On the Work of Conscious Transmutation
Alma Tetto
(A chapter from Hydra Sessions—work in progress)
(A chapter from Hydra Sessions—work in progress)
What we are engaged in here is a practice of embodied self-analysis and a process toward self-knowledge.
Self-gnosis is echoed throughout time by the ancient sages and oracles as the most self-responsible work we can do as human beings.
This work requires that we call our power back from external sources, to identify who we are beyond societal and familiar conditioning. The conditional layers peel away, and the illusion of security the external once provided us with is shown to be flimsy, conditional, and false.
To call our power back is to look courageously at our unconscious patterns. It is to devote oneself to the work of relating to what is unconscious within us, to bring it into the light of our awareness where it can be met and transmuted.
This union between the light and dark—where unconscious material is met with consciousness—is what the mystics and ancient alchemists called the sacred coniunctio, where powerful metamorphosis becomes possible.
To see what is unconscious within us is to pull back the veils that have blinded us to our own power. To consciously relate to the unconscious is to get in touch with one’s own creative power—the power to generate, organize, and deliver—or destruct.
This choice to be creative or destructive is of utmost importance. When the unconscious energy becomes a powerful destructive force in one’s life, when chaos becomes a ruler or directive force, there is an undeniable call to rise above it, to strengthen oneself in mental and physical capacity in order to tame the unconscious from running the show.
To allow our unconscious to direct our life force is to submit ourselves to destruction. There is confusion where there is a lack of clarity. Circular thinking, fearful decision-making, and a lack of commitment are all signs that our unconscious patterning has power over us.
Developing one’s personal boundaries is critical. The practice of self-discipline and relating to one’s inner authority and self-sovereignty relies on strong boundaries. One’s intention to increase awareness becomes a north star, a directional guide to taming the unconscious toward a higher goal of generative creativity and transmutation of the unconscious material.
One’s commitment to this work must not be taken lightly. This engagement puts one in direct encounter with the dark (unconscious) inner matter. This work is profoundly triggering, emotionally painful, and provokes discomfort. The individual’s commitment becomes a stronghold to support them in facing what is inevitably surfacing. Their intention and steadfastness become foundational pillars that anchor, support, and protect them to meet themselves in their unconscious depths.
Meeting ourselves in our depths with intention, we discover an unshakable inner security that is self-contained and self-activated. This is the G-O-D within—the power to generate, organize, and deliver, or destruct. This is a creative power that enables us to consciously direct our lives and organize the necessary resources to do so.
One of the first steps is profound self-accountability. An individual must become aware of where they are blaming external events, circumstances, and persons for their challenges and hardships. They must take responsibility for what they see as their disabilities or life’s unfairness. This extends to inherited traumas, familial patterns, and childhood abuses or disadvantages. One must be willing to take full responsibility for one’s position in life. This does not mean that the individual caused their own pains, but that they recognize that they have the power to perpetuate the patterns or disrupt them. The individual has the creative power to introduce new generative patterns, aligned with their intentions and to imprint new patterns as a default.
It is astounding the way an individual will stake their ground and defend their ways of being. This is a sign of victim mentality which stakes the person to their current state and their own helplessness in the matter. They make excuses as defense mechanisms, validating their unconsciousness as the reason for being as they are. These defense mechanisms perpetuate the power of the unconscious over them. To accept self-responsibility is to realize one’s power over the unconscious, to direct it in favor of life and creation. Refusal or denial of responsibility allows destruction to rule over one’s life force. This denial enables us to remain infantile in relation to our life.
The call of individuation is a call toward radical responsibility. It is to realize that we may be products of humanity, culture, family, and community and yet consciousness enables us to forge new pathways for us to thrive. To thrive is a creative act and requires that we believe in our capacity to adapt and evolve. To thrive is to honor the gift of our life.
It can be difficult to see the gift past the hardships, chaos, and confusion. Like a pearl formed out of irritating foreign matter in the oyster, one’s gift is intricately and indivisibly linked with the challenges they face. There is an innate intelligence that shapes the gift we hold within us without us needing to do anything. When we trust our own innate intelligence and nature, the pearl is revealed to us in time. However, when we reject the irritant or deny our pain, the process of our own inner refinement is interrupted.
Honoring ourselves, we trust our own processes, including the call for descent. When the unconscious erupts into our lives, one must slow down and take heed. One cannot proceed forward, business as usual. One cannot grasp at life as they previously knew it. The unconscious is also profoundly intelligent. The eruption of unconscious material and power in one’s life is a sign of deep internal imbalance. The unconscious energy erupts to powerfully transform our lives and put us back into harmonious relation. When it is denied at this point, destruction becomes the unconscious modus operandi.
At the stage of eruption, another way is possible. Rather than to deny the unconscious or push it away, one can meet with it. Slowing down life as usual, withdrawing from the typical external pushing through or fixing, is the path toward conscious awareness of the underlying patterns that contributed to the eruption of chaos. It requires the aforementioned courage to see the psychic demons (the complexes) that have haunted us (taken hold of the psyche).
Psychic levity produces the necessary neutrality we need in order to face these inner demons. Meditative practice calls our attention back to the present moment, again and again, where our duality can meet in a non-dual space. Past and present are only alive in this very moment, and when we can hold the tension of both, we find neutrality. Pause makes this possible. Impulse arises out of our being pulled by the tension, like a game of tug-of-war. The inner fear, worries, anxieties, resentments, judgments of self and other, blame, denial, repressions, rage, addictions, grasping, endless desiring—and so on—pull at us from within and guide our choices, making us servants of our own unconscious processes. As we’ve all felt at times, these inner impulses are also at odds with one another. We hold inner contradictions.
The tension between our inner patterns is unbearable. When we become conscious of our inner duality and complexity, we realize there is a point of balance between the tension. It is available in the present moment, with the power of our awareness. When we learn how to direct our attention to this place, the tension becomes generative, or creative. It is the impetus, or catalyst, for our evolution. Out of this place comes clear insight from one’s inner intelligence that allows one to thrive, to work in participation with one’s unknown depths. Clarity comes from this place. One develops trust and surrender to their innate creative genius which demands to be realized.
Psychic levity comes out of a practice of holding the tension in real-time, being present with the discomfort of what is at odds within us. We have a habitual way of becoming disembodied or distracting ourselves from our pain and discomfort. We reach for our phones, for entertainment or comfort or advice, we reach for immediate solutions and quick fixes, we reach for pain medicines, anxiety pills, antidepressants. We numb. We look away. We sweep under the rug. All of this denies the unconscious a way to become realized or rise into consciousness. When instead we turn toward our discomfort, we realize that what we are experiencing is the inevitable duality of our nature. Our presence with it cultivates a neutrality that allows us to see its transience. Rather than perpetuating a habitual pattern that exists beneath the surface of our awareness, we realize a power we have to dissolve it.
Cultivating our mental capacities is crucial for this work. Our minds are powerful, and our thoughts are sticky. In any given moment, a thousand thoughts pass through our minds. If fear has a strong disposition in us as a protective mechanism, fearful thoughts are perceived as life rafts. We give weight to our fears because we imagine they will save us from making the wrong choices. Our fears are indeed protective—they teach us healthy limitation. But when the negative aspect of mind is stronger than the positive, expansive aspect of the mind, one collapses into negativity and destruction. The person who is ruled by their negative aspect of mind is cut off from that which can feed and expand their life force. Such person is cut off from their ability to self-resource, cut off from generative possibility. Their life force is not in healthy relationship with their world around them; scarcity is the default.
When a person directs their attention to the present moment, they can give equal and neutral weight to both the positive and negative aspects of the mind: the protective aspect demands the respecting of one’s limitation and boundaries while the expansive aspect aims to slowly expand one’s awareness to creative possibility beyond the known.
This balance between the inner dual tension is primary in the process of individuation. An individual has no choice but to tend to this work of inner alignment and balance. Not choosing this work is to fall or remain victim to one’s own life. Commitment to this inner work offers a person creative power over their life, to direct their life force in ways that serve their innermost needs.
Individuation is easily misconstrued as a product of our Western individualist paradigm where the individual takes precedence over the whole. Individuation transcends individualist culture because it acknowledges that the individual is a product of and contains the whole. Each organism is a part of the eco-system. The individual who cultivates their creative capacity to thrive contributes to a thriving eco-system. The one and the many are related.
A creative, individuating person is in touch with a sense of inner purpose that directs their movement in the world. Their thriving is based on an innate intelligence or innate mechanism for survival of the whole. This creative intelligence, when honored, does not consciously perpetuate harm to self, other, or world. Rather, it serves itself as a way to uplift and transform the world in creative ways. It honors life and recognizes that the nature of life is itself transient. Life is in a process of constant rebirth and regeneration.
A person who is initiated into the path of self-gnosis and self-realization chooses life. They choose life while also honoring the profound mystery of death as a portal for material transformation. Like the leaves that fall from the branches of trees in autumn, death is mulch for more life. Death becomes fertilizer that nurtures and preserves life, that allows it to continue. But such a person does not choose death. They bow to it as a sacred part of life (sacred meaning the wholeness of it). Bowing to death, they choose life and thus perpetuate creative continuity.
To choose death is to be a force of destruction, to perpetuate patterns of pain, to leave a trail of hurt, resentment, and rage. These patterns can serve as another’s catalyst for growth, like the irritant in the oyster urging a process of inner refinement, but it leaves behind a legacy of destructive patterning. The suicidal impulse is the denial of one’s power in life. It is to collapse in the face of life instead of stepping into the realization that one is a vessel for life. Suicidal thoughts and feelings can be a sign that something in the individual is ready to die in order for new, unrealized aspects to emerge. Often what is demanding death within us is those parts that aren’t aligned with our true nature. The masks are peeling back, our skins are ready to be shed. What can emerge if we honor the death impulse as an act of personal surrender to more life to emerge within us?
The initiant understands that as a vessel for life, their life force is a gift. With such wisdom, they carry forth the gift. Their life becomes a creative offering in service of the whole. But the paradox is, this wisdom requires their profound self-containment. They turn inward to discover that their innermost needs are the key to their creative blossoming. Their healthy honoring of their boundaries and limitations in relation to their expansive sense of possibility is a place of profound and original self-conception that is true to their innate essence. In connection with this seed-place inside them, they move out into the world as a creative force.
(To be continued)