When I look back now across more than three decades of my work, I can see that some of the foundational symbols of The Living Attributes Codex were present long before I had the language to describe them.
One of the earliest experiences that I now recognise as significant occurred in 1993, when I was co-facilitating a transformational seminar called Another Point of You. The seminar was attended by both men and women and explored transformation, perception and the possibility of experiencing ourselves from another point of awareness.
During the seminar, we created a powerful process in which the participants formed a large circle. At each of the four directions we placed a gilded mirror. The mirrors became points of reflection within the circle, creating an environment in which the participants were not simply looking at themselves, but experiencing themselves within a larger field of relationship, reflection and perspective.
During this seminar, I had a dream that has remained vivid in my memory.
I dreamt that I was walking through a field along a path. On either side of the path were tiny snakes. They were luminous, a neon lime green, and I was simply aware of them as I continued walking.
Eventually, the path curved. As I gently turned with it, I encountered an enormous luminous green serpent. Its head was as large as a house, and its mouth was open. I had an unmistakable feeling that I was supposed to enter it. But I was startled. I did not enter.
At the time, I had no idea how significant this dream would become.
It is important, however, to distinguish the dream itself from what happened next in my vocational life. The serpent dream was an inner experience, rich with symbolism, whose meaning I could only contemplate in hindsight. The turning point that followed was something much more concrete. It involved a real decision about whether I would continue my work independently.
The seminar brought an unexpected opportunity. A woman from Hong Kong attended and was deeply interested in the work. She wanted my co-facilitator and me to take Another Point of You to Hong Kong and was interested in promoting the programme there.
Then circumstances changed. ~ The man with whom I had been co-facilitating decided that he no longer wanted to continue with the seminar. His decision brought our professional partnership to an end.
Suddenly, I was faced with a very practical question. Would I stop the work because the person I had been working alongside had stepped away, or would I continue on my own?
The woman from Hong Kong wanted to help me take the work forward independently. Interestingly, she wanted the programme to be offered specifically for women. (In Chinese culture, the Snake is an archetype for wisdom, intelligence, transformation, and divine power.)
This was indeed the real vocational turning point. From this change in direction I created a new experience, a Women’s Retreat – “To Be Woman.”
Until then, I had been co-facilitating. Now I had to step forward and facilitate alone. I had to trust myself, trust the work and discover what it meant to stand in my own authority. I chose to continue.
I went on to travel to Hong Kong and facilitate seminars there for approximately three years. The same woman also became the promoter who brought the retreat to Bali, where I facilitated the work as well.
This experience changed the trajectory of my vocation. It was the beginning of discovering that I could carry the work myself and, importantly, that my work could evolve into something created specifically for women.
Looking back, I can see an interesting correspondence between my snake dream and this turning point, although I do not claim that the dream predicted what would happen.
In the dream, I had been walking along a path accompanied by many small luminous snakes. The path curved, and at the turning point I encountered something vastly greater. I was invited to enter it, but I was not ready.
However, in my waking life, my professional path subsequently changed direction. The person with whom I had been travelling professionally stepped away, and I found myself at a threshold where I had to decide whether I was willing to continue alone.
The connection between these two experiences has become meaningful to me over time. The dream presented an image of a significant threshold. Life then presented me with a real one. And in that second instance, I chose to step through.
The serpent or snake has long been a powerful symbol of transformation across spiritual and mythological traditions, associated with regeneration, healing, wisdom, protection, life force, death and rebirth. Its shedding of skin offers an enduring image of renewal, while in Indian traditions the serpent became associated with Kundalini and awakening energy. The Ouroboros places the serpent within a circle, creating another powerful image of cyclical transformation.
I can say that, for me, its appearance at the bend in the path symbolised a threshold: the moment when transformation invites us to move from observing change to entering it.
Thirteen years later, in 2006, something changed profoundly in my experience of consciousness. I describe it as an awakening. From that point onwards, information, insights and creative material began to pour forth with an intensity that was difficult to explain in ordinary terms.
I began to describe the experience as being like the Rainbow Serpent coming rushing through me. And my task was not to force the information to arrive. It was to be ready, willing and available to catch the ride of the energy and allow what was coming through me to be received.
That language has remained important to me because it describes something fundamental about the way The Living Attributes Codex developed.
I didn’t experience the work as something I sat down and designed intellectually from beginning to end. It emerged through a continuing relationship between experience, contemplation, symbolism, intuition, observation and embodiment.
By 2008, the foundations of what would become The Living Attributes Codex were beginning to take form. Only now, looking back across the years, can I see how these experiences seem to belong to the same unfolding story, while still being distinct experiences in their own right.
In 1993, there was the circle and the four gilded mirrors. There was the path, the curve and the luminous snake. There was also a very real vocational turning point in which my co-facilitator stepped away and I was invited to continue the work independently, specifically with women.
That was not the serpent dream ~ It was a separate experience.
But the two experiences have become connected in my understanding because both occurred around a time of transition, and both ultimately became part of the story of how I came to stand more fully in my own work.
And today, I can see the relationship between those early experiences and what I now call the Living Attributes Codex, the Gold Circle and the Sacred Mirroring Spiral. I have recently chosen to rename what I previously called the Gold Seal as the Gold Circle.
The change may appear subtle, but for me it represents something important. A seal can suggest something fixed, completed or closed. A circle suggests relationship, continuity, wholeness and movement. It has no beginning or end. It can contain, connect and reflect.
That understanding takes me back to the experience of the gilded mirrors in 1993. Before there was a Gold Circle on the page, there was a circle of human beings standing within a field of four gilded mirrors.
The symbol was lived before it was drawn. The experience came before the framework. The framework came before the language through which I could explain it. And perhaps this is the essence of what I now understand as Sacred Mirroring Spiritual.
The mirror reflects what is present. The circle creates the field in which that reflection can be experienced. The spiral introduces movement.
We encounter ourselves, we reflect, we change, and eventually we return to something we have encountered before, but from another point of awareness.
This is why I no longer understand transformation as a straight line.
We do not simply leave one version of ourselves behind and become another.
We are always in a cycle, encountering familiar themes from a different level of consciousness. What once frightened us may eventually become a source of wisdom. What once appeared outside us may become something we recognise within ourselves, and what once seemed like an ending may reveal itself as another turn of the spiral.
This is why I now see the Gold Circle and the Sacred Mirroring Spiral as more than diagrams. They are expressions of a living process.
The Gold Circle represents the field of wholeness: the place in which the many aspects of ourselves can be witnessed, reflected and brought into relationship.
The Sacred Mirroring Spiral represents movement through that field: the continual process of encountering, reflecting, integrating and becoming.
Perhaps the most important lesson I have taken from that first encounter is that I thought I wasn’t ready to enter. And perhaps that was exactly right.
We do not always cross every threshold when it first appears before us. Sometimes the invitation comes long before the readiness.
The symbol may arrive before the understanding; the experience may precede the language. And the wisdom may only become visible when we look back along the spiral and realise that what seemed like separate moments were, over time, contributing to the same unfolding body of work.
The path curves. The circle remains. The mirror reflects. And we continue to evolve.
Heart to Heart, Elizabeth
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