The Power of Not Knowing
By Masami Covey
As I reflect on what 2020 has brought us, I can already feel the natural expansion opening into the new year. It reminds me of a poignant Haiku written by the 17th-century Japanese poet and samurai, Mizuta Masahide.
My Storehouse burnt down
Now I can see
The Moon!
The promise of the New Era and the transformative shifts in Cosmic Consciousness are something very visceral and real to me — I, too, am eager to welcome the possibilities of the new and release 2020.
But at the same time I am being guided to stand still in the liminal space — the space between the ashes of the Storehouse and seeing the Moon. And to pause in this period of transition, where something familiar has died and something new is yet to be born.
When we can be in the liminal space, we come home to our inner still point, fully present. This is when our roots can grow the deepest so our branches can hold both our fragility and resilience at the same time. Our energies are no longer drained by the dead weight of our unprocessed past or plagued by the insatiable need to know how the future will turn out.
We all have the natural tendency to want to know where we are headed, but this can make us get stuck in seeker mode, never quite finding the Source within us. The courageous act of standing in the liminal space is not only a requirement for healing and new possibilities, it’s also needed for us to hear our Soul’s voice.
Over the years, these three evocative Haiku lines have had varying meanings for me. There have been many times my throat would tighten at the end of the first line, making it impossible to accept the wisdom of the other two. In fact, I realized recently that I had ended up pausing at the end of the first line — for years — until my whole being was ready to receive the rest.
When my own health deteriorated enough to be given an MS diagnosis, followed by a debilitating car accident, and losing my father and our family home in two back-to-back earthquakes, I found myself falling to my knees again, unable to see beyond what had broken.
But during those Dark Nights, I received clear guidance to pause and hold steady in that vast unknown, instead of trying too quickly to remove — or simply bypass — my own breakdown, or seek for the promise of a cure. And for the first time in my life, I was able to drop down deeply into the language of my pain — and the collective pain — that my body was using to communicate with me.
This opening to “not knowing” changed the course of my healing work. It taught me to say “I don’t know,” and still feel grounded. It is in those three words that I found the freedom to move forward again, to find wholeness again. By surrendering, I reignited my intuition and faith.
As a Health Intuitive, I work with clients whose health Storehouse has burned down again and again. By the time they arrive at my “virtual door,” many of them have tried just about everything and are anxious to get going, yet at the same time feel stuck. They feel stagnant and depleted from “seeking” and “collecting” tools, and ironically “trying” too hard to see the Moon.
But how can they know how far they have drifted from their center, and how to course-correct, if they have never been still long enough in the liminal space, or surrendered to it?
I offer bio-individual support to my clients, addressing their unique whole-person needs, but there is never a panacea. And yet, I have seen miraculous healings happen to them. Once they surrender to the Dark Night of “I don’t know,” they begin to imagine possibilities and health again. This is when the true alchemy of healing can take place.
When we can let go of what the healing should look like based on old narratives, the cosmic possibilities begin to flow freely. When we can stop projecting our desires for what the future ought to look like, we finally see the essence of reawakening.
Our commitment to being grounded in the liminal space restores us, because the true healing is in the pausing — just as we saw that the earth began to heal when human activities paused during the pandemic.
What 2020 has revealed for us all is our immense capacity to stay with the unknown, while seeing and experiencing our vulnerability. We learned that we are strong in ways we didn’t know. We found that we can adapt, stay flexible, and be innovative while standing in the liminal space — and we began to think beyond just ourselves and hear the collective needs.
Whatever the dawn of the New Era brings for us, it is less important to seek the answers to how 2021 or the future will look, since it is not possible to contain or even understand all of those answers. What is important, however, is for us to create and nurture the visions of what we wish to experience in the outer and the inner world.
As Einstein said, "Imagination is more important than knowledge.” This is because “knowledge is limited, whereas imagination embraces the entire world, stimulating progress, giving birth to evolution.” Our imagination is big enough to contain all of our dreams and hopes, and our boundless human spirit. Each of us has the tremendous potential to shape and co-create the future.
We are the ones we’ve been waiting for, the Hopi Elder said over two decades ago. We are also the ones that will rise again and again from the ashes of the Storehouse. The ones who will courageously choose to see the Moon illuminating our journey back to our highest potential within.
May you be still and allow cosmic flow to guide you.
Masami Covey embraces the power of both spirit and science, of both intuition and physiology — and bridges the unseen and the seen to reveal the interconnections of body, mind, and spirit. As a health intuitive, her work is centered on cultivating her clients’ innate healing power and exploring the root causes of functional imbalances, rather than focusing on the diagnoses and labels around medical conditions. Her Intuitive insights, laser-pointed guidance, and practical tools offer a dynamic framework for connecting our subtle “body language” with anatomy, emotion, nutrition, breathwork, supplements, detox protocols, lifestyle practices, and more.
After working with clients since 1999, she experienced a complete physical breakdown of her body with an initial diagnosis of multiple sclerosis in 2011, followed by injuries from a severe car accident in 2012. She has been able to reverse her MS diagnosis through her own healing protocols, known as Zenshin Method , a whole-person approach that empowers individuals to become experts of themselves and build powerful foundations for expressing their soul purpose.
Masami, who was born and raised in Japan in a bi-cultural family, draws extensively from her blend of East-meets-West culture, language, and energy medicine, as well as her years of professional training and experience in functional nutritional therapy, yoga therapy, positive neuroplasticity, Ayurveda, and applied linguistics.
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This article appears in: 2021 Catalyst, Issue 1: The Breathwork Summit