The cave we fear to enter
How are you? It’s a weird old time on planet earth huh? So many people globally with their life’s work pulled out from under them. I hope whatever your situation is, you are finding a way to be with what is happening. It’s undoubtedly a movable feast of emotion. No rights, no wrongs, we are in a period where we are all beyond the known. All we have is each moment, doing our best, whatever that is. But just know this is not a time for creating more striving, filling in space and silence with new skills attainment, and keeping up with home bakers on Instagram. There seems to be a push from some quarters to use this situation as a time to fix all the stuff that’s broke and actualise on all fronts or you are wasting your time.
I say no to this approach as more busyness to stop being present to the true catastrophe that is COVID19, and everything that offers us. There are many people cheering for the silver linings in the world situation. I’ve been one of them privately, as I have seen a real opportunity to stop all my motion in the world and go in, do some excavating and probing of what I’ve been avoiding. Should you do it to? Nope. Not unless you are called to your own work. While we are collectively gripped with a crisis, we need to have time to grieve, to allow it to sink in, to be held in the discomfort of everything this pandemic is. We need to sit in the problem for longer than is necessary, not rush to a solution or a new skill or any of the things that make noise where the silent wisdom of not knowing and not doing just being could be heard.
“The cave you fear to enter holds the treasure you seek.”
It’s a quote attributed to Joseph Campbell, and has been on my mind since the world collectively have been sent to our caves. It has a simple message: the parts of ourselves which we are most frightened of, when the time is taken to investigate, lose their terror, and can be integrated and liberated. Many of us, most of us, all of us, not only have caves we fear, but we do anything to avoid entering them. COVID19 presents us with a particular sort of cave, a one stop shop of primal human fear. Death, isolation, loneliness, unemployment, identity, material support, it holds them all within its inky depths.
I think one of the primary power tools of our collective caves is another element of contemporary Western life we don’t do well: silence. For many people, social distancing, working from home, disconnection from family and friends has meant extended periods of time alone with their own selves, without the distraction of busyness, the noise of people. An invitation to step into the cave and see who we are echoed with each step. When we take away our working identities, jobs, our routine, our bedrock of working to earn money to create the trappings of security and comfort, the bottom stable layer of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, the sense of self becomes somewhat less externally defined.
When asking people to introduce themselves at workshops, I often ask that job titles and roles aren’t mentioned, to remove the status signaling that we all do as we rank and classify people into who we think they are by what they do. It is a struggle to find ourselves when we take away the convenient shorthand. It gets harder if you take away our names, what are we left with? Who are we if we have no title? Who are we when we are faced with the reality that everything we thought was safe, stable and permanent is open to decimation? To disappearing? Who are we if we are not able to be spoken?
These existential questions often provoke anxiety, anger, a desire to stay in the confines of the hard evidence of our existence. But the cave remains. Our greatest terror, that of death, asks us to give up all the us-ness. Relinquishing these items is the cause of great anguish for what we leave behind, as though its belonging to us was more than a chimera of ownership, and that things and people somehow despite the mounting evidence of eons, are more solid than the rumors would have it. What to do? How do we enter the cave when it terrifies us, and what happens once inside? How do we address the primal mortality fear that pushes us to limbic reactions and legacy actions to calm our minds?
The itinerary is simpler than your sympathetic nervous system might think. Remembering that fear and courage are companions, and that fear will undoubtedly show up in one of its many physiological outfits – anxiety, shortness of breath, hot or cold flushes, panic, constricted throat, stomach knots and nausea. This isn’t a stealth move on the part of our bodies, it’s a somatic reaction, which is convenient as it allows you to see the blockers to your courage, and welcome them on the journey.
This is your body keeping you safe, shouting at you to not do the big scary thing you are about to. You already have the only thing you need to enter the cave already – a set of lungs. Breath is the antidote to all of the above, big, deep, oxygen filled breath. Once you are oxygenated and your parasympathetic nervous system has everything under control, it’s time to sit still and silent.
The cave is a metaphor, so the entry to it can come anywhere. Your mind is no help to you now, only noise and confusion. What you need is to move your attention into your real mind, the heart, where your intuition and wisdom dwell. The phrase sit in the discomfort comes from this very situation. Nothing needs to be done. How infuriating in an action bias loving world. You feel triggered which you know as you begin to have a physiological reaction that precedes the speed of your mind registering that something is going on. You drop a pin in the map of the roads to what you fear most and you pull over and stop whatever you are doing. Just breathe and listen to your inner world.
What’s going on in there? Noisy, whooshing, silent, juicy and visceral, just pay attention. Don’t think your way into knowing, just see you way into wisdom. What just happened, just before all this started? Ok, hold that moment. What does this feeling remind you of? When does it remind you of? Who does it remind you of? When have you been here before, and what happened just before that moment? It’s a rabbit hole and you can go as far as you like into it. Spoiler alert: it usually starts in early childhood. That will have been the moment you acquired this wound that has been unhealed. A wound that finds ways to show up over and over, linking to events and people a million miles from the original event, so far you don’t even make the connection with the seeded pain.
The floor of the cave is littered with the bones of those childhood hurts, slights, disappointments. Finding the tender spot can take some rabbit holing. It’s a practice, going back to the cave and sitting with painful feelings, the ones you would normally crush with something else – maybe food, or booze, or scrolling a screen, or sex or books or misplaced anger. You get used to the cave, it’s not so scary, a little dark, but it’s you, it’s the you that just needs the curtains drawn back, a window opened. Once the fear and pain stop being over there, out of reach of soothing and are inside, where they can be addressed and seen to without flinching, that’s when their edges begin to blur. Your body will continue to give you the heads up for a while, perhaps you will get to the place where you eagerly await the opportunity to explore more deeply, in lockstep with your own divinity.
Which of course is the real cave we fear to enter. We don’t fear our pain and our wounds as much as we fear the realisation that we are divine, part of a whole so vast and ineffable as to only be able to be defined by love. If we listen to that story, then all of the things we attach so much importance to here, in this human experience, they cease to enthrall us, to entrap our minds, they are grist for the mill of being, and all experiences are welcomed with flow not fight.
However you are dealing with social isolation, your own losses or gains, the cave you are being invited to enter, it is exactly where you need to be, and you’re doing it perfectly. Try and get curious when it all feels overwhelming, and always come back to the breath to return you to a steady state in an unsteady world.
