'Holy Fire'—Resignation to the Numinous

Picture it: a Patriarch descends into a shadowy tomb on the holiest day of the year. Alone. In the dark. What meets him there isn’t a dead body. It’s fire—divine fire, erupting from the darkness. An Anima rising from the Underworld.

He emerges carrying this flame and shares it with the crowd. One candle to another, wick to wick, soul to soul, until a sea of light fills the night.

If that isn’t a symbol for the individuation process, I don’t know what is.

Each of us has to make that descent. Into the unconscious. Into the dark places we’ve been avoiding. Down there, we encounter the shadow, the archetypes, the material we’ve been running from. And also—waiting in that darkness—our own inner flame. The Anima. The part of us that holds creativity, imagination, spontaneity, and the capacity for genuine feeling.

But the Anima is only half the inner partnership. For the psyche to be whole, the Animus needs to be there too—the clear light of reason, discernment, focused action. Anima and Animus. Lunar and solar. Yin and yang. You need both in dynamic balance. That’s what Jung called the inner syzygy, and when those energies come together, something new is born: the Self.

In coaching, I see myself as a fellow traveler in this process. Through dreamwork, active imagination, shadow work, and symbolic thinking, we create the conditions for this inner alchemy. When someone engages with archetypal energies and mythic symbols, they expand beyond their limited ego identity and connect with something much larger.

But this path doesn’t fit neatly into a weekend workshop or a ten-step program. It asks for an ongoing, deepening relationship with mystery. A willingness to let go of the familiar and surrender to something vaster than your plans. Jung called this the numinous—the direct experience of the sacred that happens beyond the ego’s control.

That’s a hard sell in a culture that values literal facts over symbolic truth and quick fixes over slow soul work. Walking this path takes courage. It takes support. And it takes what I’d call radical trust in the process—a willingness to accept both the beauty and the brutality of the human experience. To release what no longer serves. To offer it into the fire.

But when you do? Something alchemical happens. You find your own light. Not someone else’s. Yours. And you carry it back up, out of the cave, into the world.

What’s being kindled in the depths of you right now? What’s asking to be released and reborn?

The flame is already there. It just needs you to go down and find it.