Balance is like grace: We don’t know we need it until we don’t have it, or until it’s thrust upon us. Without the right amount of sleep, play, food, imagination, order, or disorder, we get sick, disoriented, unable to function as we should.
Most of us resist that part of balance we don’t understand. We go along without much thought. Then, like Alice, we fall through the rabbit’s hole into another realm of being. Everything is different, turned around, confused. We find ourselves having to deal with experiences and feelings that are unfamiliar, uncomfortable, dark. We experience what the ancients called the underworld, that sudden adjustment experience or compensation that comes when we’ve stayed too long in the comfortable or familiar.
The underworld is a metaphor as old as the Sumerian myth of Inanna, as contemporary as Dorothy’s journey in “The Wizard of Oz” from the safety of Kansas into Oz and back home again. We visit the underworld often against our will, because we are part of a larger will, and because there are things worth learning we might otherwise choose to avoid. Call it the universe, life, fate, God, whatever metaphor you choose, a larger wisdom is at work in our becoming and knows better than we the balance it takes to become whole.
Our descent into the underworld takes many forms. It may visit us as a short funk or as an extended depression, an altered state of suspension in which we descend into the abyss and wander the darkness of old woundings. It might be a subtle shift of consciousness, a moment of visionary union with a loved one. It happens naturally as a descent into our night dreams where we encounter images and messages we don’t absorb in our topside or conscious world.
It may come as a temporary lapse of conscious control — a sudden change without warning in our behavior pattern, or an “out to lunch” experience for which we cannot account. It may be a fragmentary memory that pulls us away from the focused moment and sweeps us off in a flood of emotion. It comes sometimes with a troubling experience that shatters the peace in our family life or relationships.
It’s a movement downward, an inward spiral, a walk on the edges of our otherwise ordered life. We go there without notice, without conscious choice, pulled there sometimes by faceless energies just beyond awareness. Far from the goal-directed, cerebral, doing of our topside world, the underworld is affect-laden, pre-verbal, being to the core.
Like a swimmer in an underground cave, we find the gold — the truth or experience that had evaded us in our conscious mind or living — and swim back to the surface, changed. We find ourselves reshuffled, shaken by the journey, spewed back into ordinary life with a deeper awareness. All the pieces that felt flung into the air, chaotic, float down in quiet patterns of newness and opportunity. Things look different. We are different.
This natural process of compensation, built into our humanness as a corrective experience, transforms and reshapes our choices and understandings. For my part, my funk, my revisiting old woundings, is a reminder I don’t want to go back there. I might otherwise forget and repeat old, dysfunctional patterns. My night dreams teach me something about myself and my journey I can’t hear on a conscious level. They salt my life with clarity and direction.
My intuitive gropings lead me into connections with the invisible world I could not make with my conscious mind. This expands my capacity to imagine and to enlarge on hidden gifts I would not otherwise dare to dream. My personal wounds release compassion for others and provide a mirror in which I can confront my character. This calls from me a more forgiving spirit.
The sudden falls from grace that erupt in my family life, my personal life, my world, force me to learn a deeper truth I would otherwise choose not to face. The best and worst in all of us is just that – in all of us. Learnings from the underworld are pearls of wisdom, untapped energy, sacred signals from uncounscious sources.
I am reminded of the biblical story of Lot’s Wife who looked back over her shoulder as she climbed from of the valley of destruction and was turned into a pillar of salt. Slipping into the underworld and returning with what James Hillman calls the salt from it — being able to look our dark, destructive energies in the face and transform these into energies of strength and wisdom — allows us to return to our topside world more alive, more connected with the earth, our inner resources, our deeper self.
We must avoid the natural urge to resist, as Lot’s wife did – resist leaving the known, cling to the familiar, spend our whole time in the underworld looking back over our shoulder at what we know to be true in the topside world — or we won’t be able to integrate what our wounds are trying to teach us. We need to cooperate, move into our wounding and through it, so the energy that was stored or repressed in our unconscious can be harnassed on a conscious level and add salt and passion to our life.
Rhythm is important. We cannot stay too long in the underworld, or go too long without revisiting it, or we lose the salt, the flavor, that our natural rhythms bring. Integrating what we learn from our wounds, from our set-backs, into our everyday living brings wisdom and a larger perspective from which to make better choices. Then, getting on with the tasks of living in the topside world stablizes and grounds our wisdom in healthy ways.
We too often see our underworld experiences as something to be avoided, or as bad things happening to good people, rather than as good opportunities to learn wisdom that comes from the other side of wholeness. Gifts we learn against our will that change our life, transforming and reshaping our journey.