by Mark A. Shryock
https://markashryock.substack.com/p/how-do-you-walk-your-spiritual-path
A reader asked me this in a comment.
How do you walk your spiritual path when everything in you is breaking down?
I want to answer her here, in the open, because she is not the only one asking. And I want to answer her honestly. Not with a theory. With my life.
I KNOW WHAT BREAKING DOWN FEELS LIKE
When I first woke up mystically, I became completely ungrounded. My kundalini blew wide open. What Stan Grof calls a spiritual emergency. I could see people’s past lives in their faces. I could see their aura, their chakra systems. Mystical experience after mystical experience after mystical experience. And I raised capital from 13 investors and created a company based on an idea, and because I believed in myself so much, they believed in the idea also.
But I was unhealed. I came from a family where I was severely traumatized. I was called worthless cocksucker a hundred times a day. That was my name. And no amount of mystical light fixes a wound like that. The light does not do the shadow’s work.
The company collapsed. Three people lost their businesses. One person committed suicide. As I was getting ready to kill myself, the room turned a white light, and I heard these words.
I am the dreamseed that is within you. As in all human kind. In no one, am I the same and this is my gift or curse to you. For many will laugh at your dream, for they dare not know their own. But I say unto you dare to know me. For I am the path to all that you can be, and I would not be within you were it not possible for you to do or become all I have placed within. Faith is my wellspring and you are the creator and nothing but yourself can stop the reality I wish to be.
I have tried to live my life by it since. But I was not well. I went to work in a halfway house as a spiritual advisor, and sitting with the men and women of the open meetings at the halfway house, listening to the twelve steps discussed around the table, I realized they were exactly like me. Same wounds. Same sickness. That was my first taste of recovery.
Then they found me lying in a pool of blood. I had vomited it from my ulcer, because I would lie in bed all night going over everything I had done wrong that day, every day, for years. I landed in the ICU barely alive. After I got out of the ICU, a man came to see me in my hospital room, the director of a treatment center, a friend of a friend. He looked at me and asked one question.
Have you had enough?
Two months later I went into treatment.
THE BENCH IN THE PARK
I was twenty eight and furious to be there. I was so angry, so resistant, that they told me I was failing treatment. Failing at treatment. They sent me across the street to a park and told me to sit there and decide whether I wanted to stay, and they were serious, they were getting ready to kick me out.
So I sat on that bench crying, because I thought, I am failing at even being a failure. And half mindlessly I watched a caterpillar on the ground, and then a butterfly flew up to me, and I heard this.
The gift to the butterfly is not the fact that the butterfly becomes a butterfly. The gift is that it remembers it was a caterpillar as it flies.
Something in that broke me open instead of breaking me down. I went back in and I worked. They called me the sponge because I soaked up everything. I did three meetings a day for almost three years. The director who asked me if I had had enough became my mentor, one of the top recovery people in the area at that time, doing deep inner child work with Bradshaw. And eventually I went to work in that same treatment center, teaching boundaries and self care, teaching people how to take care of themselves down to the smallest things. Things people take for granted. Like lighting a candle in your own house.
THE DOOR IS THE SAME FOR EVERYONE
As we begin our journey towards our individuation, our vocation, I know from walking this path and from watching hundreds of others walk it that the first thing that happens is that you have to integrate your shadow. All the disowned pieces. Jung said it over and over. The path of individuation, which is the spiritual path, which is finally about vocation, doing what you love and offering your gift to the world, that path begins with shadow work. It begins by simply acknowledging that the trauma is there. Seeing it. Naming it. And then working through it, ever so slowly, with help.
It is the same door for every person. No exceptions.
In her comment, she realizes and understands that she’s gone through a great deal of trauma and it’s affecting her. People spend decades unable to do that. She did it in one paragraph, in public.
You think you have not begun. You have begun. The acknowledgment is the first step through the door, and you have already taken it.
This can be worked through. I have seen this over and over, this exact pattern, in years of recovery and healing work.
WHY EVERYTHING IS COMING UP NOW
And I want to say something about the timing, because I believe it matters. We are moving from 3D through 4D into 5D, and 4D is the place where the shadow work happens. That passage has sped up. Wave after wave of light is coming in, and the light brings everything up, every buried feeling, every old wound, sometimes even what feels like past life trauma, rising to be felt and released. It can be overwhelming. I have had people tell me they wanted to kill themselves under the weight of it. I have had days myself, even a couple of years ago, where I was so depressed I could not stand it.
If that is you, hear me. You are not falling apart. You are in the dark night of the soul, and the dark night is not a detour from the path. It is the path, at its most honest stage. Everything in you is breaking down because everything false is being broken. The breaking down is not the obstacle. The breaking down is the work arriving.
THE TRAUMA SUCKS, BUT IT IS
Now I am going to tell you a hard truth, and I am going to tell it the only honest way I know, through my own life and nobody else’s.
On a soul level, I believe our lives can be shaped by circumstances we would never consciously choose. I did not choose my trauma as a boy, and I would never tell another person that they chose their suffering. What the soul is doing and what the personality is doing are not the same in any way, shape or form.
The trauma sucks. But it is. I believe the universe is love and guidance, gently guiding us back to ourselves, and that something can eventually grow from what happens to us without meaning that what happened was necessary or deserved. Despite all appearances otherwise.
I did not understand that as a boy being called worthless a hundred times a day. I understand it now, because my gift became radical self love, and it is in some ways what I talk about more than anything else. The thing that was most damaged in me became the thing I was most built to give. The bow was drawn all the way back because the arrow had far to go.
I did not say your abuse was a gift. I said mine shot me somewhere. That is my testimony, and you get to take it at your own pace, today or in ten years. It will keep.
LEARNING TO GIVE TO YOURSELF
So what does the work actually look like when your body is struggling? It looks like three learnings, and they are small on purpose.
Learn to give to yourself. Learn to heal yourself. Learn to create a safe place for yourself.
And understand that the safe place is not abstract. My mentor taught me that it is built from small physical acts of self regard. Lighting a candle in your own house. One slow breath. One kind sentence spoken to yourself instead of the sentence you were trained to hear. Resting without shame.
For all of us who carry trauma, and most of us do who are here as wayshowers and guide others through this great change, for all of us who walk the path of service and have a mission to give, learning to give to ourselves and receive from others, practicing radical self acceptance, and learning to set boundaries against those who would take and take and take from us, is our great work. It is the path. And as we do these things, we also begin to do what brings us joy, and as we continue to do what brings us joy, what we love, even though it may make no sense whatsoever, even to ourselves, why we want to do it, as we do these things, as we follow our joy, our heart’s whispers, then we begin to anchor our vocation.
It is not accidental that the words earth, heart, and art are all singing the same heart note. We are here to love ourselves and let our love shine to the world through our joy and our gifts that we have to share.
None of this requires a healthy body. All of it can be done lying down. The path walked lying down is still a path.
NO ONE DOES THIS ALONE
It would be a hell of a lot easier with help, because nobody gets through this alone. I did not. At every door in my story there was a person. The man who asked if I had had enough. The treatment center. The mentor. No one can walk your path and no one has your map. But I can tell you that finding your person, a trauma informed therapist, a spiritual director, a safe witness, a group, is how people survive this. Every person I ever watched make it through made it through with help.
But the dreamseed is there from birth. You grow it by following your joy, and if I could sum it up in a nutshell, what trauma healing is or was for me, it was learning to love myself enough that I would stop doing things I hated, and allow myself to follow my joy.
Trust your heart’s whispers to the joy it points to. Watch for narcissists, as they don’t have your answers and are only there to teach you to love yourself through pain. And above all else, trust your intuition.
And take care of the body too. The spiritual path does not replace doctors. It walks beside them.
THE WOUND BECOMES THE VOCATION
One of the things I want to talk about is all of us who feel we have a higher path and feel that we have a vocation that we’re not living up to. We have this feeling because there is a vocation we do have. I’ve never met anyone on the spiritual path who didn’t have the sense that they had a special mission to do, a spiritual purpose. And we don’t know what this is. We only know that we’re not living up to it.
I think of all the emotions I experienced on my spiritual path, this, and the feeling of worthlessness and shame that was wrapped up in it, of not doing my mission, my purpose, of not even knowing what it was, of dying with my song unsung, this was what haunted me the most. I’ve walked out into the middle of a field and screamed at God and flipped God off, only to see a cloud forming that gave it back to me with a middle finger. I’ve gone into the woods for three days to become my higher self, without food or water, and walked out wanting a cigarette, a cup of coffee, food and water, sick from having drunk out of a creek, with 130 mosquito bites, but no higher self.
The truth is that for all of us, our vocation, for all of our wishing to speed it up, and wanting it to reveal itself to us, has its own timeframe. In truth we are guided to our vocation through our soul and the universe, and things that happen for us, not to us, occur and move us along the path of our vocation, despite all our best efforts. The victory that occurs, of us claiming our vocation, or what Jung called individuation, is a victory of our soul. Looking back, I did none of it. I was guided, and held every step of the way.
And so often we don’t know why we’re even doing something, why we’re going through a particular school or life lesson, and God knows I’ve gone through so many different things, and then gone through the death and dying of everything around it as I moved on to the next group of schoolings I was going to receive.
Steve Jobs talked about how when he was in college he dropped out and started taking calligraphy courses, sleeping on the floor in his friends’ dorm rooms and walking to the Hare Krishna temple once a week to get one good meal. None of it had even a hope of any practical application in his life, and yet he felt great joy in studying it, and felt compelled to do it, even though he didn’t know why, and he honored that. Later, when he designed the Mac, all of that was critical to know and was there for him.
As we work through our trauma, it is exactly like this as well. Always the seeds of what we are becoming, our vocation, are building, always, always, even though we can’t see it until we look back from the place we are standing in our vocation. My building took decades, and I would reach one level and then it would be wiped out and I would go on to the next. Now I believe because of 3D to 5D this happens much, much quicker, as does the shadow work. Those in my age group were the last to go through the cycles of extreme death and rebirth, over and over, as we took initiations, moving us to higher and higher levels of consciousness, a process for me of decades.
My gift was not built in the mystical heights. It was forged in the collapse, the ICU, the bench in the park, the treatment center, the candle. I teach because I fell. If she walks through her shadow, and she has already started, what she will have to offer the world is exactly what the walking cost her. The wound becomes the vocation. The most damaged thing becomes the most gifted thing.
SO HOW DO YOU WALK
How do you walk your spiritual path when everything in you is breaking down?
You walk it one acknowledged truth at a time. With help. Slowly. Lying down if you have to. You light a candle. You say one kind thing to yourself and let it count. You let the waves bring up what they bring up, and you remember that what is breaking is what was false, and what is rising is what was buried, and the universe is not doing this to you. It is doing what your own soul already started.
The butterfly does not disown the caterpillar. It remembers it, as it flies.
Art by Mark A. Shryock