Facing Challenging Experiences
Excerpted from "Awakening the Below" by Oholomo, available now from Aeon Press!
The Descent into the Below is a descent into the unconscious portions of the psyche. Or rather, it’s an explosion of the unconscious portions of the psyche out into consciousness. It’s as if Pandora’s Box were opened and all the hidden contents of the mind — the sublime, the beautiful, the shadows, and the nightmares — all came flooding out. Among these contents, be prepared for difficult memories and traumas of all kinds to emerge. Some of these traumas will be expected. If you are entirely honest with yourself, you knew they were hidden away in there all along. Others will take you completely by surprise — memories that were completely repressed, or that you thought you had already worked through. The point is that every last vestige of unconscious pain simply must be reckoned with.
When challenges arise in the process of Descent, there are two different approaches one may take, which I refer to as the masculine and the feminine. (I know that these binary gendered terms are going to be off-putting for some people. If they are bothersome to you, please just replace them as you read with yang and yin, or any other terms you like. In my case, as a cisgendered heterosexual male who is deeply in love with a whole retinue of goddesses and other feminine spirit guides, it feels natural and important to refer to my approach in feminine terms.)
What I call the masculine approach represents the typical advice given in Buddhist and Advaita circles (Above-based traditions not coincidentally dominated by male spiritual heroes and teachers). This is to hold difficult experiences in one’s awareness until they dissolve or resolve. In the Theravada Buddhist meditation retreats where I spent much of my 20s, the instructions were phrased more or less as follows: “These afflictions are simply unpleasant body sensations; they are impermanent. Observe them with equanimity and they will pass away.” Advaita teachers I have heard, on the other hand, have tended to give an inquiry question like “To whom are these unpleasant experiences arising anyway?” or an instruction like “Experience yourself as the awareness that contains all experiences.”
These kinds of approaches are paradigmatic of Above-style spirituality: by holding the mind steady in a state of higher consciousness, all Maras can be vanquished. One’s mind is purified of these “defilements,” as they put it in Buddhism, or purified of “sin” as the Christians say.
On the other hand, the feminine approach is for difficult memories, traumas, and other challenges to be seen, recognized, and eventually even welcomed into the wholeness of your being. In order to start to do this, you must surrender to them, sink down into them, and deeply feel them. On the surface, it may look like the practitioner is doing the same thing as in the masculine approach: sitting with the experience and waiting for it to resolve itself. However, the attitude is completely different. Rather than objectifying the negative experience, disidentifying from it, reframing it, staying aloof from it, or observing it dispassionately, the feminine approach is to fully invite it in without any resistance and allow it to totally eviscerate you.
Think back to the two versions of the Buddha myth with which I started this book. In the traditional story, the Buddha is the archetypal masculine spiritual hero. He is strong, resolute, equanimous, determined, unshakable, and in control. In my recasting of the story, however, I replaced these attributes with their feminine counterparts. I made the Buddha vulnerable, emotional, relational, and surrendering. I made that change for this book because, while masculine approaches to spirituality can be quite effective in the Above, I have learned that the best way to navigate an Awakening from Below is to totally and utterly embrace the feminine.
To illustrate how this principle applies in real life, let me tell you a story about something that happened to me when I was somewhat early in my own journey into the Below. One of my kids was having a surgery to correct a congenital condition. It was not a life-threatening situation, but it was a major procedure. Although up to that point in my awakening process I had been very comfortably ensconced in the Above, with a high degree of equanimity and very little emotion arising other than tranquility, I noticed that I was feeling some trepidation about her safety and wellbeing when undergoing such a procedure. As she was wheeled into the operating room to go under the knife, I closed my eyes and tuned into my body sensations. A tremendous amount of anxiety suddenly welled up in the form of sharp little waves of sensation fluttering about in my body. These sensations were surprising and uncomfortable, and I noticed an impulse to recoil away from them.
Now, my years of mindfulness training had prepared me for precisely this moment. I knew that the “proper” thing to do with this kind of conditioning (or, as we dismissively called it in my Buddhist circles, “attachment”) was to dispassionately and analytically dissect the sensations that were appearing. To observe where they began and where they finished, their temperature, the speed of their oscillation, how they changed over time, and other details. I knew the teaching was to neutrally note these qualities as they were arising, seeing that all of it was an impermanent cloud of impersonal, transitory phenomena. I had done that many times in the past, and that’s what I “should” have done now.
But, as I sat there, something led me to just surrender instead of trying to observe, and to let the sensations completely take over my being. Among the sharp and prickly feelings of anxiety and the impulse to recoil, I now also felt my displeasure at the whole experience, my frustration with having to feel these sensations, and a tension in my chest that felt like sadness or like I wanted to cry. All of this swelled and churned like waves in the ocean during a storm. I felt gutted, like I was completely falling apart.
This went on for a while — perhaps 20 or 30 minutes — and somehow I just sat there surrendering to what was happening and sinking down into all of it. After a time, though, I noticed the sensations changing. The sharpness and prickliness seemed to give way to something more gentle. Just then, in a surprisingly sudden shift, it was like the ocean of sensation that was so uncomfortable in my chest area suddenly dissolved into a warm glow. It was precisely the feeling that I remembered from when my daughter was a toddler years ago, and I used to pick her up and hold her to my chest to comfort her when she was crying. I could feel her little warm body pressed against mine, and at the same time, a kind of outward extension of bittersweet tenderness from my heart area.
Feeling like I was actually holding her in my arms right that moment, I sensed a deep connection with her, like I was somehow sharing the trauma her unconscious body was undergoing in the operating room. I understood then that the anxiety I had felt earlier — while it may have felt cold, sharp, and unpleasant — was really just a form of love in disguise. I also understood that my vulnerability to be able to suffer so deeply out of love was not a problem — it was actually one of the most beautiful and important parts of my humanness. Pain, suffering, and vulnerability can be welcomed as part of the whole.
Do you recognize the similarities between the story I just told and my revised version of the Buddha myth in the preface? That shift from masculine to feminine is precisely the way to access the elixirs of the Below, no matter which Mara we are facing. I could never have discovered these elixirs if I had approached my experience using the techniques my mindfulness training had taught me. If I had exercised a detached posture toward my experience of anxiety, I could certainly have strengthened my equanimity, my appreciation of impermanence, and my resolve in the face of suffering. However, by surrendering to the anxiety instead, I found the blessings of vulnerability, connection, love, and tenderness lying at the core of an unpleasant yet entirely human experience. Different approaches, different elixirs.
The realization I had on that day was highly impactful for me, and from that point onwards, I applied that same feminine response to all of my weird and difficult experiences as I Descended further and further into the Below. Rather than observing these experiences with Above-based techniques, I relaxed, let go, and let them into my being. Sooner or later (sometimes much later!), I always got similar results. Some of these experiences took longer than others to sit with and fully digest; a few I had to come back to again and again for months or even years. But if there ever were any challenges or difficulties in my process of Descent, it was always only because I hadn’t yet managed to fully surrender.
Now, the advice I would have been given by my Above-based teachers about all of those experiences would have been that they are just clusters of impermanent phenomena, which I should equanimously observe and allow to pass away. Such things are distractions or delusions, they would have said; don’t get involved. If you have a lot of training in the techniques of Above-based spirituality, your ego will probably try to establish a sense of normalcy by falling back on that kind of advice. However, if you are encountering difficulties in the process of Descent, retreating into the aloofness and equanimity of Above is simply not going to work for you in the long run.
That being said, you can’t retreat into the Middle either. Don’t cling to the tools of conventional psychology, biology, neuroscience, or other knowledge systems of the Middle to try to explain the Below in a linear way. Undoubtedly, again, your ego will attempt to do this in order to tell itself that everything is okay. But, don’t allow your mind to settle on straightforward explanations or fixed notions of reality. When the ego struggles to explain what’s happening, just drop the effort to understand and surrender to fully feeling the experience instead. Sink down into experiencing whatever is going on, up close and intimately, in all of its gory detail.
Suspending your attempts to explain or understand, as well as your familiar tools and techniques, will likely make you feel naked, alone, vulnerable, or terrified. Surrender to those feelings as well, feeling them fully as they arise. If you need help with surrendering, try a surrender prayer or mantra. I wrote this one spontaneously one day, and used it daily for many months as I circled around the Abyss:
Divine Mother,
I surrender to your grace.
Embrace me, keep me safe, teach me.
I am yours.
I found that these words helped ease my mind. One of the reasons that I think this mantra worked well for me is that it set up a situation that I call “surrender by proxy.” For me, the Descent was at many points so harrowing that it seemed impossible for me to surrender to it directly. Instead, I decided to place my trust and faith in the hands of the divine mother in all of her forms (María, Quan Yin, Sol, Bachué, and all the rest). Whereas I could not manage to surrender myself to the Abyss, I found that I could surrender totally to her, trusting that she would guide and protect me. Of course, as I mentioned in the Abyss section of the previous chapter, you eventually have to let go of all crutches and pass through the Abyss naked and alone. But, I found that surrender by proxy eased my approach and gave me more confidence as I came near.
While I will present a lot of other practices in this chapter, I would say that, ultimately, the only thing you need to do to successfully navigate the challenges of the Below is simply this attitude of surrender. If you’re encountering the effects of trauma lurking in your body or your energy system is ravaged and battered, surrender to whatever is happening. If you see visions of dark threatening entities or find yourself in the underworld being torn into pieces, surrender to the experience. Faced with existential terror, madness, or the fear of annihilation, surrender to all of it, without exception. If you fully surrender to the Below, it will eventually reveal its gifts.
(That being the case, remember what I said above about grounding, specifically how it can provide a counterbalance to surrender. Learning how to pendulate between the acceleration of surrender and the self-care of grounding is a crucial skill that will ensure your safety throughout the Descent.)