What Gate Am I Stepping Through?

The gate of birth.

14, 21, 28, 35 years. While I was walking in deep death, deeper and deeper into the dark woods.

There is a rhythm that has moved through my life like an invisible thread, opening gates every seven years. Looking back now, the years from 35 to 42 reveal the movement into rebirth. It felt like dying, but actually it was the transformational process of growing new skin under the old one that was going to be shed.

And now, approaching the threshold of 42, something in me recognizes the next gate.

A new life lived from a state of remembrance.

A painful crawling through the canal while, all along, there has been light shining at the end of the tunnel. On some level I have always known that the light was never somewhere else waiting for me. Everything is already here. And still, my investigating nature wanted to move through the whole possible spectrum of experience in order to understand what was hiding beneath the surface. I wanted to know what it means to become conscious of myself, not only of the parts I could see and name, but of the whole. Who Am I?

And somewhere along the way, I think I also fell in love with death.

Not death as an ending, but its simple power. Death releases the hands from control. It opens the fists. It brings us to the place where the old strategies no longer carry us, and what remains is surrender.

For a while, I thought my surrender began when consciousness started descending, in a very particular way, from the mind into the body and into the present moment. Now I see it as a much longer process. From shadow to gift, and from gift toward what has always existed underneath them both. In the language of the Gene Keys, toward the Siddhi, the original state of being that does not need to be constructed.

Lack of trust. Nervous system dysregulation. Unsafety. Control.

I have travelled with these layers for a long time, and along the way my understanding of healing has changed. Real peace cannot simply mean becoming endlessly skilled at regulating myself back into a state I have defined as safe. Regulation, somatic practices and bottom-up work all have their important place, but underneath them lies a deeper question:

What do I believe?

If my starting point is continually that something is wrong, that my body is dysregulated, or that something around me is dangerous, I may unknowingly keep reinforcing the very reality I am trying to become free from.

The real shift has therefore begun to happen on another level.

I have started locating the beliefs that sustain the story of life as unstable and dangerous. I have learned to take small actions that contradict those beliefs, not violently, with clenched fists, or by forcing myself into panic, but with curiosity. Consistently and gently. A hand on my heart.

We were afraid before. We don’t need to be anymore.

The nervous system can be spoken to. The body can be met in conversation. My different parts can come into communion through conscious communication. New pathways can be created through repeated experience. A vast sea of possibilities often lies on the other side of discomfort, but there is no need to break our way into it. Too deep, too fast, too much can simply reinforce the old wound.

Real strength is not the capacity to endure more. It is the capacity to remain connected to ourselves while something new becomes possible.

And at the same time, I have understood that none of this is happening on only one level.

The lower world, the middle world, the upper world. Body, mind, subconscious, consciousness. Biology, emotion, belief, spirit. I spent a long time trying to understand on which level something needed to be resolved. Now the image is changing. The thread of Life moves through all of these levels simultaneously, carrying information, remembrance and harmony between them.

Not somewhere in between.

Everything happening all at once.

Maybe the deepest work is not an endless movement from one level to another, but remembering the place from which all of these levels can be perceived simultaneously.

The superconscious.

Not as an escape from the body, nor as an attempt to rise above our humanity, but as a state of consciousness that includes the body, the subconscious, our history and this very tangible human life.

My work with trust seems to have been leading me here for decades.

Not toward convincing myself that everything is safe, but toward no longer building my existence around the assumption that I must constantly know, control and secure what happens next.

And there is an important distinction here.

A healthy nervous system is not always calm.

The body is wise. If an environment is genuinely dangerous or harmful, it should react. Some things are meant to be rejected. Some things are meant to frighten us. External safety comes first. The purpose of healing is not to regulate myself so completely that I can remain peaceful under any circumstances. That would simply become another way of disconnecting from my own intelligence.

A healthy system is a living system. It moves, reacts, opens and closes. It learns to recognize the difference between an echo of the past and an actual danger in the present.

And it also knows that we were never meant to do everything alone.

Co-regulation is not a failure of self-regulation. Bonding, connection, oxytocin, another person’s presence, being held and sharing space are part of human biology. Especially for women, by nature. Maybe this is why some deep feminine wisdom within me has guided me toward support at the very moments when my mind would have preferred to do even this alone.

This, too, belongs to birth.

Because birth does not happen in a vacuum. Birth needs an environment capable of receiving new life.

When something that once triggered me becomes neutral, I know something has been learned. When I no longer need to fight it, analyse it or regulate myself around it, something has genuinely changed. Not because I have conquered myself, but because the reality to which that old reaction belonged no longer exists in quite the same way.

And maybe this is where I am now.

35–42: entering rebirth.

42 onward: a new life lived from remembrance.

If the years of death have taught me how to let go, the gate of new life is asking something different. It is no longer asking what I am willing to release.

It is asking:

From what state of consciousness am I willing to live?

Trust is no longer a practice I use to calm myself down.

It becomes a way of being.

Surrender does not mean that I stop acting or abandon discernment. It means that control moves out of the hands of the small mind and returns to the greater intelligence that has been carrying this journey all along. To the same thread of Life that has travelled through the lower, middle and upper worlds, through my body, my shadows, my nervous system, my relationships, my deaths and my births.

Maybe I am not stepping through a gate into a place where I become something new.

Maybe the gate of birth opens at the moment I stop becoming.

And begin living from what I have known all along.

Pictures are some gates that I have been walking through..within and without 😉