Spirituality, Therapy, and the Good Life

We each face more than one period of crisis during our lives. Encounters that can shake us, break us, and often take us to darker, deeper places than we ever planned on going. I call these encounters BirthQuakes.

In her book, “No Enemies Within,” Dawna Markova describes these experiences as sacred catastrophes and observes, “Suffering is the soil of renewal. The burden and responsibility of learning your way through the ‘sacred catastrophe’ that is a turning point is that you must change the way you are living your life – deep, fundamental changes of the entire system. Often these are made in very small steps, but still they require great strength of heart. Our soul is asking nothing less of us than that we reassert the truth of our true potential.”

Michael Meade refers to such occurrences as initiatory events, encounters that “mark a man or a woman’s life forever.” Regardless of what we name them, when a crisis strikes or the forces inside of us that contain vast amounts of uncertainty (and wisdom) erupt, we all too often resist. And who can blame us, the unknown is generally rife with risk. And speaking for myself here, I’m not a particularly good risk taker. I want to keep my options open, maintain an exit strategy and possess at least two well thought out back up plans. And yet, every now and then, no matter how careful I try to be, I find myself in the midst of some hazy unknown territory without a reliable map. And in spite of all of my training in stress management, mindfulness, positive psychology and learned optimism, I seldom feel prepared to confidently navigate foreign terrain.

My husband and I loved climbing the rocks on the Maine coast and for several years made an annual pilgrimage to Acadia Park in Bar Harbor where we would gaze out over the ocean from the summit of Mount Cadillac in silence and in awe. And then, without warning, in early mid-life, I developed vertigo whenever I looked down from high places. All of a sudden, I became nauseous and the world began spinning whenever I came too close to the edge of places I had effortlessly travelled to before. The edge became a frightening place where the world seemed to spin out of my control.

Poet, David Whyte wrote, “In our personal pilgrimages there are constant edges that we are asked to go to. And if you shy away from these pioneering edges because you feel that they lead through doorways that are too difficult, you stay in a kind of bland middle…There is no human being who can stay at the edge all the time, and you shouldn’t try and force yourself to the edge. We’re creatures of visitation and absence, and we learn through visitation and absence. But, if you don’t spend any time at all in places where you are being broken open, where you are being enlarged, where you are being humiliated, where you’re being re-tooled for a larger world, then you stay in your old life and can become haunted by it.”

For years I attempted to force myself to return to the edge, as close as possible to the precipice where land and air and ocean seemed to meet. And while I succeeded from time to time, the experience no longer contained magic, only misery, and so eventually I gave up. I had to accept that there were places in the world that I could no longer comfortably stand. Something inside of me had been altered, forcing new limits and leaving me both disappointed and humbled as I found myself taking new paths up the mountain, encountering the border between ocean and land from a different perspective.

I began spending more time exploring alternate landscapes, places I’d seldom taken the time to investigate before. I fell more in love with lakes and rediscovered my affinity for rivers. Rivers – unrelenting, constantly in motion, moving passages that wind around and over obstacles, reflecting sunlight and moonlight, and connecters of the past and future while always in the eternal present.

One of my earliest experiences of awe was peering between the bars of a bridge, mesmerized by the mighty Aroostook River. This memory comes with a hazy and yet compelling notion of a dreamer being awakened at that moment within the heart of a tiny little girl. And one of my greatest ally’s in healing four decades later from a lonely and unanticipated grief was the Congaree River as I followed the river walk daily and meditatively along its shores.

When I first encountered the house that we live in now, it had no well or adequate septic system, and no bathtub or even a clean surface anywhere. It was a sad looking house, complete with crooked floors, rotting wood, cracked and broken linoleum, and was threatening to collapse in on itself. The little house would never be a showplace, or well suited for entertaining large groups ofamily and friends, nor would it offer a serene and quiet safe haven as traffic on route 131 ran just steps away from its front door.

I did not choose this house as a permanent residence. I didn’t for a moment want to move over a thousand miles away from the friends, family, and community that I had come to love whole heartedly, or leave my sweet and light filled cottage, and the life that I felt both blessed and safe in.

Moving to this little house in Wayne on Lake Pocasset was accompanied by heart wrenching loss and a longing that has not even now, years later, been completely extinguished. Still, my heart has come to open more readily here than anywhere else I have ever taken shelter. David Thoreau wrote, “A lake is the landscape’s most beautiful and expressive feature. It is earth’s eye; looking into which the beholder measures the depth of his own nature.” I have felt lost here, alone here, bereft and afraid here, and at the same time this place has both soothed and helped to deepen me. It has become my soul’s home.

Sometimes we lose ground. And at other times we discover that the place in which we first faced catastrophe, has ultimately led us to the brink of discovery; to a country where wisdom lives and the sacred resides. Bless you, bless you where ever you are, and may you come to appreciate that the place where you have currently found yourself, right here and right now, (whether welcomed or unwelcoming) may truly be holy ground.