. It will not be quenched, it will not be silenced. This is the fire of our consciousness, our hearts, our souls. It illuminates the path we walk in life. It defines our relationship with ourselves, with other living things, with the air we breathe and the food we eat. It changes and evolves with us, in a symbiotic spiritual dance that expresses—or only dreams of—the full wondrous potential with which we are blessed.
Some call it auras, others call it personal chemistry. Whatever the label, this is the core spiritual energy all of us are made of. Stardust? Perhaps. But I would say much more than stardust: star fuel. In our very core, we are indeed just like stars. We are fueled by an intense inner burn that lasts our entire lifetime—and if you believe in multiple lives, then it may be that we keep the same spiritual fuel as we experience different lifetimes.
It begins as a pure, white flame when we are born, and turns into the colors that express who we are and what we do as we live our lives. For some, the fire burns hotter and brighter than others. In fact, some soul flames last long past the physical lifetime of the individual… think of Buddha, Khalil Gibran, Sappho, da Vinci, and many other thinkers, artists, writers, scientists and other creators who have left extraordinary legacies to human civilization. They all had a powerful, inimitable soul fire that knew no limits and feared no obstacles.
But these personalities represent just the few whose work and lives have captured the heart of history. Many more women and men whose names have not been recorded, whose lives have not been celebrated, lived profound, meaningful, passionate lives.
Think of those who have lit up your life in some way, who have illuminated the path for you when you couldn’t see, who believed in your when no one else did. It could be a grandparent, a sister or brother, your closest friend, your spouse, your children, or perhaps a poet long since buried by the sands of centuries past whose work somehow speaks to you across the vast winds of time.
But it’s a fire too many of us have forgotten. Linear time has something to do with that. In my earlier post The theft of sacred time I write about the difference between sacred and linear time, and the imbalance between the two that modern Western society is experiencing—with negative impacts on our individual and collective psyche, health, and spirit. The negative forces in our lives, such as stress, ill health, depression, and social isolation, dampen our inner fires. It’s like throwing wet rags into our fireplace: it generates a lot of smoke that fills our house and burns our eyes, soot that stains our walls, and our fire is nearly extinguished.
Take your fire outside. Let it breathe fresh air. Stoke it with respect, love, honor, compassion, and dignity. Let it burn high and let it burn bright, and let no one convince you your fire is insignificant.
But how do we do this? How can we re-ignite the flames of our soul’s true passion?
The answer lies in sacred time. Time is one of the archetypal elements that has governed the rhythms of human activity since the dawn of our evolution—we live by it to this day. No matter how far removed we may fancy ourselves from our days in the caves, we still rise and dream according to time.
This is why our experience of and relationship with time is so critical. Time, like food, like media, like the technology and tools we use every day, is sacred and should be lived as such.
There are limitless ways how to integrate sacred time back into your life.
Find a moment during the day that can be yours, and yours alone. Spend it in meditation, thought, daydreaming, yoga, tai chi, or simple reflection. Anything that calms and centers you. Don’t worry about being “productive” or the things you need to "do". Just be.
Give of your sacred time to others. It’s a simple thing and it takes little effort. A genuine, heart-felt “good morning” to a passing stranger on the street, reading a book to your child at night, kissing your partner good-bye when he or she leaves for work, these are “small” but profoundly meaningful expressions of love and respect that our society is so starved of.
Challenge yourself—look for the moments in your day that are the most frustrating or stressful and see if you can turn them into sacred moments. How about rush hour traffic? That'll drive (pardon the pun!) anyone crazy... but you can turn it into your own sacred time by simply letting go and using the time you're apparently "stuck in traffic" to think, reflect, create new ideas or projects, or simply to be one with all of the other people sitting in cars all around you.
And if you want to be inspired each and every day, may I humbly suggest my book, “The Serpent and the Jaguar,” which runs through the entire 260-day cycle of the Mayan Tzolk’in calendar and its daily energies, attuned to the sacred time that this ancient calendar has kept for millennia. You can also see them on our Facebook page, where at this writing, over 30,500 people read these energies on a daily basis.
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