keep on walking: labyrinths, dark spaces and new beginnings
Just about two years ago, one of my very best friends was at my house in Seattle getting ready to celebrate his forty eighth birthday. He was talking about his anxiety on approaching 50 and the feeling that maybe he wasn’t in the place he wanted to be. We were all getting a bit tipsy, and my husband kept ribbing Dan, saying, “You’re not even forty-eight yet, why are you worrying about fifty?” Dan was getting pretty irritated, and Sasha was getting pretty needly. Finally, we changed subjects to Kate Bush, which I think only brought us back to talking about how old we were. The night ended, but it was still with me the next morning – not only in throwing away the line drawing Sasha had made for Dan, illustrating the difference between 48 and 50, but also because I remember saying to Sasha, “I’m so glad for my spiritual practice. I just don’t have those kinds of anxieties about aging, or whether I have fulfilled my life, or its purpose.” Through my spiritual practice, I believed, I had the assurance that my life was unfolding as it should. It was about a year and half after that -- a year and a half that had been filled with hot flashes, depression, never ending change, hard news, hard times, giving up everything and finally making the decision to close The Samarya Center and move to Mexico -- at the end of the fall teacher training, that I was walking the labyrinth at the Grunewald Guild, a labyrinth I had walked at least a hundred times before, where I had a profound, and profoundly unsettling, experience. The labyrinth at the Guild is a traditional triple spiral. You enter in one place and keep walking the spirals as they move in and out around the center point of each, ultimately setting you back out at the very place you entered. When I take students through the labyrinth, I usually go first to set the pace, wanting folks to be mindful and present, and at the same time, wanting to make sure we get through in a reasonable amount of time. I have my pace, and I know about how long it takes to get through. I know the places where we all get squooshed together, and I know where we spread apart. I know the buildings around me – there’s the sauna, there’s the Centrum – I know how the river wooshes by to the north and how the sky opens up above us to an infinite starry vastness. I know this place. And yet on that night last fall, as I walked the labyrinth with my students, I suddenly became completely disoriented. I simply could not tell where I was, or which way I was facing. I wanted to stop and just face up, look at the sky, but I felt like that would confuse my students. I kept walking, focusing, trying to discern where I was, trying to understand how I could feel so off course, trying to not let anyone know I was confused. I kept walking. I was unsettled even more by the “unsettlingness” of it all – if that makes any sense.
I was confused by the experience itself, but also confused that I would be the one having the experience. How could I be lost?
I kept walking. I turned another curve in the spiral and finally took a moment to glance up at the sky. There it was. Whatever else was happening, the sky was there, inky and inviting. I kept walking. But then suddenly, the experience washed over me a second time. I can’t tell where I am. I can’t tell where the buildings are, or where the river is or which way is north. How will I even know if I have made it all the way around? Moments after that, my eyes fixated on the stones of the spiral I was completing, and I knew I was back where I had started. I stepped out of the labyrinth, looked up at the sky and began to sing – just like I had done almost a hundred times before. But I knew something exceptional had happened. On the very afternoon that training ended, I got on a plane to see Ram Dass. I remember telling him about the experience, both experiences actually – Dan’s existential angst near his birthday and my psycho-spiritual bewilderment in the labyrinth – and I remember his response. In a typically Ram Dass fashion, he first smiled hugely and then focused his eyes and heart, and said, “Yep. Yep. You just keep on walking.” While staying at Ram Dass’ house, I began reading one of my favorite of his books, Paths to God ~ Living the Bhagavad Gita. At one point, when he is describing Arjuna’s paralysis on the battlefield, Ram Dass talks about it as “stripping away of our models” of ourselves - allowing ourselves to be laid bare. He says, “It requires mental discipline to be in that place without flickering… That’s a very scary discipline. It’s terrifying to stand on the edge that way, to have no definitions you can cling to: no reference groups, no identifications, no self-concepts, no models. Will you dare to do it? Will you dare to throw everything over?”
He goes on, “It is only at the point where the conflict has become that real for you – where there is incredible confusion, and you don’t know where to stand in order to judge what to do next – it’s only at that point that you are ready to hear something you never heard before.”
As I read that passage, I returned to the feeling of being bewildered in the labyrinth. I returned to the night a year or so before that, talking to Dan about aging and of my self-satisfaction that I was at ease with that process because of my practice. I felt anew that feeling of “incredible confusion.” And I clung to the promise of hearing something I had never heard before.
It occurred to me then that I was entering into this darkness as a rite of passage. I would keep on walking.
This feeling of darkness, confusion and passage is one that is returned to again and again in mystical literature. Perhaps most famous is the dark night of the soul described by St. John of the Cross, a 16th century Spanish Christian poet and mystic. The dark night of the soul refers to a step on the journey to God-realization and specifically, the painful experience of isolation and abandonment of ego as part of the process. While this is a necessary step, it is also a lonely and destabilizing time. In fact, it often looks like depression – so much so that many existential and humanistic psychologists including Carl Jung and later Carl Rogers saw the experience of the dark night - its denouement and its process of integration - as a key contributor to depression, anxiety and other maladies of the “wounded well.” Stephen Cope describes this crisis in his book Yoga and the Quest for the True Self. I believe this experience is echoed in the idea of “hitting rock bottom” as described in the 12-step literature – the idea that when we are laid completely bare, in a place of total vulnerability and surrender, we are most open to radical change. It reminds me a little even of the Christian idea of “spiritual poverty,” that as we have less material wealth and less ego-identification, we are more likely to focus on our relationship with God, or move towards God-realization. But, even with the promise of something new coming in, it’s still a really hard place to be. I know. I have been there for what seems like a very long time now. I think about that time near Dan’s forty-eighth birthday when I felt so removed from those feelings he was expressing, and I long to re-experience that assuredness. Instead, I find myself in rural Mexico, separated from all of my closest friends, struggling with a painful and protracted virus, with no real job, no money stashed away, unsure of how to spend my time, missing and reliving various stages of my life so far, worrying about my sister who has stage 3 ovarian cancer, thinking about mortality in general and worrying about my whole family and how we will be together through all of the inevitable deaths in our lives, wondering about my marriage, my livelihood, my purpose, my value.
Don’t be alarmed, I’m not in any more of a crisis than anyone else, I’m just speaking it out loud. I’m a bit lost.
One of the common themes in Jungian analysis is that “there can be no wholeness without realizing our brokenness, and no self-actualization without suffering.” As I approach the New Year and as I approach fifty myself, I think of the various resolutions - - tiny shifts in habit - I might make, or the grand plans I might lay out for myself. But these trips into the future tend to feed the feelings of fear and anxiety. I just want to stop, face up, look at the sky, and allow myself to be in that vastness, that unknowing. I trust in that creative emptiness, I trust in the place of brokenness and questioning, and I trust in the process of aging and transformation. We are all in this together. What if we allowed each other to be in these places of transition without trying to justify, rush or change them. What if we spent our time creating soft spaces for these jagged feelings. What if we managed our own anxiety around the way things should be and allowed for time and space around periods of transition in ourselves and in others. There is something to be learned here, something precious to be gained. Trust it. Just keep on walking.