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