PICTURING THE PRAIRIE Paintings by Philip Juras at the Chicago Botanic Garden 2021
I am a Phoenix.
I used to think a phoenix was a mythical bird-like creature the burned itself up, turned into ash, and then rose from the ashes renewed after having gone through an incredibly pain-filled process. I’m questioning my understanding and definition of “pain”.
I assumed the burning and re-birthing was a one-time thing that looked intense and sounded like a good way to get a full system overhaul quite effectively, albeit a bit extreme and harsh.
As I journey through the multi-layered healing process of releasing my own past traumas, I see a resemblance in the ways of the phoenix in how I heal.
Starting off, I believed healing had to be painful, take time, and was most effective when you worked hard at it. After all, “if it isn’t hard, it’s not worth doing” was an underlying belief fueling my actions. As I moved through the first layers of my healing, they were tumultuous and felt painful enough to resemble a full-on burning down of my spirit to extinguish all that I saw as “bad” within me so that I could be sure to let it go. After years of burning to ash and rising as a renewed version of myself, I’ve come to understand things differently.
First off, the phoenix doesn’t rise from the ashes one time. The burning process is like breathing. It’s automatic, done with ease most of the time, and a natural part of the process. It isn’t to be feared or avoided, but embraced. I can burn through a new layer of myself in an instant, a day, or over a couple of weeks, and I can repeat the cycle any time it’s needed.
Secondly, the burning and re-birth of the phoenix don’t have to be a damaging process. We are taught to think of fire as being destructive, but it can actually be incredibly healing and cleansing. Prairies are scheduled for controlled burns to reset the land for new growth. Nature uses fire as a way to cleanse the earth and make it more fertile. It’s natural, normal, and beneficial. It can be incredibly beautiful — as captured in the painting above by Philip Juras that I saw while visiting the Chicago Botanic Gardens. The image took my breath away. Somehow it appeared to be majestically healing the land.
Third, painful doesn’t always mean bad. There are forms of pain that some might consider good - a deep tissue massage or the soreness of a workout. Pain can be beneficial if it’s to reset a broken bone, deliver a needed medication, produce a form of pleasure, or create a desired outcome like the tattoo of your dreams.
Fear around being a phoenix feels scary to me. Fear of the unknown, the expectation of pain being bad, and the anticipation of what you become once you rise from the ashes. It’s the shedding of what was and the space that it creates that feels uncomfortable.
Many of us have set points in our internal compasses that focus us on the negative potential outcomes of a situation. We’ve been conditioned that way by society, media, religious organizations, and such, to varying degrees. Some of that conditioning may be justified in keeping us safe or providing a moral compass to live by. When we focus on the negative, we attract it to us and shut out the potential for positive outcomes. It’s the law of attraction. What we focus on, grows.
We have the power to change our thoughts and actions and to control how we respond to experiences in life. I’m choosing to embrace my phoenix-like healing journey as I burn off the beliefs, fears, thoughts, and energetics that no longer support the positive outcomes and desires I seek.
I’m choosing to lean into the potential pain, embrace the burn, and dance with the cycle of rebirth that comes so naturally to the phoenix. May it become second nature to me as well.