Turning, turning in an ever widening gyre
                                           The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
                                           Things fall apart, the center cannot hold;
                                           Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.
                                           Everywhere the ceremony of innocence is dying.
                                           . . . . Surely some revelation is at hand.
                                                                              –W. B. Yeats

Underworld experiences can, indeed, feel like a “falling apart,” a loss of innocence, a dark cloud clustering over the Center. What we fear most is often what we need most to be able to receive the “revelation at hand.”

Living in the topside world with its technological distractions and materialistic mania eclipses our ability to see the transcendent present in creation, in all people, whatever the form or stage of evolution. Our sudden drop into the underworld clears our vision like a virginal sky untouched by the pollution of a busy city. Previously unable to see because of our polluted choices, we suddenly see and are awed by the light of it.

What we sometimes frame as divine intervention is a shift at the Center. Divine energy, spirit-who-seeks-our-matter, finds its way in – sperm-like – and constellates our longing, our reaching. We just hadn’t realized, at the time, reaching for spirit was what we were doing, or seeking, or needing. Our spiritual poverty, our shortsighted vision chose lesser gods. Our underworld experience readjusts our vision.

We are confronted by the Baba Yaga, stopped in our tracks by a burning bush experience, thrown off our horse, our centerpoint, by the blinding light of sacred energy – all this in very ordinary ways we humans encounter the transcendent in our lives. This encounter causes a shift in our personal center, in our focus, in our perspective, in all that previously captured our energy and attention. It initiates a deepening in us.

We sit in the dark until the light present in it emerges. As the darkness shifts, our surroundings look different. We find ourselves in a new center – we have new insight, new direction, new energy for what, about us, really matters – without knowing exactly how this just happened. Things that, moments before tunneled our vision, now seem less.

Only then can we realize the real privilege is not being protected from or spared the pruning of the life-death-life cycle, but the privilege of participating in how this pruning reveals to us the deeper meaning, the “revelation” we couldn’t discover while distracted by things other than matters of the heart.

We realize this shift in perspective is the miracle, the gold, not alleviation of our pain, not the resolution of what flung us into the underworld in the first place. The new perspective – the light that goes on inside of us, the wisdom that reveals the rich connection, the “ah-ha” that wakes us up in the night – is the real healing.

Like the old Willie Nelson gambler song, we have to discern “when to hold it and when to fold it.” There are times we should hold our center – not allow ourselves to be rocked by the winds of disharmony and change. There are times, as well, we should let go to the shift at the center of our lives in order to learn the wisdom to be gained there. 

The wisdom, the discernment of which to do, and when, comes from our relationship to the archetypal Center. The Center is the Still Point at which divine energy shifts and changes into whatever metaphor, encounter, or experience will speak the language of the one who seeks it. Knowing whether to hold our personal center or to let go to the shifting energy at the core of us is revealed at this point at which the divine in us and the human of us converge in honest intercourse.

Underworld experiences provide the necessary space and time for these inner revelatory forces to do their work. Like a Samurai wrestler who first connects with his inner silence before he executes his punch, like a poisonous snake that instinctively coils before he strikes his prey, the wisdom that emerges from our underworld struggle comes after much inner work that is not seen with the human eye.

I was raised on Rudyard Kipling’s poem, “IF.” “If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs and blaming it on you; if you can trust yourself when all men doubt you, but make allowances for their doubting too. . . .” This would be an instance of when to hold our center. The time to let go of our present center in order to move into more sacred energy, a more enlightened place, comes with our wrestling, like Jacob, with the angel of revelation we meet at the Center.

This means paying attention to our breathing, becoming more aware of our breathing as coming to us from a transcendent source, and resource. We consciously let go to this inborn autonomic system that knows Center and serves us as an inner beam of light, leading the way.   

The death of “innocence” that comes with underworld experiences is the necessary outcome of letting go of one revelation for another. What captures our soul’s imagination and longing one day does not the next. This letting go process initiates us into energies that transform and deepen us and will one day lead us, even without our understanding, to that split moment in which we are one with the eternal

I met the Baba Yaga in Africa. She came in the guise of that forceful, disrupting furor, El Nino. She grasped at me through that lost baby gazelle I had to turn over to forces I didn’t understand. She flashed her toothless grin at me beside that Hadza hut where I unconsciously released my grandchild to the whimsical forces of life. 

The Baba Yaga is a goddess figure in Russian fairy tales for the dark side of the Good Mother. She eats people who think life should bring them only happiness, people who ask “why” in the face of suffering, people for whom the dark side is not acceptable. She meets us in any descent into the underworld where we are temporarily overwhelmed by unconscious forces that disorient and leave us breathless. Her intention is to disorient us so we may stop and listen.

I learned of this Russian goddess/hag from Marion Woodman and Robert Bly in their book, The Maiden King. The Baba Yaga is a fairy tale metaphor for sacred energy — the life force that pulls us to the Center and makes us look beyond the illusions we create in our efforts to feel safe. Encountering her is our initiation into wholeness: death in the service of life. She holds the wisdom of what our dark moments are trying to teach us. She knocks us around, causes a shift at our center, and demands we face her and answer her question. 

Baba Yaga questions abound in spiritual history. Like the question posed to the Rich Young Man in Jesus’ parable: You say you want to live? Can you give up – let go of — the one thing you prize most? Or, the question to Abraham: You want life’s fullness? Can you give up, let go of your only son, your heart? Unless you’re first willing to give me your heart’s delight, she taunts, your last holdout, you’ll never be free to understand the full mystery of what I have to teach you. Give up control and I’ll empower you with a life far beyond your present understanding.

Baba Yaga’s question is posed to each of us: Do you live your life out of an awareness that your very breath is something given you from beyond? That every day, every choice, invites you to deeper living, to be used to its fullest, with grateful heart? Or, do you live your life by random acts? As Woodman suggests, if we answer with a simple answer and not with the subtlety of our whole life experience, the Baba Yaga will devour us and spit us out. She is no easy lady.

I went to Africa to see the wonders of nature uncontaminated, to see wildlife grazing in pastoral beauty, to experience something beyond my usual way of knowing. What I got was something I could never have consciously chosen. The Baba Yaga chose it for me.

She spun me around in my soul like El Nino spun around our plans until I had no resistance left for her questions: Can you let go of your expectations of what you would experience here and live in the moment I give you? Can you give over to life your precious grandchild and allow him the life meant for only him? Your own vision of what your life is supposed to be? Do you trust that the universe provides exactly what each needs in order to be whole?

There was no simple answer to hold her at bay. I have to answer with my life, with the ongoing, unknown, unpredictable drama of my life. I have to look in the mirror and answer those questions every day. She stands right behind me, her cackle ever present in my soul.

I am reminded of something Carl Jung wrote in his Memories, Dreams, and Reflections: “The meaning of my existence is that life has addressed a question to me. Or, conversely, I myself am a question which is addressed to the world, and I must communicate my answer, for otherwise, I am dependent upon the world’s answer.” (318)

Jung mused that an “impersonal archetype” was “pressing in on him,” a question he couldn’t clearly articulate. It’s as if the universe wants us to figure out, with her, more appropriate questions that open up possibilities ahead for the future of all of us. We are not personally picked out to do this by ourselves, for the human race, but our piece of the truth – our experience of archetypal energy, our personal coming to consciousness – opens a door for all of us.

This happens with our inevitable encounter with the Baba Yaga, in whatever form it takes in our life. She knocks us around, forces us to look at questions we wouldn’t choose ourselves, pushes us to grapple with eternal questions we’d rather not have to face, always sacrificing for the new in us that is trying to evolve. She comes in the service of our wholeness.

“Don’t take my harrowing interventions into your life personally,” the Baba Yaga, according to Bly, shouts at us. “It’s not personal; it’s archetypal.” It is that sacred energy in life that leads us from the Center from which we came back to the Center, the Still Point, into which we return at the end of our days — that sacred space in which Mother has been all along.

Don’t clutch or cling to anything, she reminds us. Trust in the eternal wisdom that everything flows, is supposed to flow, into that eternal river, as it should, and as you will, at death. These daily deaths you experience along the way – Don’t take them personally. They are for your good, a holy remembrance of that sacred arch we all have to journey as part of life’s unfolding.

The Baba Yaga had roughed me up enough in Africa that, by the time I arrived at the airport in Atlanta and was met with my daughter’s unexpected news, there was nothing left in me to take her decision to move from Atlanta personally. I knew this was not a personal bad joke played on me by a menacing universe. It was just one more visitation from that sacred life energy that burns away in us anything that is not essence. 

I know she’s out there, the Baba Yaga, just around the bend. It doesn’t have to be in some exotic land or obvious display of disruption that she spins her magic. She knows just when you need for her to drop down into your life. She knows just what question you need to address.

Remember. Don’t take it personally.

I was 7 years old when I fell in love with the moon. I was at summer camp for a second year and tormented by one of my cabin mates. This caused me to be homesick; I wanted out. I wanted my mother to make me feel safe. A wise head counselor would stop by my cabin and take with her into the night. She made me feel special, told me wonderful stories, and taught me, with her, how to howl at the moon.

Those nights with that counselor, out under the stars, calmed my spirit and mothered my soul. We’d howl at the moon, snuggle close together, sit quietly at times and just listen to the night. My homesickness was cured; my mothering needs were met. Something deep and archetypal and spiritually fine awoke in me and held me tight. 

The moon has fascinated since time began. Early man, according to Eliade, incorporated moon cycles into their ritual. The moon, for them, was a magical creature that danced out life’s story, revealing the cyclical recurrence in everything living. The disappearance of the moon was never final. It always recycled back with a new moon, a new cycle. It was a sign, for early man, of the necessary regeneration in the life-death-life cycle. It generated hope, says Eliade, for what otherwise seemed to be random occurrences and catastrophes.

We post-moderns are so removed from nature and its cycles. We’re insolated. We’re more comfortable with perfection, with persons and things in their prime, with the up-swings in life. We feel cheated and personally deprived with the down swing. Every living thing, writes Eliade, in order to recover vigor, to put out new growth, “has to be reabsorbed back into the formless from time to time; restored, somehow, by the primordial darkness from which it came.”

Underworld experiences do this for us. They carry us, against our conscious will, into the darkness of some black experience, only to spit us out on the other side with new insight and vigor. Within our dark moments, light emerges like a new moon and revives, renews, starts us off again on a new plane, with new insight, with a clean heart.

Our darkness, never final, is, indeed, a cleansing agent, a tearing apart so things can be put back together in a different way experience, a returning-so-we-can-remember experience. It is the natural order of things, like the moon recycling, waning, and then reviving itself. We are recycled back, re-membered back, reacquainted with something we have forgotten about ourselves, dipped once again into the primordial darkness of our origins.

Relationships go through this cyclic pattern –.periods of disenchantment, a loss of vigor and nurture, a questioning of why we got in relationship with this person in the first place. The relationship suddenly seems dry, stale, without enthusiasm (without breath). We have to dig deep, hang in there, work it, until the relationship – the love and commitment – revives, once again, from the ashes, renewing the meaning of why we are together.

One reason addictions are so entrenched in our society is that we don’t know how to deal with these natural cycles. We are suddenly starving, restless, irritable, for no apparent reason. Instead of digging deep and discovering what in us needs to be renewed, we turn to food to fill our hunger, to alcohol to ease our restlessness, to casual sex to release the tension.

If we can consciously hold the tension as we move through the down cycle, we can work with it until we can release it into the renewed energy of the up cycle. It’s usually a spiritual hunger and not a physical hunger at all, an existential problem, not a real danger. Our spirits are hungry to find life or meaning in something. We need time away, a moment of clarity or rediscovery, solitude. Then we can rejoin whatever we sought to evade with renewed energy.

The moon, I’m told, vanishes from view for three days at the end of its monthly cycle. This absence, this disappearance, is metaphor for our own descending, deep into our interior, in order to discover, within the present circumstance, the vigor we need to embrace our commitment. We return to the upper world, the world of our visible endeavor, put back together in a new way, not noticed, perhaps, by those around us, but energized and more insightful.

The moon mirrors life for me in other ways. Watching the moon shift shapes and sizes has allowed me personally to become more comfortable with my physical body. I see my body wane and revive, my energy wane and revive, all towards some sacred wholeness that stretches beyond awareness. My moon compassionately companions me in my up and down weight cycles. Perfection to me is now no more important than any need for the moon to always be full.

The moon doesn’t change; the light of the sun on it changes. We can’t always see its full shape. Hidden in darkness, the fullness is there, ready to be revealed with a slight shift of sunlight. We, too, are already full with enough sacred energy to complete our story. It takes the light of consciousness to reveal to us this fullness and our kinship with this moon that mirrors our becoming. A trip to the underworld releases more of this conscious light in us, if we allow it.

I’ve never lost my attachment to the moon. I still want to howl at her, am swooped up by her charm. She was mother to me when, for whatever reason, my own mother couldn’t. She was friend to me when, for whatever cause, my world simply wouldn’t. I often wonder if that wise head counselor who first mothered me so was really my moon come to hug me below.

The stain glass windows that grace the cathedral of my home church are stunning. The cobalt blues and brilliant colors shine like jewels on a sunny day. Images jump out and stories unfold with each shift of daylight. Without this light, without the sun to display their brilliance, they stand, darkened, in quiet witness to the faith-life they portray.

The beauty and sacred wisdom within each of us are much like these windows – hidden, silent at first, waiting to be revealed by the light of our spiritual awakening. Like stain glass, this hidden wisdom, this inner beauty, can’t be ours without the light of awareness, but they are there, waiting for the right exposure. Otherwise, they remain in the dark.

This is what I call the positive dark, the unknown of us, the pregnant source within that reveals to us our true being. This dark is that part of us that goes through the fire of ordeal in order to allow the light within us to shine on our experience and reveal in it what we came to this place to learn; in order to release our inner wisdom, the eternal spark within that informs our lives.

Those experiences that throw us into the dark — our struggles, our failures — hold the new energy, the new revelation. Naturally, we don’t want to go through the dark, the fire. It’s hard to embrace the dark from an ego position. We see this as our having to give up that part of us that keeps us grounded in the only things we’ve known up to now. It’s only when we begin to see from a soul position that we can recognize the new ground of our becoming – who we are becoming because of our ordeal — as holy ground, as positive in a spiritual sense.

The more we go through our dark moments with this awareness that there is wisdom hidden in them, clues that reveal our way through the forest, the more light we shine on these dark places. We realize that going through the fire is the only way we get the wisdom, the sacred beauty within. This helps us more easily tolerate the anxiety these experiences bring. We can more consciously surrender to the fire that transforms.

We only learn to love the dark when we can shine a light on it and see traces of ourselves as already transformed, as already having the wisdom because of our dark experience. It’s as if we already see ourselves on the other side. Our dark experience doesn’t go away when the light of consciousness shines on it. The pain, the struggle is still present. The light only makes them more prominent, more potent, more rich, so we can move through them.

Stain glass windows sparkle and reveal their beauty in the light; they don’t cease to exist in the dark. Our dark experience – the death of someone close, a lost job, hardship that causes a deep wound – doesn’t necessarily change when we shine light on it. We still have to use every ounce of wisdom and trust we have gained till now to get us through. But, we know from experience that a revelation is at hand, that the resource we need is already within.

The positive dark contains the beauty and the love and the creativity that is hidden in us, those unknown parts of us that release the new energy. The positive dark holds that new deck of cards within us from which we can draw a new hand, a new potential, a new way of being in the world. To the world, our having gone through the fire leaves us looking bruised and blackened. What the world views as ugly is indeed our best hope.

Like the Black Madonna who graces that famous temple of medieval stain glass — Chartes Cathedral – we are blackened by the fire in order to return to our virginal state, ready to give new life to what is precious within us. The dark experience strips away all that detours us from our virginal Yes. The consciousness that emerges from our having endured the flames vaults us into a way of being only our inner wisdom could have imagined.

In the positive dark of our wounding experience, our wisdom, our potential, our fullness waits. It waits for the light of consciousness to shine on it and reveal its treasure. This happens when light and dark come together in fruitful intercourse. This happens in us when we discover in the dark the light that is hidden there, waiting, revealing, releasing something in us that matches our longing.

Unlike the negative dark that feeds on addiction and suicidal ideation, the positive dark that houses our inner treasure does no harm to our essential self. It just waits for the light to reveal it, for us to become conscious of its presence in us. The negative dark – addiction, war, genocide, violence – thrives on destructive energy even in the dark and cries out to be activated in the tormented soul.  

Like Jacob fighting with his angel till morning light, we have to fight any negative darkness in us until we can drag it, kicking and screaming, into the energy of our positive dark. There is more light accessible here. We can transform the negative, destructive energy with the light of our conscious intent, by hard work, by the wisdom we have gained from our work in our positive dark.
   
The dark is not final. It waits for the light. Allowing the light to shine on it and through it and from within it lights up our soul like a stain glass window on a lovely autumn day. Learning to love the dark is taking the pieces of our brokenness and creating from them something of beauty.

“I feel like Alice in Wonderland and somebody’s changed all the signs through the forest. They’re all pointing in different directions, and I don’t know which way I’m supposed to go.”

My client was frantic and scared, confused most of all. She sat in the middle of transition, of change. Nothing seemed to calm her spirit. I called on that place in me that knows confusion, feels lost, doesn’t know which way to turn.

We all know that place, try to keep the door locked, to lose the key. We struggle to feel inside and to be close to whatever we find there, to be whatever we are to be. We have to shift, like a kaleidoscope, trying out different meanings and directions until one fits our experience, our own path through the forest. Then we know we’ve found our meaning, our path, our next move.

It’s in the in-between times we grow, find the “new” we need to wake our angels. It’s living in between states of knowing, without fixed expectations, that we stumble into our raison-d’etre. We realize, while we were waiting for something to happen, something or someone was waiting for us. The universe was opening up to us as we were opening up to it.

It’s not a passive, but an active waiting that’s key, a straining to see a face on our  becoming, a waiting to hear a voice that might speak, or not. We have to be quiet to hear those closed places in us opening up, stretching to the light; to sniff out the hidden light that’s present in all darkness, to lean into it until our dark is light. It’s an Old Testament waiting, a making ourselves available for possible encounter. 

Being in between times of growth is like moving through the dark phase of the moon, when we can’t see light from our perspective. We know the potential is there, brilliant in all its luminous radiance, hidden, just on the other side. We just can’t see it yet. It’s the same with sensing the presence of that invisible reality that supports and sustains us as we move through visible reality. We know it is there, just beyond our conscious awareness, yet we don’t know it. 

Then, as with murky waters, our feelings clear. We see beneath what’s been there, all along. The waters still, the dark night subsides, the flip side swings back around. We see our face as if for the first time, witness ourselves taking on our dark companion on his turf, see us move into energy we didn’t know we had.  

It’s as if some inner body steps outside us to lead the way. We move with that inner body, keep pace until it’s our own pace we’re keeping, claimed, enfleshed, enlivened. What we don’t know is supporting what we do know, what we can do, until these two fall into line as one courageous movement forward. Grateful, we toss aside all understanding of what is happening in us and just allow it to have its way with us.  

As the waters still, we see our signs through the forest were not turned around at all, not changed by some trickster’s hand, but clear and bold before us. It was our perspective of them, our narrow vision, the way we saw them, needing them to be a certain way, not seeing possibilities. They hadn’t changed, only pointed in directions we could not decipher with the map we had.

The signs — the next right step — come from within ourselves, from our own experience enlarged one step, just beyond our ordinary way of seeing things. Signs pointing from the world soul, through our own, and into our field of time. Direction at last! Energy at last! We step beyond the fear even though we do not yet see clearly through to the other side.

Arriving at this inner place of knowing is a different task for each of us. For some, waiting until we know the next step is soulful. For some, coming to decision by first trying things out to see what suits us, what helps us to know the next step, works best. There’s no one way, only better for us. We each have to forge our own way through the forest.

As for my client, I could only tell her to wait, to wait until the waters cleared, to wait until she saw herself doing what she loved, to wait until her passion began to stir once more. I could only assure her that her full energy would return, with direction, with focus, within a new cycle. All I could do was to wait with her, to witness her journey through the forest, to know it was all there within herself, waiting to lead her home

“You’re the best thing that ever happened in my life,” David told his new wife in one of our joint therapy sessions, “but being with you deepens my anxiety, my sense of failure.” David married late in life. He struggled knowing his wife now witnessed his lifelong battle with self-destructive behaviors. “The guilt I feel makes me hate that destructive part of me,” he said. “I know you hate that part of me, which translates to me, you hate me. That causes me to hate me.”

David’s self-loathing, in turn, feeds his demons, makes him turn to them more, for comfort, for familiarity. His demons know him better than his wife knows him. He unconsciously sabotages the relationship, tries to “kill” it so his wife can’t witness, can’t see him in his shame. She feels him pushing her away and interprets that as his not loving her. Things spiral downward. The dark side of them both surface and interact.

I was a philosophy major in college. One of my favorites was Fredrich Nietzsche, a 19th century German philosopher famous for his statement, “God is dead.” That’s from a work called Thus Spoke Zarathustra. In this philosophical piece, the Ugliest Man killed God because he could not bear the thought of God looking at him in his shame.

He did away with God, killed God – or his metaphor of God – so he wouldn’t have to deal with his own dark side. “He saw with eyes that saw everything,” the Ugliest Man said of God. “He saw man’s depths, all his concealed disgrace and ugliness. He crawled into my darkest nooks. He had to die. Man cannot bear it that such a witness should live.” (Nietzsche, 379)

Most of us have a hard time embracing the dark side of ourselves, our personal demons. We fail to accept the fact that human beings are both generous and devious, both loving and selfish, both magnificent and flawed. We fight that part of ourselves we aren’t proud of, don’t like. We want to split it off, not address it.

I see this struggle in many of my clients. Fred wore a rubber band around his wrist for the first few weeks of therapy. I didn’t have to ask the reason; he used it to remind him to emotionally beat up on himself. He couldn’t live with the fact he impregnated a woman with whom he had casual sex and then didn’t want to acknowledge being the father.

He wanted the whole thing to go away. It marred his image of himself as hero in his family, the one everyone looked to for guidance. It caused him to want to kill the God-energy within himself – the healing energy within – as he didn’t think he deserved love or forgiveness for his “selfish, random act of lust.”

We’re not meant to be perfect in this life. We’re meant to be whole. In fact, our imperfections, our warts, are what a friend of mine calls “the love handles by which God can grab hold of us.”  There’s also that line in The Arabian Nights: “Where you fall, there is your gold.” Learning to face the dark side of our personality and coming to a place where we can befriend it is what cracks open our shell and releases our higher angel. It brings us down to earth, humbles us, softens our heart, grows our compassion.

For our newly married David, allowing a loving presence in to the secret spaces of his self-destructive behaviors – allowing someone who loved him to witness his struggle, his existential battle to live – allowed him not to battle it out alone. It offered him the possibility of self-acceptance and healing. “If you can love me in all my darkness, I can learn to love me,” he told his wife. Hope was restored, and energy to do the hard work. 

Love and acceptance melt down the walls of our pain and shame and allow healing. The sweet consolation of a loving presence in our life, especially in the midst of what seems like a losing battle, awakens in us a song we had forgotten to sing, a laughter we thought was lost to us forever.

When we fail to allow this, because of our shame, we become the Ugliest Man, wandering around in sackcloth and ashes, beating ourselves up and refusing to be open to the very forces that can heal us. These invisible healing fingers – love, connection, beauty – are everywhere, accessible to anyone willing to face and tame whatever demons might line one’s journey through the forest.

The truth about living we gain from our wounds, from our darkness, becomes the wisdom that saves us in the end, or as Hemmingway put it, makes us “stronger in the broken places.” Once we struggle, or fall, we know the landscape of it. We learn from past dark experiences how to illuminate these dark moments with the bright beams of beauty and love available to us, until these light our way to the other side.

Failing to do this, we fall prey to even stronger self-defeating energy, like addiction and suicidal ideation. This is the negative dark that lies at the lowest bowels of our darkness. It is that part of us that wants us dead. It is unforgiving, unrelenting. Staying connected, reaching for the light in our life, whatever that is, frees us to rise up to higher ground.

My client Fred eventually removed that rubber band from his wrist, allowed the healing support of friends and a new loving relationship help him find the good in himself, and discovered he could indeed deal with having a son out in the world. His shame melted into gentle self-acceptance. He gave up having to be seen as perfect.

Learning to live with our dark side is not easy. Slowly, we come to realize that we have everything we need within ourselves or within our reach to handle what comes our way. The gold in it is what it has to teach us about the fragile, glorious, baffling thing we call living. 

Sometimes it takes generations to feel something. Sometimes we have to grieve for things that happened years ago, sometimes even before our birth. Something may have happened in our parents’ or in our grandparents’ generation that was never grieved and has impacted us in ways we never imagined until we hear a story from their life.

My mother tells a story of something that happened to her when she was a small child. She tells it with no particular emotion, sees no significant implication for herself, for her life, as she was not allowed to feel it, to grieve it, by her own parents. They didn’t know how to mirror back, how to process feelings themselves, so they couldn’t help her with hers. My mother stuffed her feelings.

When I recently said to her, upon hearing that story from her childhood, “That was abusive, Mother,” she responded, “That’s the only way they knew how to discipline.” No feeling. No connection between that experience and her way of being in the world. As I push her to feel it, to process it now, she gets in touch with past hurts and disappointments, able to feel them, perhaps for the first time. We grieve together, process it together.

What this kind of exchange has done has opened up for us a whole new way of talking about our own relationship. Mother, now in her 80s, is more in touch with her feelings and vitality than I can ever remember. She feels everything, wants to resolve anything and everything that was ever unresolved between us, whether she knew its impact at the time it happened or not. She’s the mother she wants to be, could have been, had there been no hurt and damage in her own childhood. She feels, grieves, loves openly and wondrously.

Lately, I’ve been grieving experiences from my own past that are long over, but for which I never really grieved. I’m surprised myself by what has initiated such a flow of untapped grief. The joy my grandson brings me has gotten me in touch with the sorrow I never allowed myself to feel. I find myself grieving for all the times I was not emotionally free to delight in my own children with the same availability and sense of wonder I can now with my grandchild.

Experiences I could not previously bear to feel rise up before me like long-neglected children, wounded, hungry for the chance to be seen and embraced. Memories from my marriage, too painful to process until now, circle round and finally have their day. Wounding moments from a past long gone yet present still within my body cells.

I’m grieving losses I intellectually resolved but never fully felt. Sometimes it comes in the form of pure feeling, no content. I’m not even aware of what I’m grieving, but the pain and depth of sorrow that emerges in me stops me in my tracks. I have to stop and feel it. As I breathe my way through the feelings, I sense a letting go. As if a larger space is being carved out in me for joy. I’m more in touch with the natural highs and lows of life, find joy and sorrow wedded.

The body knows these things. She wants us to be whole. She holds back things we cannot bear to process until that time we can. She gently reunites us with unprocessed feeling from our past so we can release the energy it took to repress this until now. She allows our tears that wash light into body cells that hold our past dark wounds. We have only to trust her wisdom.
As my mother continues to do her emotional work, as I do my own, an inter-generational blockage that hovered over my own childhood is slowly breaking free. Feelings thaw and flow more freely through the veins of our family. It touches every level. We’re able to process and talk about things as they happen, not wait until a later, better time to come back to resolve.

My own children don’t seem as tainted with the same emotional stoppages. They weep, declare, emote freely, as experiences interface. If we each continue to do our emotional work, my grandchildren will not feel the need to grieve for past generations as I feel the pull to do. Feeling the fullness of life with its ups and downs will be a natural rhythm. No attempts to talk someone out of his or her feelings. No fear of what will be said or left unsaid.
  
This creates in me a litany of gratitudes. I welcome home what Mary Oliver calls “the warm animal of my body.” Emotions ebb and flow in natural cadence, gifting me with parts of myself I had long silenced. My feelings wander home like little lost sheep, wagging their tails behind them.

WINNING THE BATTLE WITH THE BOOGIEMAN

Living in the woods as a child taught me about letting go. There wasn’t a lot to do in the country at night. Our nearest neighbor was over a mile away. My sister and visiting friends and I would play a game of “Boogieman” outside to entertain ourselves.

It had to be dark. We’d all gather around a certain spot outside and dare one of us to walk around the darkened house, alone. I must have been young enough, at 10 or 11 years old, because I was terrified. I can remember to this day the physical fear that pulsed through my body while I’d sing out our traditional verse about how the Boogieman “can’t get me tonight.”

I must have been old enough, too, to sense how to hold my own hand, to give my fear over to a stronger presence within, to dare to walk a walk my legs did not want to go. The walk around the blackness was the adventure. The pounding of my heart was the adventure. The coming back to place, the return to smiling faces of my sister and friends on the other side of the blackness, the prize.

When I returned recently to my old house along the Chattahoochee River and saw the distance around it which seemed endless as a child — as an adult, so containable –I marveled at what depth such learning experiences play, what grace they offer.

Friends often ask me now, for one reason or another, “How do you stay so calm?” When economic worries shake my door, when uncertainties seem more uncertain, when I can’t seem to see the plan I set in motion taking shape, I go back to my little childhood game in the woods and sing the Boogieman out of my heart.

I sing instead the woods and the waterfall and the animals I allowed to take the Boogieman’s place. I sing instead the presence within who loves me into behaviors and attitudes I cannot claim myself. I sing until I am no longer alone. Then, the walk in the darkness does not seem so dark.