A Day of Thorns
As mentioned on other blogs, I’m in a weekly men’s circle. Much of the work within the container touches on negative self-beliefs and messages. The hidden and repressed part of us flourishing in our subconscious if often exposed. Such revelations can be both illuminating and treacherous. As a deep feeler and deep thinker, I bring intensity to my life’s experiences. Putting light to shadow has always been paired with the unleashing of wild energy. Self-awareness and healing (for me) has always followed yet it is a process to be handled with caution. But it is not a process to be avoided. As Joseph Campbell said, “The cave you fear to enter holds the treasure you seek.”
Yet I did not enter the cave last week. I left my men’s circle with a lot of unprocessed wild energy. As a I drove away, a random song played on my phone about suicide—a song (“The World That I Know”) that I have a long history with and that I have avoided for some time but I let it play and then played it again. Rough sleep followed as my mind was burning rubber which required wine (something I have not done in a while) and a sleeping pill and a carb splurge). I awoke feeling yucky, and then I somehow dropped a spoon in a morning smoothie and the result of that was smoothie erupting over the floor, up the cabinets, to the ceiling, and a ruined blender as the spoon gashed through the container’s hard plastic. As I went to get a ladder for the ceiling, I smashed the door on my toe.
In short, it was to be a day of thorns.
Not by coincidence, I judged that I was out of integrity with myself (which in the past has engendered bad outcomes) for not working in my men’s group through the wild energy that had been awakened. My heart was racing and the energy was boiling and bursting and rushing throughout my body. These physical symptoms have been present before when my body is pushing me to work (to process) and I’m in resistance. I had a dream that in a direct way communicated that my subconscious was attempting to push the work forward. I was an erupting volcano hidden by my personal shield.
Why didn’t I work? I knew going into the circle that other men wanted to work. It’s been my policy to defer. The moral code piece of this is that I feel both personal and collective responsibility. It’s not always easy to tell when I should give priority of one over the other; the men who worked had compelling reasons to do so. Yet where did this moral code come from? In part, it’s a tendency of my personality type. But as I have pondered these last few days, my code is also driven by a desire to stay out of Hell. Put another way, my moral code which is intended to keep me in the light is in substantive ways something created from shadows.
The shadow piece comes in a few shapes and sizes— in this case, my lifetime of hiding in the light, afraid of my darkness, afraid my darkness is a pathway to Hell, to eternal damnation, to burning in agonizing pain in a lake of fire without end. Raised a Southern Baptist, Hell was not just a metaphor—it was a real place where the souls who failed suffered to the end of time. Fear of going to Hell drove me as a child to separate myself as much as possible from my dark aspects, but this in turn left me an incomplete person. The work felt especially vulnerable, and I feared rejection. It also felt like in this work the nature of my soul was in play and am I ready for that? I’ve been running from my inherent darkness for a long, long time; there’s also the old patterns of I can take it, I can take being in distress, I don’t matter, I’m selfish, no one really cares, don’t draw too much attention or people will hurt you, I will do the wrong thing—all of these voices were active.
Given time, I think I would have worked but my ability to process to that decision was not in sync with the time available to get there. And I’m also not sure—I was not sure how I would do what needs to be done without accessing the darkness, without letting others see it… is that something that anyone else should ever be allowed to bear witness? But the day of thorns reminded me that the work must be done whether I like it or not.
The consequence of being out of integrity was a day of difficult energy and unfortunate outcomes. I’m giving it some awareness, seeing what messages and lessons are being imparted, and this string of sentences is part of that.
In the song about suicide, as the man is about to dive to his death, a bird lands on his hand and the subtle shift in weight pulls him back, and his perspective changes. The universe sent a simple message of, I see you, stay, and his despair vanishes in the light of his joy. A small act of kindness can move mountains. So as I’m writing this, as I walk across and through the thorns, I have my teary eyes to the sky looking for a bird.
Postscript: The bird did indeed come, an entire flock of them, and I have gained some clarity on what must be done. I believe that we are born of both the light and the dark. The human race didn’t survive evolution through politeness and faking virtue. Darkness is not evil, but it can be scary and uncomfortable; in our civilized world, we have a difficult time acknowledging the beasts we harbor usually in secret.
My lesson is that it’s time to no longer fear the dark abiding within. The path to Hell, if it exists, is not shrouded in the dark but in the fear of what I am. But there will be resistance from the shadowland. The work is challenging and uncomfortable. But in a way, resistance to Hell has created a kind of hell in everyday life. No cave should be too deep or too dark for me to dare. Monsters and demons may lay in wait. But who knows what treasure I will discover.
