To have soul is to be real. To be real is to be fully unique and fully related. In a virgin forest, no two trees are identical, and everything is in constant, interdependent relationship to everything else. Thus we feel a kind of homecoming when we are able to be fully present in such a forest. The eyes rest easy.

In the modern built environment, most objects have been stripped of uniqueness and relationality. Every window in my house is identical, or of at most two standard types. The modern environment abounds in precise right angles, the elements of standardization and sameness. The products of the commodity economy are also remote from their origins and relations. If I cut a tree to build a door, I can see the effect of my action, and I may be careful to choose the right tree for cutting. The enormous distance between manufactured objects and their original context helps make us oblivious to the ecological harm they may represent. What is less obvious is the aesthetic harm, the psychological harm that comes from living among alien, standardized things. The eyes cannot rest easy; they are ever searching for the soul of what they see. It is a strain for a living soul to live among soulless things.

In his four-volume opus, The Nature of Order, architect Christopher Alexander explores the question, “Why do some buildings (and other made objects) have a quality of life or soul, while others do not?” He illustrates the question with striking photographs contrasting modern buildings with older ones – think Grand Central Station compared to Penn Station. It is obvious what he means. The list of characteristics he develops bears a striking feature: in its totality, it is not amenable to formalization. No formula or algorithm can replicate soul. This conclusion is not mere metaphysics; it offers a guiding compass for our economic and technological future.

It would be impossible to mass-produce the buildings at Source Temple. Even if machines could imitate their hand craftmanship, the buildings are unique to the land and community they serve. An exact replica relocated to a different environment would no longer be the same building. Objects cannot be separated from relationships. If we really digested this fundamental implication of quantum mechanics, we would have a very different society.

The market economy as we know it depends on the separability of objects from relationships. That is the nature of money itself: it is pure, abstract value. My dollar is the same as your dollar. It works well to mediate exchange of other dissociated, alienated objects, but when it interfaces with the relational, the unique, and the sacred, it tends to reduce them to itself. If you are a home-builder, for instance, you have to defy the logic of the marketplace to spend that extra time to make it more beautiful than it needs to be, beyond the contract. Why would you do that, in defiance of money? Well, for love. Aesthetic perfection too is a relationship, a service, a devotion to something or someone you love beyond the thing itself. Because the object is itself only in relationship.

The devotion manifest in the buildings at Source Temple mirrors the devotion I saw in members toward each other. It was a balm for me to see people overflowing with easy laughter and easy tears, serving each other in ways that might not even be noticed, gazing with love upon each other’s faces, sitting in circle. In covid isolation I’d on some level forgotten such basic expressions of humanity still exist. Here too is a kind of wealth. The self is relationship. How tragic that in order to preserve that self, we cut it off from its relationships. Something persists in that isolation, but it is a shrunken being compared to what can thrive in full relationship to community. The poverty of isolation mirrors the poverty of the modern built environment.

* * *

We live in the time of the ballyhooed Great Reset, a time following when great destruction has cleared the way to build something different – or to lock in the gains of big corporations, central governments, and the super-wealthy. What vision of human development might we hold that expresses devotion to that which we love? Source Temple offers a glimpse of it, as do certain other intentional communities and, in particular, many indigenous and traditional societies. One thing they have in common is that they stand outside modern economic paradigms of wealth, progress, and development. In fact, they ask us to reverse much of conventional economic thinking.

Let me draw out some economic principles for a Great Reset that will help make love visible in our physical and social environment. They are reversals of globalization, growth, and productivity.

1. Localization

Until very recently, globalization has been widely accepted as an unstoppable – and desirable – trend. It is indeed a natural consequence of mass production and the alienation of materials from their originating matrix of relationships. It doesn’t matter where something comes from; all that matters is the price. The myriad interactions that produce a consumer object – the ecological interactions that produce the raw materials, the human interactions of production – funnel into the single, one-dimensional relationship of buyer and seller. We feel alien ourselves surrounded by such things. A subtle feeling of not being truly at home eats away out our insides.

As children, we did not have to be taught what awe was. We simply experienced it. Recall the first time you found yourself stretched out in a field, on a balmy, late-summer day, watching those soft, billowy clouds drifting across the sky, changing forms with a restless abandon. Revealing stories to your mind. Luring you into what you only later came to understand as “reverie.” Or recall the time you were alone, perhaps on a crisp, cold winter’s night, somewhere far from city lights, and began to see the immensity of the heavens open above you as the Milky Way revealed itself stretched across the skies like a soft, wide, glowing belt. Awe, in its first, unconscious form.

Later, as you grew older, you began to realize that these stars were not simply “up there” doing their twinkling magic, but were many billions of lightyears away—and gradually, you began to understand, however dimly, what “far away” could possibly mean. 32 billion lightyears might be somehow imaginable, but hardly conceivable. As with such magnitudes, such a notion bends far beyond the widest reach of our minds. And the notion that it is constantly expanding, that it is in a sort of outward migration, exceeds the limits of our minds. What is left, in such moments, but a growing sense of awe, if—as we grow older—one shaped by a self-awareness we did not have as children.

In such moments, we begin to wonder: Who am I and who are you, breathing for a span of years in the midst of such immensities? We are but one infinitesimally small speck—by comparison, at least—in this unimaginably vast and expanding canopy of space. And yet, and yet. . .we are a “center,” somehow, of a consciousness that allows us to imagine ourselves, however distantly, as a being among what begins to appear to us as an infinity of other creatures and things. How else can we take this in other than with a sense of amazement, perhaps edging toward bewilderment? The ancient Hebrew psalmist captured this sense of awe, writing: “As for mortals, their days are like grass; they flourish like a flower of the field; for the wind passes over it, and it is gone, and its place knows it no more” (Ps. 103. 15 – 16).

And yet, and yet: these days, each one of them, can be as treasured as a precious gift, as we approach it with awe. Yet we also know that if this sense is something we come by naturally, almost instinctively, as children, it is something we gradually lose sight of as we grow older. The presence of children in our lives can help, of course: a walk along a shell-strewn beach with a grandchild in hand, or a lazy bedtime hour reading some treasured book with them that we recall from our own childhood, as once again the whimsical characters of Winnie the Pooh and Piglet, Christopher Robin and Eeyore come to life—such moments remind us of a delight we once knew without thinking about it. In their presence, we find ourselves touched again and again by awe as we watch them discovering their world, our experience as adults now seasoned with memory and the long arc of experience.

Rainer Maria Rilke was a poet, one might say, who felt himself caught up over and over again by the capacities of awe. It seemed to be the state of mind out of which his poems emerged, and he occasionally wrote memorably about it. In a French letter written near the end of his life to the talented young Swiss painter Sophy Giauque, he put it this way: 

How all things are in migration! How they seek refuge in us. How each of them desires to be relieved of externality and to live again in the Beyond which we enclose and deepen within ourselves. We are convents of lived things, dreamed things, impossible things; all that is in awe of this century saves itself within us and there, on its knees, pays its debt to eternity.

He went on to wonder “how to speak this language that remains mute unless we sing it with abandon and without any insistence on being understood.”

Our work, as humans, is—in part, at least—to find our way back to this original posture of awe. To learn to respect, with a sense of wonder but also with “fear and trembling,” that we are part of a “whole” whose center is everywhere, and whose bounds we cannot even imagine. Ours is the work, as we grow older, of recovering this posture, of learning in an adult form the cadences of this strange and marvelous language, and finding a way to embody the rhythms of its vocabulary and the energies of its grammar in our life. Ours is the work of wandering in what the French philosopher Gaston Bachelard described as the “intimate immensities” of our minds. Ours is the gift of learning to recall, as Rilke put it, that our lives are “convents of lived things, dreamed things, impossible things”—which is yet somehow necessary for the expansive collectivity that holds our wellbeing. 

The poets we turn to in our desire to recover this sense of awe invite us to delve into this alluring sense of wonderment and linger in it, seeking those unexpected yet somehow familiar ways by which we remember to open ourselves to awe. Theirs are the voices and gestures that remind us of the boundlessness of our imagination, that elastic portal of our consciousness mind that opens us into what we have long gestured toward as the “heart.” Ours is the work of following their lead, and allowing ourselves to be “re-minded” that “all things” including ourselves, are in migration.

Again and again

Some people wake up.

They have no ground in the crowd

And they emerge according to broader laws.

They carry strange customs with them,

And demand room for bold gestures.

The future speaks ruthlessly through them.

-Rainer Maria Rilke

No doubt you have noticed that we are living in turbulent times culturally and as a planet. All pretense of immunity is collapsing as we realize how completely entangled our lives are with one another, with kelp beds and calving glaciers, with refugees and the dreams of young people everywhere. The disequilibrium shaking the world feels like a continual tremor on the fault lines of our psychic lives. Very few things feel stable. It is like a fever dream. It may be that this is the initiatory threshold we require to wake us up. Whatever is happening, much will be asked of us if we are to make it through the whitewater of this narrow passage. We do not know what lies ahead, but one thing is sure: This is a time for bold gestures. It is time to wake up and humbly take our place on this stunning planet. The future is speaking ruthlessly through us.  

___________________________________________

The immediate need of our time is for ripened and seasoned adult human beings to take their place in our communities; individuals who carry a deep and abiding fidelity to the living body of this benevolent earth, to beauty and to their own souls. Traditionally, these were the ones who had successfully crossed a series of initiatory thresholds and had come through as protectors and carriers of the communal soul. They were the ones whose artistry and wisdom kept the current of culture alive. We live in a society that has all but abandoned rituals of initiation. Consequently, we are languishing from the absence of mature and robust adults.

How do we become seasoned adults, a true human being? This is not a given. Traditionally this was the work of culture. Through the long labors of multiple initiations, individuals were gradually crafted into persons of substance and gravity. The process yielded someone more attuned to responsibilities than rights, more aware of multiple entanglements than entitlements. They were initiated into a vast sea of intimacies; with the village, star clusters and gnarled old oaks, the pool of ancestors and the scented earth. 

Through the sustained attention of culture, individuals were ripened into adults capable of sustaining culture: A marvelous symmetry. 

We are meant to cross many thresholds in our lifetime, each a further embodiment of the soul’s innate character. Yet many of us carry the uncomfortable thought that we are unsure of our place in the world, still anxious about our sense of value and our right to be here. The unfinished business of adolescence haunts us and makes it hard to live into the larger arc of our lives.

Crossing the threshold from adolescence into adulthood requires an ordeal, a tempering of the individual that begins the process of ripening. There is no easy passage. Many traditional cultures escorted their youth into the world of adulthood and the sacred through an elaborate series of rituals. These rituals occurred in nature, in the holding space of forests and caves, savannahs and bush. It was a space outside the ordinary world of the village, apart from the community and often took place over many weeks and even months. It was a time of tempering the young ones with intense ritual ordeals that took them beyond their capacities to endure. Something died in the process. Something needed to die in the process. And something needed to come forward. Some new shape of identity that was wedded to the silt and slope of the land, that spoke the feathered and furred language of the creatures and the song of the dawn. This new identity was commingled with the holy topography. They became one and the same.

Underneath and holding up this initiatory process was a deep and abiding relationship to the wild world and the spirits of place. This passage was rooted in a nearly endless succession of generations that had come to learn the necessity of such a transition. The awareness for this is essentially universal: our souls must be shaped by a process of intense ritual encounter, communal reflection, and immersion in the natural and supranatural worlds. In other words, to become an adult, certain gateways needed to be crossed for that territory to be fully embedded within the person.

What we witness daily in the litany of injustices and exploitation of others and the world are the actions of uninitiated individuals. It is not difficult to see how questions of adequacy and inclusion are often portrayed in gross exaggerations of power and force. Nor is it a stretch to see how the persistent hunger in the unripened psyche of so many is at the heart of our violent consumption of the planet. 

Initiation is an entrance into a place, a terrain. It is a courtship of a large dreaming animal. It is not an abstract ideal of psychological accomplishment, but rather an entrance into the specificity of locale, of geography, of rhizomes and crab thought, mercurial imaginings, moon cycles, and seasonal rhythms, with eyes that regard these as sacred. Through these intimacies, a grand landscape comes into vision: a world riddled with spirit, ancestors, community, cosmos and the dreams of those yet to come.

Initiation, in its deepest traditional sense, was meant to keep the world alive. The purpose was not individual, but cosmological in scope. It was never for the individual. This is very hard for us to get our minds around, having been conditioned within a psychological tradition that fixates everything upon the “self.” It is always about me and my growth! Here’s the truth, however: Initiation was an act of sacrifice on behalf of the greater circle of life into which the initiate is brought and to which they now hold allegiance.

Can you feel your longing for just such a knowing?

At the same time, initiation profoundly affects us as individuals. It activates and authorizes the particular soul thread we came to offer the waiting world. Much like those seed pods that only germinate in the heat of fire, the soul seed we carry responds to the heat generated by initiation. 

The soul is fully aware of the reciprocal relationship it has with the wild world, with the worlds of spirit and the ancestors. Soul recognizes the innate requirements for maintaining these connections. It was the role of mature individuals to honor our place in the family of things by carrying out the rituals of gratitude and renewal that sustain our relations with the breathing, animate world. Initiation embeds in us a fundamental requirement of being human: 

We are meant to feed Life in an ongoing way!

As we mature, we are asked to come into a more reciprocal relationship with the earth. We are called to develop the manners which help sustain the body of this exquisite world. Values such as respect, restraint (our least developed spiritual value), gratitude, and courage help to fortify our ability to stand and protect what we love. We are here to participate in the ongoing creation, to offer our imagination, affection, and devotion to the sustaining of the world.  

It is not difficult to see how far we live as a culture from these practices. The central question is, how can we, once again, recognize the transforming cadence of initiation in a time of amnesia, a time in which the old forms have been abandoned? 

The truth is initiation is not optional. Every one of us will be taken to the edge, pulled by the gravity of the soul to engage the rigors of ripening us into something substantial. No one is exempt. Imagine if we could see the circumstances of our lives as the raw material necessary for the movement across the threshold into our adult lives. This could free us in radical ways. From a mythic perspective, these are the conditions that can cook the soul and bring us closer to the mystery of our own singular incarnation. The rough initiations of loss, trauma, defeats, betrayals, illness, become the Prima Materia, the beginning matter, for undertaking the crossing into our more encompassing life. So much depends upon how we perceive what it is that is happening in our world. Taking a mythic view enables us to see our circumstances as necessary, even required, for the work of deep change to take place.

The need is clear: we must cultivate a robust collective of adults whose primary fealty is to the life-giving world upon which we depend. We must be able to feel our loyalties to watersheds, migratory pathways, marginalized communities, and the soul of the world. We must feel the bedrock of our aliveness, and the reality of our wild and exuberant lives. Initiation tempers the soul, drawing out its hidden essence and calls forth the medicine we came to offer this stunning world. It is time to wake up!

I started to write compulsively when I was in the second grade: journals filled with secret thoughts and shameful truths that I could tell no one. Many writers begin this way, turning inward as children to look for answers they can’t find around them. These notebooks were my confessional, the place where I could reveal my true feelings and try to make sense of myself and the world.

I always felt better after I wrote. No matter how anxious, confused, or unsettled, my mind was clarified by writing. It was like flipping on a light in a darkened room; with words to describe what was blocking my way, suddenly I could see my way forward. Language helped me navigate my inner world—I no longer felt helpless or trapped. Afterward, I could reread what I’d written and locate clues about who I was, what I was thinking, and why this person
inside me was so drastically different from what others saw.

This difference came as a revelation. The voice pouring out of me onto the page, separating truth from lies, was my fearless and natural self. This self was hidden behind a mask, a fictional story that I called “me.” This mask wasn’t me by a long shot, however. Writing freely, without disguise, the gap between the mask and truth—between story and self—became glaringly obvious. Odd as this disconnect was at first, I realized that it was the gateway to freedom. Through it, a message emerged loud and clear: I am not my story. This life-changing truth has defined my work as a memoirist, teacher, and spiritual seeker over the course of thirty years.

What does it mean to say “I am not my story?” Students ask me this all the time. “Are you saying that what happened to me didn’t happen?” Of course not. “Are you calling me a liar, like I’m making these things up?” Not at all. What I’m acknowledging—along with a vast majority of psychologists, physicists, and spiritual teachers—is that what we believe to be real is not reality. The mind creates stories out of things that happen and composes a character they happen to. We then take these false stories for fact and live as if they are the actual truth.

We do this because we are Homo Narrans, the storytelling species, the only animal in all of existence that creates a conceptualized self. We invent ourselves at every moment—connecting the dots, developing plot lines, revising scenes, replaying old dramas—by composing a solid narrative with this fictional self at the center. We fully believe that our story is real, which is why when I tell students that every life is a work of fiction, they quite often feel existential confusion. Luckily, this confusion doesn’t last long.

Seeing that the story isn’t ourselves is a quantum leap in self-realization and the starting point of a whole new life. Engaging with that conscious life is what this book is about. Writing to Awaken is a journey of self-awareness deepened by the exploration of the stories you tell yourself and the masks you wear in the world. The transformational power of this writing practice continues to amaze me after all these years. The radical act of telling the truth awakens us automatically. When we write down our story, we become the witness, and this objective distance brings an aha! as the character we believed to be solid reveals itself as a narrative construct. As we move together through this journey, you’ll come to understand this better. For now, just remember a simple message that will make the way clearer as you progress.

When you tell the truth, your story changes.
When your story changes, your life is transformed.

Why is telling the truth so radical? Because we rarely do so completely in social life. As socialized animals, we’re taught to hide our feelings, to protect reputations, conventions, and interests. We’re liars of necessity, fear, and convenience. Imagine if everyone told the whole truth—regardless of the consequences. It would be a brutal nightmare! To avoid incrimination and cruelty, we opt instead for versions of the truth, euphemisms, half-lies, and tidied-up candor. Though we’re mostly honest, most of the time, civilized life calls for reticence and cooperation breeds compromise.

Then there is the matter of shame. We tolerate such heavy loads of it that revealing the truth can seem menacing, as if uncensored honesty might wreak havoc on our carefully manicured lives. Shame tends to keep us dishonest and silent, sitting on our secrets, trapped in the dark. That is why finally telling the truth—in writing, therapy, or a church confessional—has such a catalytic effect. We’re awakened by its unmistakable sound, like the pealing of a bell. Once we’ve rung that bell, it can’t be unrung. We’re called on to live with what we know since the fiction of self no longer traps us. We understand why we have felt inauthentic—in subtle as well as obvious ways. Wiping away the mask of lies, we reveal our true face in the mirror through writing, often for the first time.

The benefits of expressive writing are incalculable. They include psychological empowerment, emotional healing, social
intelligence, increased well-being, creative growth, and a spiritual awareness that keeps us rooted in the life we’re living. Research has shown that as little as fifteen minutes of expressive writing a day can markedly improve physical and mental health. Unlike journaling, expressive writing requires that we do more than simply report the facts of our experience or free-associate on any random subject that comes to mind. The research of psychologist James W. Pennebaker reveals that in order for writing to be transformative, we must include our thoughts, emotions, beliefs, and insights about our experience if we hope to reap the benefits. Pennebaker’s studies have shown that when subjects approach writing in this way, the practice can boost the immune system, reduce the need for psychotherapy, lower stress, and even accelerate physical healing.

The journey in Writing to Awaken is divided into four parts that each lead to the next. Along the way, I will offer reflections and many examples from students who have participated in my classes. While their names have been changed, their stories are real.

Part One starts with a question: who am I? This is the departure point for traditions of self-inquiry that precede even Socrates with his ancient maxim to “know thyself.” You’ll investigate your personal creation myth, explore the contents of your psychological shadow, uncover the nature of family attachments, and be introduced to the witnessing awareness that allows you to observe yourself clearly and gain insight from what you see.

Part Two explores your stories themselves, revealing the cast of saboteurs that block you internally, as well as how shame operates in your life, how you relate to purpose and meaning, and how love shapes the person you are.

Part Three considers your public persona, questioning things like performance, intention, power, control, and how you may be hindered by ambivalence or lack of focus.

In Part Four, you’ll learn how to reap the gifts of transformation, reveal the sacredness and spirit in an awakened life, and harness the power of the original genius that is uncovered in this truth-telling process.

In total, there are forty-eight lessons contained in these sections. It’s best to complete these lessons in sequence, taking all the time you need for each one. At the end of each lesson, you’ll find a series of in-depth writing prompts for you to choose from. It’s advisable, but not necessary, that you respond to all prompts, choosing any sequence that works for you. Trust your instincts and write about the questions that have the deepest resonance. You can always revisit these lessons in the future to explore questions that you skip.

Trust your own rhythm and the pace that suits you best. Deadlines can be helpful as long as they’re realistic, but do your best not to turn this into a writing marathon. Take your time with the questions, allow yourself to dive deep, but resist including everything that pops into your head. I recommend a maximum length of one-thousand words per response, which translates to four, double-spaced, typewritten pages. This word limit will help you distill the writing and train your mind not to wander too much.

Whenever possible, avoid throat-clearing and lengthy prefacing of your responses. Instead, go to the heart of what you want to say. You’ll notice how evasive your mind can become when asked direct questions, particularly around sensitive subjects. Like all forms of awakening practice, writing requires mindfulness. Just as we bring our attention back to the breath during meditation, you learn to observe the wandering mind without excessive control, and gently return your focus to the question at hand.

Some writing days will be better than others, as happens with any ongoing practice. Expect to meet your own saboteurs along the way. Truth telling frequently calls up resistance; in fact, you will typically know you’re approaching a breakthrough when you feel discomfort. That’s when it is most important to stick with the practice. The more you write, the more comfortable you’ll become with the discomfort of revealing dangerous knowledge and saying unsayable things.

If you find yourself feeling nothing when you write, or notice that you’re getting bored with a topic, see those as signs that you’re not taking risks. Pause and ask yourself: “What am I avoiding?” “What scares me here?” “What is niggling at me to get onto the page?” Allow yourself to follow these detours without losing sight of the question at hand. They can lead to discoveries you did not intend to make. As the philosopher Martin Buber reminds us, “Every journey has a secret destination of which the traveler is unaware.” This holds true for the writing adventure as well. By using the lessons offered in this book as points of departure, and the prompts as invitations to destinations unknown, you’ll stay open to what is below the surface of your conscious mind.

Remember that writing is only half of the process. After you’ve responded to a question, set it aside for a day. Then reread it. While you may have gained insight through your initial response to the prompt, it’s when you notice the gaps in what you’ve written— between what is true and your story about it—that transformation happens. Allow yourself the time to write about what you noticed during the review and to fill in any blanks. This close attention to your responses will deepen your insight. You’ll become less afraid of the witness’s perspective and what it reveals. You’ll see that the fears themselves are stories, which dissipate when you face them head on.

Although our medium is writing, you don’t need any writing skill for this practice to work. Literary talent is irrelevant here, and so are grammar, syntax, and elegant prose. The strengths you need are courage, transparency, commitment to the truth, and a sincere desire to transcend your story. I’ve guided thousands of students around the world through these lessons and am continually astonished by the cathartic power of Writing to Awaken and its lasting effects on people’s lives. I invite you to embark on this journey, dive into your own deep waters, and find out who you really are.

This introduction originally apeared:

Writing to Awaken: A Journey of Truth, Transformation & Self-Discovery (New Harbinger Publications, Inc.)

I am in a category of people who will not be going back to “normal”. As those close to me receive or pursue COVID vaccination, and begin to dream of “returning” – to connection, to work as before if possible, to in-person learning, and so much more – I am stymied. My eyes glaze over at best, and I am totally scrambled inside as I listen to them, WTF being my most honest response.

I hear the yearn –  for what was, for what could be, for communal joy and connection in ways beyond Zoom or intimate pods. I hear the hunger and readiness for perceived invincibility, for getting back into the groove of systems that felt safe and sustaining to some, yet dangerous and depleting to many more.

I will not be going back.

While I don’t yet totally know what that looks like practically, I know that I cannot contort again/ anew to fit inside a normalcy that has never been normal, never been liberatory, never meant thrive for all.

I know that me at the mercy of approval, legitimacy, accolades, success, productivity – even in the minimal ways my irreverent & privilege-saturated self tracked these things – must drop.

I know that my liberal yeses to intensity and sacred adventure, and regularly convening experiences ripe with them, needs to be curated with much greater care.

I know it means that even if you are so excited to meet again, or to work with me in person, I may not meet you there.

Teaching from the sanctuary of my li’l spot has made it infinitely more possible for me to impact change and stay whole-enough inside than when I was getting on eight planes a month to share the goodness everywhere.

I feel ridiculously lucky and privileged that much of my work has been able to pivot to online, and that I have been able to access creative expression this past year even amidst/ in between bouts of epic exhaustion, systemic overwhelm and flailing inside of trauma feedback loops.

I, too, yearn. For bodywork. For sex with someone I love besides myself. For chicken satay and a fresh young coconut. To hear the crash of the waves against rock and watch sunsets in my heart home. To sit in the workshop of my teacher – who is far from the reach of wifi – and feel his care and transmission through his welcoming smile, his raspy, booming voice, and the spice in his Shabbat stews.

Hermiting these nine months – really having to face myself, my patterns of dysregulation, over-orienting to external stimuli, letting overwhelm and reactivity run my show – has been a boot camp I never would have chosen and that has been transforming me from the inside out.

I have so much more rooting in presence to do. So much more balance to be. So much more living into the mystery to say yes to, not from abandon but from inhabiting awe.

I am not ready to go back anytime soon, or ever.

The only way I know forward that feels whole and honoring of what has been and become is to track any movement toward emergence with exquisite care, to let that motion be as colossally slow as it needs to be to truly anchor change.

I palpably remember the beginning of the pandemic – my distinct not knowing if I would make it to the other side.

The not-knowing remains, and has morphed into a pulsing commitment to show up with what I have, continuing to weave love and community and transformation in the ways specific to my capacities and perceptions. And to share the gifts that do live inside of me from overflow rather than depletion.

So, I will not be returning to what was.

Many people associate the black horse with evil knights and renegades, but this universal archetype represents something more profound than reckless defiance. From the perspective of the Mexican aristocracy, Zorro rode like the devil on his magnificent black steed. The masked warrior, however, was acting on behalf of repressed populations, reclaiming freedom and dignity from a corrupt, narcissistic regime.

And so it is whenever we ‘re forced to face what the ego is so quick to reject as “the shadow.” The shadow is essentially a catchall for what we’ve suppressed through social conditioning. According to Robert A. Johnson, author of Owning Your Own Shadow: Understanding the Dark Side of the Psyche, “the ordinary, mundane characteristics are the norm. Anything less than this goes into the shadow. But anything better also goes into the shadow! Some of the pure gold of the personality is relegated to the shadow because it can find no place in that great leveling process that is culture.” 

Learning to distinguish between truly destructive impulses and the “pure gold” hidden in the nether regions of the psyche is part of the skill involved in becoming fully empowered. The call to explore this unknown potential often comes in the form of a dark horse who can literally turn into your worst nightmare if you refuse the journey she represents. 

In dreams and myths from around the world, the black horse heralds the reassertion of qualities difficult for the well­-groomed persona to handle, revolutionary insights and energies that can’t be readily tamed by the rules of polite society. To those courageous yet humble souls who ultimately aspire to ride her compassionately and consensually, this explosive force becomes a vehicle for expanded consciousness, inspiration, and innovation.

To those who suppress or ignore her talents, fear her passion, or try to harness her energy without integrity, she becomes an impetuous and compulsive element, inflicting mood swings and bizarre cravings on people who once seemed the epitome of good sense and reason. Cultures with a misogynistic bent are quick to demonize the black horse. The Bedouins, for instance, were among those inclined to slaughter black foals at birth. The fact that these male-dominated Islamic tribes exhibited a savage fear of dark horses would not have surprised Carl Jung. His experience with clients led him to recognize images of black horses as manifestations of long-neglected feminine wisdom rising up from the collective unconscious.

One dream he found particularly fascinating involved a magician and a dying king. The sickly monarch wanted to be buried in one of the ancient tombs scattered throughout his kingdom and finally chose the grave of an ancestral princess. But when the tomb was opened and the young virgin’s remains were exposed to the light of day, her bones changed into a black horse that galloped into the desert. The king’s magician raced after the enchanted creature. After a journey of many days and seemingly endless trials, he crossed the desert and came to the grasslands on the other side. There he discovered the rarest of treasures – the mare had led him to the lost keys of paradise.

In Jung’s estimation, the dream of the ailing king held significance far beyond the personal needs of his client. It was a richly symbolic myth that had emerged fully formed from the archetypal realm, simultaneously predicting the death of purely masculine forms of leadership and pointing to the resurrection of a long-buried feminine principle capable of moving future generations toward a more balanced existence.

As Jung himself once wrote, “Enlightenment is not a matter of imagining figures of light, but of making the darkness conscious.” Much of this work involves digging through vast graveyards of wisdom forced underground and left for dead. The black horse rises from the remains of an ancestral virgin, a pure being whose innate intelligence never matured under the patriarchal leanings of civilization. Inadvertently rediscovered, she springs to life when the first hint of light touches her bones. This part of the vision is crucial to distinguishing black horse wisdom from other, potentially malevolent aspects of the shadow. 

The magician, the part of the dreamer most open to the engines of existence, is the only member of court compelled to follow the night- haired mare. Luckily, he’s too wise, stunned, or inexperienced to bend her to his own limited will and imagination. Instead, he tracks her, plunging ever deeper into that proving ground of saints and mystics, the desert, an expansive vista where everything is stripped down to its essence, where the habits of logic evaporate in the trances of an unbridled sun, where the shadows are suddenly welcoming, nourishing, life-saving. Like so many saints and mystics, the magician is seasoned through his trials and finally rewarded with the ultimate treasure. 

The black horse doesn’t draw the magician a map or lecture incessantly on how to find the lost keys of paradise. She embodies the innocence, instinct, spirit, and vitality capable of leading him to the prize. And the trip back to the Source is no family vacation. 

Black horse wisdom challenges us to step off the well-worn paths of civilized thought. It is wisdom shrouded in mystery, wisdom that’s felt more deeply than it can ever be explained, wisdom we often unfortunately ignore, until some difficulty in life opens us up to other possibilities. This universal archetype champions knowledge rejected by the mainstream: instinct, emotion, intuition, sensory and extrasensory awareness, and the human-animal partnership associated with tribal cultures. It is, like the ancestral virgin, an innately pure, non-jaded, spirited, yet immature source of knowledge neglected for so long that it initially lacks the ability to interface directly with the modern human mind.

Science may never be able to dissect this wisdom, to bring it into the light of conscious understanding, but through the metaphor of the horse, and through real-life interactions with these animals, we can learn to track these mysteries, maybe even ride them, if we develop the right balance of trust, discernment, skill, and abandon.

Literally learning to ride a horse can act as a catalyst for dramatic shifts in consciousness, reinvigorating instincts that lie dormant in people forced to sit dutifully at desks for much of their adult lives. Moving with a being who has not been conditioned by human thought patterns, prejudices, and social taboos can awaken intuitive, nonverbal, body-centered wisdom. At the same time, respectful interactions with horses can open up other worlds of creativity and insight, including realms associated with the collective unconscious, the spirit world, death, rebirth, and tragedy. There’s a paradoxical element to this wisdom. What looks like darkness, hopelessness, and inhospitable mystery actually contains the seeds of transformation. 

“To refuse the dark side of one’s nature is to store up or accumulate the darkness,” Johnson warns; “this is later expressed as a black mood, psychosomatic illness, or unconsciously inspired accidents.” 

Those who grew up with rigid styles of riding, for instance, may find that a serious fall from the one horse unresponsive to conventional training techniques plunges them into a particularly troublesome, yet necessary, dark night of the soul. This is black horse wisdom in its harshest guise: a tragedy that holds the gift of expanded awareness. 

If, like the magician, we have the courage and endurance to cross the desert of what we’ve neglected the most in ourselves, the black horse will lead us to those rich and nourishing grasslands on the other side. 

“Our penchant for the light blinds us to the greater reality and keeps us from this larger vision,” Johnson emphasizes. The first half of life is devoted to the cultural process: gaining one’s skills, raising a family, disciplining oneself a hundred different ways; the second half of life is devoted to restoring the wholeness (making holy) of life. One might complain that this is a senseless round-trip except that the wholeness at the end is conscious while it was unconscious at the beginning. This evolution … is worth all the pain and suffering that it costs. The only disaster would be getting lost halfway through the process and not finding our completion. Unfortunately, many Westerners are caught in just this difficult place.”

Ultimately, and ironically, when the black horse pays you a visit, it’s time to claim the majesty – and the mystery – of what it means to be fully human.

Excerpted from Linda Kohanov’s book Way of the Horse: Equine Archetypes for Self Discovery