The relationship dance.
“Forgive yourself for not knowing what you didn’t know before you learned it.” – Maya Angelou
The chrysalis is a metamorphic intermediate stage that shelters a state or stage of being and/or growth. Specifically, it is the protective enclosure or cocoon in which the caterpillar not only immerses itself, but liquifies itself to become something new. To put it another way, it’s a pressure cooker. It’s literally a transformation chamber—the process of which—through force and energy beyond one’s dominion—has the power to transmute matter, form, and being.
At some point in our lives, we are all initiated in the transformation chamber. To be in the heart of the chrysalis is to be initiated into a new way of being, and if you are going to take the next step forward in the evolution of your life’s journey, whether through courage or circumstance—if you are ever going to fly rather than die on the branch of the milkweed—then you need to see the process through. How does one do that? Through the darkest nights of your soul you simply hold on to the walls of the transformation chamber with all your strength and resilience.
When confronted with life’s unavoidable winters, we are called to go inward, for to evolve and become something new we must transform, and to transform is to endure the pressures of metamorphosis. The process of metamorphosis is transformation itself, and processes require energy. But I would argue that transformation is not just a form or function of energy, but in fact it is a specific state of energy in flux. For this reason, its evolutionary design is to expand and evolve consciousness. To resist this natural tide is to be condemned to the fate of Sisyphus.
To come out on the other side of the transformation chamber is to accept that life is a never-ending process of the transference, transmutation, and transfiguration of energy—and it is that energy which reorganizes perspective, matter, and physical reality. From the quantum, the smallest quantity of radiant energy, to the collection of cells that creates tissue, to the exponential ordering of tissues that form the human body, to learn how to move in the flow of transformational energy it is to learn how to master the self.
But I am far from a master, dear reader. I am simply a soul on the journey, which is why instead of surrendering to a new flow of energy, I gave all my power away to a woman. And it is in that transference of my vital force to something outside of myself that I once again found myself in the transformation chamber.
***
Surrounded by mountain flora, Douglas firs, and Ponderosa Pines, as I descended the wooded path towards Little ZigZag Canyon, I felt like a crustacean submerged in a slow boil. For weeks I had been simmering in my own skin and there was nothing more I wanted than to crawl out of it—to molt the energetic exoskeleton in which I found myself imprisoned.
Whatever was emerging, whatever wanted to be shed or birthed, was outgrowing its old form, and to withstand its constraints was to a suffer a psychic pain the likes of which I was not sure how much more I could endure. And yet like an old sweater, to let go of this way of being would be to let go of something familiar and comforting.
It was a mid-July afternoon after a very mid-life birthday that found me hiking ahead of my sisters on Oregon’s Mount Hood. The swiftness of my gait was not out of intention, but rather I was lost in the forest of my own mind. In the process, I kept forgetting to breathe, causing me to take big, deep gasps of air to compensate for all the otherwise shallow or forgotten ones.
When I reached the precipice of the giant gorge, to follow my gaze from the sunlit snow-capped peak of Mount Hood, down the great canyon, and down to the cascading river valley below was to witness a scale of incomprehensibility only known to nature—and only fully appreciated when standing in its humbling, majestic presence. When my sisters finally caught up with me, one of them asked a nearby ranger how much further the trail continued.
“Well, after you descend a 900-foot vertical slope, you gotta climb up the other side. Then you gotta hike another six miles to get to the next camp. And then you gotta turn around. It’ll definitely show you what you’re made of.”
A better metaphor for the current state of my life could not have been more aptly articulated.
***
During the winter and spring of 2019, I experienced a great expansion, the container and catalyst of which was a romantic relationship. To cap it off, in late spring we spent a week driving around the Algarve, Portugal’s southern coast, followed by three dreamy days in an apartment in the Chelsea neighborhood of New York City. We were both living in Mexico, traveled well together, laughed all the time, had talked about kids, and it seemed I had finally found someone whose lifestyle was compatible to the life of freedom I worked so hard to create.
After our vacation, I unexpectedly found myself back in Seattle where my return plan to Mexico was temporarily scuttled. It was during this delayed stopover that she abruptly ended our relationship. Perhaps nothing in life gives rise to disorientation and questioning more than the death of a loved one or a mid-life broken heart. In a sense, they are both a loss of the relational self. In the process of unexpectedly finding myself once again walking alone, I forgot who I was, who I was becoming, and who I aspired to be. Having no idea where life was taking me, or what my next form would bring me, it was out of unconscious fear that I backed myself into the chrysalis.
What I did not know—because I did not yet have the language to wrap around the molten feelings of my internal world—was that I was in the midst of my life’s greatest crisis of faith.
***
It’s not just any old broken heart, nor any run-of-the-mill broken heart, that throws one into a crisis of faith. This woman who I loved, although unaware of what she said or who she was being, used shaming judgements and condemning words to belittle me, causing me to feel as if she had shot holes in the very fabric of the life I had chosen to lead. Not surprising, this was exactly what her mother had spent a lifetime doing to her.
The first time she ever shared any intimate details about her childhood, she cried in my arms. I wanted to make everything all right, but all I could do was hold her to try to make her feel safe. Her rare outward expression of vulnerability was the most beautiful thing I had ever experienced with her, and yet when I asked her more about her childhood, she told me it was too painful to revisit.
As a result of my internalization of her projection, I questioned every decision I ever made with regard to my choice of being a writer—as if walking the uncertain path of an artist and believing in the manifestation of a dream only I can see and feel was not a hard or lonely enough path upon which to tread.
And so I bought into the projection of her own fears and insecurities—not because they were objectively true—but because she had managed to tap into the very heart of some of my life’s greatest insecurities and fears. Although I had done copious amounts of internal work to contain them, they had been patiently lying in wait for me to revive them with my attention and awareness.
Not that I could see them through the oxytocin dream, but there were clues early on that variations of the fears, insecurities, and unrest that lived in me also lived in her, for example, she once told me men never break up with her. She also told me that the men she dated always turned out to be needy, and that in the past eight years since breaking off her engagement, all of her relationships ended at either three or six months.
No one had ever accused me of being needy, in fact I was often accused of the exact opposite, so when she told me I was being needy, I was perplexed. What I couldn’t see at the time, and didn’t yet have the life experience to distill, was the role she played in constructing this perceived neediness—the energetic game of push-and-pull of which she had unconsciously become a master. A few months later, I would learn it’s called a codependent control pattern.
Every time it seemed like things were going great, like we were growing closer, she would swiftly retreat, each time taking with her not only our connection, but a piece of my heart. What I was experiencing as falling in love, she was perceiving as a threat, and what she was perceiving as me being needy, was actually the confusion and loss I felt every time she (her being) disappeared. Despite the strong, independent person she projected to the world, I knew through conversations with her and her friends that she really wanted a partner, but how can one ever expect to have a successful relationship when the feelings and sensations of intimacy trigger such visceral fight or flight responses? In observing this behavior, I later recognized it all too well as a pattern that up until my two most recent relationships, I too had been perpetuating to my own degree.
As you do in a romantic relationship, in the sharing of our stories it became very clear to me that her upbringing taught her love was not safe. It explained the anxiety that arose every time we grew closer, and her resulting retreat into the fortified castle of her heart. I also found it curious how every year around the holidays and summer break, without fail she would come down with severe bronchial problems, the place where it’s said we energetically store grief. As it turns out, this also coincided with the two times of year she would have to spend extended periods of time with her mother.
“What if I’m just a few years behind you in my journey and evolution,” she told me on more than one occasion.
“It’s not a race,” I would say trying to diffuse her anxiety.
What I wanted to tell her was that I loved her, that it was ok, that in the construct of our relationship, we had the opportunity to transform our lives to become something greater. In doing so, in being able to stand before each other in naked vulnerability, we could transcend the conscious and unconscious wounds and fears that held us back—while at the same time becoming the guardian of each other’s wounds and fears. Deep down, however, I knew it would be too much for her. As long as we stayed in the “fun zone,” as long as she didn’t have to jump into the deep end, everything was copacetic.
“It’s ok to be vulnerable. You’re safe with me. I don’t want anything from you and I’m not going to hurt you. I just want to know you better,” I told her instead.
But that message never made it past her emotional moat. Because our brains are a neurological record of the past, we’re wired to only see what we know and have experienced. For many of us, relationships—whether romantic, familial, and so on— have caused a tremendous amount of unresolved pain, so if we don’t enter a relationship with intention, conscious awareness, and openness, we are doomed to repeat the mistakes of our past.
And so from the safety of her guard’s tower, she unconsciously fired shots as to why I was not enough. What hurt the most, however, was that none of them were about my character, in fact, she often said I was the most thoughtful and communicative person she had dated. Instead, they all had to do with material comfort, despite the fact that she did not lack these things, had never lacked these things, nor would she ever. What it all added up to was that she couldn’t see me, nor did she have any belief in me or who I was becoming.
Like my former self, she was looking for someone who was fully formed to complete her, which is the greatest lie we have ever been sold when looking for a partner. The person who seeks this will never be fulfilled, because no one will ever be good enough for them. Another lie I bought into early on was that I always thought I needed to find the place to live, then have the job, then I would be ready for the woman. It took me a long time to learn that the journey is not about two fully-formed people coming together as one, but about who we become in the process.
Beyond her pedigree, success, education, and ability to charm and disarm others, beneath the external facade she projected to the world, I saw the wounded little girl who was actually reciting reasons why she wasn’t enough. I desperately wanted to tell her how beneath the man, the wounded little boy in me felt the same way, but she never got to see that that little boy, nor did she ever get to experience the true freedom and breadth of my spirit, because every time she disappeared, I felt less and less safe to reveal myself. Beneath each of our many layers of survival adaptations and learned behaviors, what we both shared was the outward search for something to complete an inward longing.
When she officially ended our relationship on my birthday, like a rush-hour train departing right on time, we had just reached the six-month mark. While I would love to blame her and make her wrong, because it would be so much easier to disavow my own culpability in the demise of our relationship, with time and distance I recognized that she was acting out of unresolved trauma patterns, just as I was acting out of my own.
To make matters words, as a result of my desperation to be seen, heard, and accepted by her—which was accentuated every time she disappeared—I began trying to become someone I wasn’t for somebody who no matter what I did, would never be able to see me through her own fears, wounds, insecurities, and unconscious programs.
And so in a relationship unlike any other I’d been in, our energies were like warm and cold fronts coming together over a coastal town, and in the uprising of the storm—like some long lost treasure buried beneath the sands of time—surfaced our wounds. Because we lacked awareness, however, we did not recognize them as a calling to transform. The ocean tide, which is another form of energy in flux, is a great reminder of transformation. Whereas at one moment you may see the bay, in a relatively short amount of time, shipwrecks and treasures once concealed are revealed. Thus is the ebb and flow of life.
***
I’ve often wondered how it was I could “randomly” meet someone, be completely attracted to them, form a deep relationship, and then later come to discover they were inaccessible at the level of inner sanctum where I wanted to meet them. (Granted, I was that inaccessible person more times in my life than I was the open-hearted one.)
The answer is really quite simple, and it’s the same answer as to why relationships fall apart; it’s because we are energy beings, each operating at certain levels of consciousness, or strata of frequencies. We call this the law of attraction. When two energies (people) come together at the same frequency, on the constructive side, like attracts like; on the destructive side, wounds attract wounds.
The stories we wrap around our lives exist at a certain frequency, within a level of consciousness. It was in the gilded stories she wrapped around the experiences of her life that her emotional and spiritual development was arrested. The confluence of our stories and energies only fed my own story of lack, inadequacy, and the desire to be loved—which in itself was a level of consciousness within which I had become incapacitated. My previous relationship to her revealed my affliction of unworthiness, and in the mirror of this relationship revealed my unconscious love affair with lack. Both were unattended diseases of my soul that manifested in my relationships.
And so when two people come together in a relationship, they do so out of a shared level of consciousness (or unconsciousness). This strong woman, who at a another level was fragile and scared—this beautiful woman who caused me so much pain was my mirror, and as a result, she triggered my own unconscious programs. When that happened, she ripped off a band-aid, under which was a scar that hid a much deeper wound, the origins of which I could not yet pinpoint. It was only after the breakup, however, after spending months perseverating over imaginary conversations with her about what a terrible person she was and how deeply she hurt me, that I saw my own unconscious pattern emerge: I was attracted to very strong women who had deep, emotional, unresolved, early-childhood wounds.
While there is no questions in my mind or heart I loved these women, on one level I did so because I wanted to heal them. On another, more profound level, I wanted to love away their pain and sadness, just like I wanted to love away the pain and sadness of my mother.
At a soul level, this woman became the symbol of my pain, of the unhealed wounds I needed to look at. On the human level, she was the source of my pain, and to focus on something external as the source or cause was much easier than having to go within. At some point, the pain of this focus and blame pushed me up against my breaking point, so I had to make the choice to leave it in my past or let it destroy me. Thus, in the name of self-preservation, I had to surrender an old way of being and become someone new.
***
And so perhaps it was not out of pain but instinct that I retreated inward. Unbeknownst to me, on the other side of that retreat, was a precipitous downward spiral. While I was aware of the centripetal force that was syphoning me deeper towards my uncomfortable center, the pull was greater than my will to step outside of it. In the process of passing through this vortex, I felt lost and broken in the labyrinth of myself.
As a result, like so many other similar times in my life, what I thought I had outgrown or outrun had once again emerged in a new form and context. It appeared that as my life evolved, so too did this thing I called my soul ache—and once again it was eating away at my will to live. In the self-indulgent haze of my own pain, I lost sight of the soul ache’s purpose. Instead, all I could see was a 45-year-old man living the 17-year-old self’s actualized dream of being an artist—a dream that in the flesh was much more challenging than anything he could have ever imagined.
More than a dream, though, it was a calling—a calling for which I could not have known from the safe, secure vantage of the past that following this path would at times ask of me to sacrifice jobs, relationships, paid vacations, ease, comfort, healthcare, and more. That calling, which arose in my late teens, has always been greater than my will to resist it. In the youthful naivety of answering the calling’s nascent whisper, I asked to be used as an instrument of peace. While many times since then I have tried to jump off this speeding train, somehow or another life keeps putting me back on it. When life keeps placing us on a certain path, it’s something to pay attention to. Thus, in the end I elected for experiences and worldly knowledge, rather than security and stability. Was I just living in a delusion?
We are an absurd lot, us artists, for above all else we are driven to create, express, and emote. It is not a sickness per say, because a sickness tends to be an aliment of the body, but rather I would call it a madness, because madness is a possession of the mind and spirit. To be an artist is to walk the path upon which no else but you can tread, because you are answering an inner calling to express an ineffable aspect of the universal in the reflection of the particular—that being your soul’s humble Earth walk. Did I have a choice?
Of course I did.
At all times the human condition exists in a state of choice, and within that construct, choice and the infinite pathways, potentials, and possibilities it reveals, empowers us with the prerogative to resist transformation. That is creation’s gift to humanity, free will, for it is our free will and our creativity that separates man from beast.
As for me, I made the choice to believe and internalize this woman’s story of who she thought I was as a reflection of herself, and as I result I lost my way. I bought into her story, which aligned with unresolved stories and wounds within myself, and this caused me to turn away and shrink from the magnetic and generative greatness that is my life—that is all of our lives.
For me, the first lesson is to never again give away my power to someone or something outside of myself. After giving away your power to someone for extended periods of time, when those unspoken energetic bonds are broken, you’re left completely devoid and depleted, and sometimes—such as in my case—that process takes months and months to replenish. When the body no longer has the energy to replenish itself, matter begins to break down. This is how the entropic process of disease begins.
Perhaps the saddest part of this story, which is perhaps the saddest part of the present predicament of the human condition, is that beneath this tug of war, all we both really wanted was to be loved, to feel safe, and to feel secure. Amplify the microcosm of this singular relationship to the macrocosm and you have the global experience of humanity.
The second lesson I learned is that the soul ache is not a pain to be anesthetized, nor is it an adversary to be defeated. Instead, it is a compass, a north star, a spiritual device designed to course correct us so that we come into alignment with our higher self. To put it another way, the soul ache is the shadow self calling us forth from the darkness to the light.
When left unchecked, the soul ache’s purpose is to elicit a crisis of faith, underneath which is the lesson and direction to move us forward. The more we ignore the calling of the soul ache, the more we have to repeat the lesson, the more painful it becomes.
When examined, however, the soul ache is a calling to surrender more deeply in the mystery of creation, and sometimes that requires us to trust in a new direction in which the destination is not known, nor sometimes can the road even be seen. In that light, the soul ache is a catalyst for discovery—a navigation system inviting us into a deeper understanding of who we are during this brief but magical time we inhabit our physical bodies.
What it all comes down to is that life is a laboratory, a great vivarium experiment, within which all experiences are neutral. By wrapping stories around these experiences, however, we naturally inject them with an emotional quotient; therefore, it is the individual who labels and determines whether experiences are good or bad, painful or joyful. Distilled, this discernment is the journey of life.
At all times, we have the power to choose to hold on to anger, hurt, hate, and pain—or we can choose love, celebration, and joy, and to accept our experiences as lessons for our emotional evolution and spiritual growth—for it is in mastering our emotions where growth is to be found. What I am choosing to bring to this experience is the gratitude for intersecting with one of my life’s greatest soul teachers to date, for it was in her mirror that a profound awakening and life lesson was revealed to me. It is in unearthing and extricating the emotional charges from past events where we find the irons and ores of wisdom.
Like a bovine being scored with a branding iron, wounds from the past leave imprints on our soul, and sometimes like scar tissue they remain buried beneath the sands of time. When these wounds are not healed, they act as invisible tentacles reaching out from the past into our present, and even beyond into our future. In this light, the soul ache also calls us to forgiveness.
I recently heard Oprah say that forgiveness means giving up the hope that the past could be any different. That not only requires us to forgive the past, but perhaps more importantly, forgive ourselves, for as Maya Angelou said, “Forgive yourself for not knowing what you didn’t know before you learned it.”
What we bring from the past to the present can imprison us. What we take away from it can set us free.
***