ecopsychology on Dark Edge

Vision fasting completely changed my perspective on life

darkedge@darkedge.world (Guido Stevens) — Thu, 17 Sep 2020 00:00:00 +0200

Alone without food in the wild: I never felt more alive.

Figure 1: Iona beach

When I reached the beach, I had been fasting for one day and two nights already. I would spend the next three days here. Alone. Without food. Without smartphone or books. Just me, my tent, sleeping bag, a canister of water. And, crucially: my soul journal. A vision fast is foremost an encounter with soul—a quest to find the most profound truth about yourself: the reason you’re alive.

A vision quest is a ritual enactment of the hero’s journey: you leave the village, roam the wild, then return with supernatural gifts. It’s a rite of passage. A boy leaves behind the safety of his mother, faces a dangerous bear on his own, and returns as a different being: a man. Transformed.

Severance: losing your old identity

We had converged towards the isle of Iona, like pieces of driftwood swept up by the tide. On arrival, our guides immediately set course for the deep. Skip the “this is my name; this is what I do for a living” introductions. Instead: share your most vital dream image or memory with the group.

I am in Spain, on a beach, watching the sun glitter on the Mediterranean sea. Thousands of sun glimpses splash on the dancing wave patterns and signal a divine morse code. What if entropy does not swallow information, but preserves it? The whole history of the world shapes these waves. The mesmerizing patterns of flickering lights would reveal the Akasha Chronicles—if only I could read them.

We were sitting in a circle in an old barn, speaking in turn only when holding the talking stick. We focused on listening deeply, in an ancient tribal ritual: council—sacred speech.

Figure 2: The barn

Everybody brings their own ordeal. You don’t sign up for an expensive program, centered on having no food for days on end, unless you have a strong commitment to sort out your shit. Most of us were pretty intense.

I was on fire. Desperate. I had lost my marriage, my business, my community, my money, my home, my mother. My whole life had come apart at the seams. Losing everything woke me up alright. Spilling my grief lit up the room. A cascade ensued, of opening up, being heard, and shedding tears of compassion for the suffering you witness in others. We forged lasting friendships in a bonfire of raw emotions and heartfelt connections.

Feeling enmeshed in that small community, even if it was only for 12 days, was transformative. We are genetically wired to live in a tribe, as social animals. I’m a lone wolf by default, or so I thought. Yet belonging with a small band of lovely people felt amazingly right. My energy levels went through the roof.

We shared stories and dreams over meals. We partied and drummed and danced. With open hearts and senses, we headed out into the open, sometimes as a group, sometimes alone. Soulcraft practices provided gateways into the wild wonders of nature and the human soul. I had read the eponymous book by Bill Plotkin (Plotkin 2003), founder of the Animas organization that facilitated this vision quest. I knew I was courting danger. It’s why I had come. Little did I know.

It is essential to have experienced guides, holding this process. I’m so glad I did not try to do this by myself, in a dark corner of a forest at home. The goal of a vision fast is quite literally to lose yourself in the wild. That is inherently dangerous: psychologically dangerous, physically dangerous. Our guides were full-time experts who have dedicated their lives to eco-centered healing. They spun a web of poetry, rituals, and wisdom that invites you to open up, to go off the reservation, to return more whole.

What you can plan is too small for you to live. What you can live wholeheartedly will make plans enough for the vitality hidden in your sleep.

David Whyte, What to Remember When Waking

I ran into trouble fast. Witnessing a woman speak about the death of her child moved me to tears. It’s like her shell cracked open. I was looking directly into the lava of her soul. I fell in love in a way I had thought beyond me. The guides encouraged me to name my feelings for her in the group. Terrified, I skulked about the island under dark clouds. My inner turmoil was mirrored in the storm winds buffeting the long grass. David Bowie wailing in my head: Wild is the wind.

When the group reconvened, she spoke of healing, and I was spellbound, mesmerized. She spoke of love — suddenly, gusts of wind loudly tore at the roof of the barn. It was all too much. Inner world and outer world, self and other, all boundaries collapsed.

Scary. Exhilarating. Wild.

I was ready.

Threshold: entering the realm of magic

To ensure my return from the abyss, I left a picture of my daughters under a stone. We formed a magic circle, and one by one, stepped into the void. We fetched our gear and dispersed around the island, each to their chosen place. As I walked there, I hummed the song I had written the night before, under a full moon, to the beat of a shaman drum.

Star Fire

May the winds blow
When the shadows grow
May the moon rise
Where the wolf cries
May the thunder roar
Upon the hidden shore
Where I will lose myself
To find the golden elf

Oh, how her eyes will shine
When her gaze catches mine
Her movement soft and strong
Tell me where I belong
Her voice sweet poetry
That stirs my deepest sea
We kiss: a tide of desire
Our hearts burn: star fire.

Figure 3: Iona beach

Three days of pure magic, I lived alone on the beach. A lucid dream. Nothing like the tension or depression I feared. Instead, I surrendered into openness. Into the rhythm of the tides constraining and enlarging my little space. The coming and going of showers and sunshine.

I lay down in my sleeping bag when it rained, or I was tired or cold. I wrote in my journal. I visualized finding new love and inviting my ex for my new marriage. That got out of hand. I ended up performing a ritual at the seaside, in which I married a mermaid living in the waves. She was the one that proposed. How could I resist?

I was mesmerized by the wonder of the natural beauty around me. Patterns of shells, moss, and cracks in stone revealed themselves deeply meaningful. I read a language of alien runes, which only the nonverbal part of my brain could begin to decode. I took pictures intense and haunting, like windows into the mysteries of life and the universe. They’re perhaps the best pictures I ever made, in a lifetime of photography and travel.

Figure 4: The language of stones

Return: finding a way back home

At the end of our fast, we all converged back to the hostel that was our base camp. We shared our first meal and enjoyed each other’s company. We debriefed in a series of council gatherings spread over three days. Counting down the days to the end of our retreat, I felt strangely deflated. I wanted to hold on to this peak experience. I had found magic in my solo vigil and heart connection in our little community. Finding such precious gifts, then having to let go and part ways, that sucks.

Leaving, we hugged, then gradually unwinded our invisible connections, weaving in and out of conversations on the ferry. Some of us converged again for dinner in town. My muse joined me for a fairy tale train ride across Scotland to Glasgow. A final farewell. Then I was alone, my head spinning, a storm of whirling emotions. I prowled the city with fresh eyes, like a visitor from another time, raw and open like an animal. A street musician brought tears to my eyes. I bought a new notebook and started writing. Kept writing unsent love letters obsessively for months.

Having faced my private demons, I was now facing the hardest part of my journey: how to be at home and live soulfully, in an ecocidal society. We are all living in a death cult.

The gifts of the Forest are now often unwanted by the returned-to society. If the community is in denial of a Great Self, then your shining and gifts are deeply threatening.

(Shaw 2011)

It’s been three years. I’m still unpacking the gifts of those days. They awakened a fierce sense of being rooted in the mysteries of the more-than-human world. I’m still maintaining friendships forged that fortnight. I am still figuring out how to be true to my deepest self. How can I be a force of healing in this time of great unraveling? I’m feeling my way into my calling to write. To truly, fully, live.

I discovered a way of being that is older and more vital than city hustle. I found a source of well-being beyond the claustrophobic rat race of business and distraction. I see a path into a future that is not ego-centric, or even human-centric, but eco-centric. The natural world is not a place — it’s alive, brimming with intelligence and ancient wisdom. It heals whoever steps out of their comfort bubble and surrenders.

The sacred is right here, at the edge of your vision: it wears feathers and leaves and speaks through cracks in stone. All you have to do is listen. As if your life depends on it. Because it does.

Figure 5: Alien runes

All photographs in this story are my own work – © Guido Stevens

References

Plotkin, Bill. 2003. Soulcraft: Crossing into the Mysteries of Nature and Psyche. Novato, Calif: New World Library.

Shaw, Martin. 2011. A Branch from the Lightning Tree: Ecstatic Myth and the Grace of Wildness. Ashland, Or.: White Cloud Press.

The planet needs you to feel its pain

darkedge@darkedge.world (Guido Stevens) — Mon, 31 Aug 2020 00:00:00 +0200

World collapse invites spiritual transformation (part two).

Figure 1: Cracks in the ground. Photo by Joshua Brown on Unsplash

There’s a famous scene in the movie The Matrix, where the hero is offered a choice. Take the blue pill and go back to sleep. Or take the red pill, and reality will never be the same.

You take the blue pill…the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill…you stay in Wonderland, and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes.

The Matrix

I felt like I swallowed the red pill when I came across Dark Mountain and read the Uncivilization Manifesto (Kingsnorth and Hine 2019). A great sense of relief washed over me. I found a group of people who lived beyond resistance against impending doom. Their premise is not: how can we stop the ecocide from destroying our future? Instead, the paradigm is: our civilization is fundamentally flawed and doomed; let’s mourn all the beauty lost, together, in art. I felt a belonging: I found my tribe. Reading Deep Adaptation provided a similar experience (Bendell 2020). Thank God it’s not me who is crazy; our society is. Radical acceptance feels surprisingly soothing.

The myth of progress has led us into the valley of death

World collapse not only haunts us individually. It is a fate we also need to face collectively. As a species, we have failed to adequately safeguard and cherish this precious planet that has been entrusted to us. As the dominant life form on Earth, we should be the loving stewards of all life on Earth. Instead, we have revealed ourselves to be a ruthless executioner.

How can we possibly bear the sadness of the great dying of the more-than-human? How can we face the guilt of being complicit in this crime? All those insects, birds, trees, ecosystems, ancient and now lost forever. We are executing a mass extinction, and now we’re on the list ourselves. Merely participating in the systems that rule our world is an act of violence threatening our children and grandchildren’s very lives. Because of how we live, they may not live at all or only live under great adversity. It’s a suffocating, deranged state of affairs.

This grim result calls into question all of the social, technical, and economic systems we built in the name of progress – our whole society. It exposes the hollowness of the ideologies and creeds we profess to value. What is holy, if not life itself? We face a dark reckoning. And we must – face this darkness. We must bear the truth of what it is we have done. What we are doing. We must stop behaving like there is no tomorrow. The time of careless hedonism has ended. It has always ever been an exclusive party for the elite only. As a species, we are now confronted with the bill for excess. Either we grow up and clean up our act, or we die.

It’s unclear if that is even possible – survival. The damage we’ve done is enormous, beyond repair. Our stubbornness, stupidity, and depravity seem endless. We must find ways to enact radical change, to heal both the world and our inner brokenness.

Healing can only begin when we allow ourselves to grieve for all the damage done.

Let the sorrows of the world pierce your heart

Our bodies instinctively remember our birthright: to be enfolded in the embrace of the natural world, the primal matrix–the matrix of life. In the absence of its nurture, we suffer. Cut off from the web of life, we feel disconnected from everything, including our deeper selves.

Our soul life flickers dimly, and rather than feeling a kinship with the entire, breathing world, we inhabit and defend a small shell of a world, occupying our daily life with what linguist David Hinton calls the “relentless industry of self.” … We are suffering from what ecophilosopher Richard Louv calls nature deficit disorder.

Francis Weller, The Edge of Sorrow (Weller, Hübl, and Lerner 2015)

The dying of the world causes us to feel a sadness that is not personal; it is shared, communal. At a very primal level, we are intertwined with all of life. The great dying affects us directly, intimately, inexorably. We suffer with the world.

What we feel from the surrounding world is not a projection of our own minds outward to the environment … it is the grief of the forest registering in our bodies and psyches–the sorrow of the redwoods, voles, sorrel, ferns, owl, and deer, all those who lost their homes and lives as a result of this plunder of living beings.

(Weller, Hübl, and Lerner 2015)

Through this grief, we directly experience the weeping of the world’s soul, the anima mundi. We are haunted by the specter of what we had and loved and lost.

The grief and sense of loss, that we often interpret as a failure in our personality, is actually a feeling of emptiness where a beautiful and strange otherness should have been encountered.

(Paul Shepard, quoted in Weller, Hübl, and Lerner 2015)

To change, we need to allow this grief for the world to tear us apart.

To rediscover life, we have to face death

We feel lost, empty, and depressed because we have cut ourselves off from the nurturing embrace of the web of life. We are all complicit in killing the very life we so dearly miss on an industrial, planetary scale. We are caught in a vicious cycle. We are bereft of nature and meaningful connections. We numb our loneliness and existential angst with screen time and the pursuit of material comforts. In doing so, we exacerbate both our nature deficit, and the rents torn in the web of life.

The remedy is not to numb our grief; the cure is in embracing our grief.

By fully opening our hearts and allowing ourselves to feel the world’s sorrow, we find something beyond the void. We have to let go of who we thought we are, who we thought we wanted to be. This starts with an effort to come to terms with the suffocating blanket of cognitive dissonance, accompanying every routine act of consumption and indulgence that makes us complicit in the ecocide. All change starts with awareness. Being aware that this way of life won’t last, challenges inner assumptions of entitlement to a certain standard of living.

That may sound pretty grim, but there are unexpected upsides too. Increased gratitude, for one. The laptop I’m typing this on perhaps involved shady mining operations and nasty labor conditions, but isn’t it a miracle that I’m allowed to use it while I can? A heightened sense of being enmeshed with everything and every one is another upside. The myriad complex supply chains that make us complicit in environmental degradation, also connect us with the Amazon, the oceans, the Earth, and the people our current reality depends upon.

Accepting and expressing our grief and guilt, changes us; it heals the very alienation that is the root cause of our suffering and despair. We find ourselves mourning the vitality lost, yet in doing so, we feel the vibrancy of our intimate interdependency and kinship with all of life. The sadness does not go away; it becomes a gateway towards reconnecting with life and creating new meaning.

We are presented with a Buddhist paradox. A frantic fear of death has enclosed us in a death cult, yet facing death restores our connection to life.

This the second half of a two-part story on world collapse. Part one looked at the individual experience of coming to terms with traumatic change.

Resources

References

Bendell, Jem. 2020. “Deep Adaptation: A Map for Navigating Climate Tragedy.” Iflas Occasional Paper 2, July. http://lifeworth.com/deepadaptation.pdf.

Kingsnorth, Paul, and Dougald Hine. 2019. Uncivilisation: The Dark Mountain Manifesto. England: The Dark Mountain Project. https://dark-mountain.net/about/manifesto/.

Weller, Francis, Thomas Hübl, and Michael Lerner. 2015. The Wild Edge of Sorrow: Rituals of Renewal and the Sacred Work of Grief. Berkeley, California: North Atlantic Books.

Losing everything woke me up alright

darkedge@darkedge.world (Guido Stevens) — Fri, 28 Aug 2020 00:00:00 +0200

World collapse invites spiritual transformation (part one).

Figure 1: Source: public domain.

A few years ago, my life went off the rails completely. My love of decades walked out and broke off all contact. Other disasters appeared as sideshows. My business failed, and I lost all my money. Home ownership: gone. My mother faded into dementia. The scaffolding of who I thought I was and what I lived for, collapsed into rubble.

Spare me your pity. I’m doing fine. This story is not about me – it’s about facing the human condition. We all suffer overwhelming losses.

The experience transformed me. Life will never be as it was before. It changed me. I had to change.

World collapse: your life falls apart

There is a central human experience that will shake us to the roots and that each of us must eventually face. Nobody likes to acknowledge or talk much about it. … I will call it the moment of world collapse.

John Welwood, Toward a psychology of awakening. (Welwood 2000)

John Welwood coined a name for what I experienced: world collapse. Something happens that shatters your world view, that turns everything you held dear and real upside down. Your child dies of a disease or gets murdered. Your partner is killed suddenly in a freak traffic accident. Bankruptcy, betrayal, terminal illness, or divorce upends your apple cart. We all see it happening around us. Then it happens to you.

Life has myriad ways to break your heart. Sometimes, that leaves you speechless, confused, broken, stunned with incomprehension. How could this happen? If you’re religious, an ugly question may raise its head: what kind of God allows this to happen? No matter how many tears you cry, no matter how loud you wail in desperation, no matter how hard you try to numb yourself: your world just ended.

Facing ego death is scary

World collapse is ego death. Roles, relationships, material circumstances, your very body: they seem stable, but are not. The things that define who you are can suddenly break down and disintegrate. When they do, a whole scaffolding of ideas and thoughts and assumptions about you, the world, and your place in the world, all come crashing down.

Nothing will ever be the same again. Reality changed irrevocably, and you don’t understand its rules anymore. Who you are has become undefined.

The word identity comes from a Latin word that means “the same.” Maintaining an identity literally means that we are trying to establish some kind of sameness from day to day. … When we perceive the basic groundlessness of all our finite projects, our whole sense of who we are is put into question.

(Welwood 2000)

The naked fickleness of existence stares at you, as you face the abyss.

From a traditional point of view, this is the worst that can happen to you. Loss of identity, not knowing who you are, existential emptiness: you should avoid this confrontation with the horrors of a meaningless world at all costs. We have whole industries of entertainment and distraction dedicated to helping people escape this predicament.

He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster. And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.

Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil

The existentialist response to groundlessness is “the relentless industry of self.” One heroically constructs a meaningful life despite the looming presence of the abyss. One tries to keep anxiety at bay, by working hard, by wrapping oneself in the trappings of “the good life.” Yet the projection of success on Instagram can never fully mask or mute the howling insecurity inside.

Lean into the void

Figure 2: Jump! Source: Max_Pixel

A different response is possible. Mindfully leaning into emptiness, into overwhelming grief, involves giving up your resistance. All the ego energy you expend on maintaining your defenses against the fear of emptiness and sadness is a waste of effort; that’s why you feel so depleted and sad. Giving up that fight liberates the life energy you squandered on fighting entropy.

Buddhist psychology moves beyond this existential dread. Yes, everything is unstable; nothing lasts. Putting your head in the sand doesn’t change that fundamental truth of reality. How about embracing life as it is, accepting that suffering profound losses is integral to the human condition?

If we can stay present and not recoil from the emptiness we encounter when our familiar sense of self breaks down, we eventually discover not just a meaningless void but a fresher quality of presence that feels awake, alive, and liberating.

(Welwood 2000)

To accept change is to welcome life

I experienced a moment of great clarity. I was in Amsterdam, in a tram crossing the river. Golden autumn sunlight streamed in through the windows. I found myself fully open and awake. Fully aware that being raw and vulnerable was the only way I could hope to survive my existential earthquake, the end of the life I had lived.

My old coping mechanisms, of denial and dissociation and shutdown, were more than useless in the face of this onslaught of painful emotions. That way lay death. Those tired defense mechanisms would turn my heart to stone, shrivel me inside. Shutting down my feelings would turn me into a sad, old, bitter cynic. The poison would manifest bodily soon enough as heart disease, cancer, or whatever.

So actually, I had no real choice but to break open. I recognized, at that moment, that what was happening to me offered a once-in-a-lifetime spiritual opening. My world had cracked, and I had to step into that crack, to find out what lay behind.

There is a crack, a crack in everything. That’s how the light gets in.

Leonard Cohen, Anthem

There is much that each of us will not let go willingly. But must, nonetheless, when catastrophe hits and forces your hand. To face the trainwreck head-on is more straightforward than cringing and looking away. The pain bites like hell either way.

The moment of losing your identity is a sacred opportunity, wherein a new way of being may emerge if you let it. Your old story ends, yet here you are, alive and breathing, in an unknown present full of surprises. Beyond the wasteland, new vitality beckons.

This story is part one of two on world collapse. Part two explores our collective predicament: how can we face despair over climate catastrophe and an increasing likelihood of societal collapse, without losing our sanity?

References

Welwood, John. 2000. Toward a Psychology of Awakening : Buddhism, Psychotherapy, and the Path of Personal and Spiritual Transformation. Boston : Shambhala. http://archive.org/details/towardpsychology0000welw.