RED NIGHT OF THE SOUL
Holy places are dark places. It is life and strength, not knowledge and words that we get in them. Holy wisdom is not clear and thin like water, but thick and dark like blood.
C. S. LEWIS
Till We Have Faces
The first knock down after my Rouge Awakening happened through my relationship with a big-hearted actor named Dennis. For an entire year, Dennis had wanted to be in a monogamous relationship with me. For an entire year, I had refused to be monogamous, because I was enjoying dating several people at once and Working with a few men under the influence of the sacred-prostitute archetype. Experiencing all that heart-opening, paradigm-breaking eros made me honestly wonder if I was too spiritually evolved for monogamy.
(It’s all right. You can laugh.)
While there’s nothing wrong with exploring one’s sexuality, Red Touch, dating many people at once, or redefining monogamy, After Marion, I recognized shadows behind my noncommittal actions: all this erotic “free-for-all’ing” kept me flittering away from emotional intimacy and authentic human connection and was just another way I was bypassing the middle world.
Although I refused to commit solely to Dennis B.M. (Before Marion), I loved him as much as I could at that time, and he was the one I turned to a few hours after the interview with Marion. That stormy night in Toronto, over Skype, I had no words for what I was feeling and could only cry my previous spiritual reality out. Dennis silently watched me sob, for hours, gently nodding and holding me with his loving gaze through his computer screen in San Francisco.
I didn’t have the full picture of what was going down that emotional night (and quite honestly, I’m not sure if I’ll ever have the “full picture”), but besides needing my soul, I knew I needed solidity. It was time to stop floating. It was time to root down into the dark, dank reality of imperfect, vulnerable, messy life. One way for me to do this was through intimate human partnership. Although I had had monogamous relationships before Dennis, I now wanted, perhaps for the first time in my adult life, to really go there. And so, for the next few days in Toronto, while my previous sense of self, spirituality, and life began to crumble around me, I knew I had something stable to go home to — Dennis. And I couldn’t wait to tell him face to face that I was finally ready to commit.
The moment he picked me up from the airport, I knew something was off. I know you know the feeling — where your heart caves and your insides get jellylike and your entire system goes on guard, but you don’t have any logical reason why … yet. But we women can sense in a nanosecond when a man’s heart has changed direction. It’s one of our spiritual superpowers. Dennis and I had originally planned to spend the day together, since it was my first day home from my week-long trip, and I was still reeling from my Rouge Awakening. But as we walked into my apartment, he informed me he had made other plans, with his costar in the play he had started rehearsing the very week I was in Toronto. “Sera,” he practically panted. “She’s so soulful, embodied, and grounded. She’s so feminine!” It felt like spiked lemon juice had been poured onto my freshest wound. Dennis didn’t think I would be bothered by his new love interest because I was dating other people and had always encouraged him to do the same, even though he never had, until now.
Until now.
To say I got upset is an understatement. You wouldn’t have wanted to be anywhere near my apartment — hell, anywhere near my block — that day. The feelings coursing through me would have torn up a tornado, flooded an ocean, exploded a volcano; jealousy, grief, rage, and a lifetime of loss all poured out of me. While I was trying my damnedest to explain my cataclysmic reactions to Dennis so I didn’t appear completely insane, I was simultaneously having an internal dialogue with the Divine that sounded a lot like this:
ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME???!!! I’M FINALLY READY TO TAKE THE PLUNGE INTO INTIMACY, AND THE MAN I’M IN LOVE WITH, WHO HAS BEEN IN LOVE WITH ME THIS ENTIRE FUCKING YEAR, HAS SUDDENLY DECIDED HE LIKES SOMEONE ELSE!
FFFUUUCCCKKK TTTTHHHIIIIISSSSS!!!!!
Talk about divine timing. Talk about divine irony. Talk about devastation. Dennis was, of course, confused. Shocked by my reaction. Defensive. So was I. What was happening?
THE ULTIMATE BREAKUP
In the weeks and months that followed my Rouge Awakening with Marion, my relationship with just about everyone and everything was shaken to the ground, and some relationships, like my one with Dennis, were even destroyed. Yet the most heartbreaking experience of all was my breakup with spirit. It had been my primary relationship, my One True Love who had always been there for me, no matter what …
and then It was gone.
Just
like
that.
The vision I had during this time was of a massive Red velvet curtain, like one that hangs above the stage in those grand old theaters, dropping down quickly to the floor, right in front of me.
(THUD.)
Cutting me off from my audience, from the “house lights” of spirit, from the world.
There is nothing like a first encounter with Absolute Darkness.
There was no God. There was no Goddess. There was no Red Lady.
Being cut off from the Big D, as I knew it at that time, meant I was not only cut off from feeling Its loving presence throughout my day, it also meant I was cut off from the ways I had received guidance my entire life. Gone were the powerful dreams, synchronicities, and my energetic abilities. Gone was the consistent intuitive guidance from my out-of-body spiritual “team.” Not having these spiritual support systems was like waking up one morning with no arms and yet having to go about my day doing everything I normally did (like brush my teeth and cook and write and pleasure myself). I had no idea how to function. It felt like I had been thoroughly grounded by the Universe.
So, I sat on my couch and cried. I lay in my bed and cried. I washed in the tub and cried. I canceled my Redvolution workshops and talks. I stopped shooting my Red film. I stopped writing. I stopped responding to my email or my phone or my parrot. I had no energy for any of it, and I honestly had no idea if I would have the energy for any of it ever again. If I didn’t have the Divine, I didn’t have anything. As the mystic Mechthild of Magdeburg wrote:
There comes a time when both body and soul enter into such a vast darkness that one loses light and consciousness and knows nothing more of God’s intimacy. At such a time when the light in the lantern burns out, the beauty of the lantern can no longer be seen. With longing and distress we are reminded of our nothingness.1
DOWN SHE GOES
During this dark and disorienting time, not only was I blocked from making collect calls to spirit, but also, when I tried to go to the human people — the teachers, colleagues, healers, and energy workers — I usually went to for help, the practices they used and paradigms they shared only supported my addiction to spirit.
When I reached out to my beloved energy teacher, she exclaimed, “Oh Sera, don’t go down that dark path! That’s dangerous! Not where God wants you to go, stay up above it, raise your vibration, try to find the light again.” I hung up the phone, terrified I was making a huge mistake and was spiritually screwing myself for lifetimes by
Falling
Down.
According to Bill Plotkin, “Most religions and new age spiritual groups omit or obscure soulwork…. It is due to its downward and darkward bearing that many people misunderstand or fear the journey of descent. Western religious traditions associate the downward direction with a turn away from the sacred …”2
A few weeks after the fear-inducing phone call with my energy worker, I tried to share a bit of my experience with a respected leader of a retreat center. Her calm advice: “Oh yes, I’ve been through depression as well. You’ll be fine if you look to spirit for guidance.” To which something sinking in me silently growled: “This is not just depression or even just a psychological breakdown. This is complete spiritual reorientation! I have to learn how to navigate my life not by my tried-and-true north (spirit) but by what appears to my ego as my ‘untrue’ south — my soul.” As the mystic St. John of the Cross advises, “If a [wo]man wishes to be sure of the road [s]he treads on, [s]he must close [her] his eyes and walk in the dark.”3
Although I couldn’t feel the Divine anymore and was scared and confused and felt more lost than I ever dreamed possible, I also was beginning to sense that spirit’s absence actually was my “spiritual guidance.” Maybe I could no longer float up and out for answers and divine head rubs because I was supposed to sink down and in.
Okay, it’s just begging to be said: Many spiritual people are completely “stuck up.” Robert Augustus Masters, author of Spiritual Bypassing: When Spirituality Disconnects Us from What Really Matters, warns, “Having to stay ‘up’ dilutes and impoverishes us, leaving us to feed mostly on recycled spiritual clichés and other heady souvenirs of secondhand living.”4 Kali eats spiritual clichés for breakfast, with extra hot sauce, and then shits them down a dark sewer. All I knew during this dark time was that if one more person told me one more variation of how I should “create a more positive reality,” I was gonna get medieval on their ass.
I’m not just pointing the (middle) finger at others; I’m also speaking about myself. Although I’d been tutored for years by a spiritual-cliché-smashing Red Lady and had outwardly rebelled against limiting spiritual ideals and repressive supposedly “cosmic” codes of conduct, behind closed doors, I still gave a lot of power to these popular spiritual beliefs. In fact, I had a startling Redvelation a few months A.M.: I had unconsciously replaced the Catholic Church with the New Age with the academic study of religion with the energy school, which was then replaced by the female energy teacher. While each appeared radically different on the outside (and like an upgrade), when I looked under their covers, I found that they all shared similar asexual and disembodied qualities, and all emphasized (some more obviously than others) purity, following external spiritual guidance (God, teachers, spirit guides), controlling our thoughts/energy and therefore our life, and following the “rules” and “being a good girl” in order to ascend, evolve, or manifest all our dreams. Masters relays, “A common telltale sign of spiritual bypassing is a lack of grounding and in-the-body experience that tends to keep us either spicily afloat in how we relate to the world or too rigidly tethered to a spiritual system that seemingly provides the solidity we lack.”5 It’s like I was dating the same sick man with different faces over and over again.
To be clearer than angel spit, I don’t mean to bash religion, academia, the New Age, energy workers, or even the broad mainstream spiritual arena. I learned (and most likely will continue to learn) powerful and true things from each, and I am grateful to them for enlightening my life and for reflecting my shadow. Although I do feel that these traditions and groups need to claim more responsibility for their spiritual asymmetries, they weren’t really the problem — I was. I would have manifested these issues no matter what or who I engaged with; these spiritual systems just happened to be the perfect external projections of my own internal states of spirit addiction.
It’s also never helped that I appear ridiculously seraphic. In fact, when yoga teacher Sofia Diaz met me during this confronting time, she exclaimed, “Wow, I feel like I’m sitting across from an angel!” — something everyone and their brother has said to me at some point in my life. I retorted, “That’s the freakin’ problem! My overly ethereal nature has fucked me up! I’m dying just to be a human woman!” After my meeting with Sofia, I found an old magazine ad for Diesel jeans, depicting a topless, badass-looking female angel who is giving the birdie sign with one of her enormous white wings. I posted it on my kitchen cabinet next to a quote from David Deida:
Ours isn’t a world of angel wings and white spires.
Maybe when you die and go to the other side,
You’ll flit around as golden light.
But that’s not how love shines in this human realm …
This is the red realm.
And the only way beyond it is to feel through it — by loving as it.6
Bottom Line: My past cravings, intuitive attraction, and passion for Red’s life-affirming qualities were the healthy parts of me, reaching toward that which would help heal my addiction to spirit. The problem was, I still hadn’t embodied these Red qualities, nor had I thoroughly implemented them in my ordinary life. To help me understand more about why I hadn’t done so, soul-based counselors soon arrived on my murky scene.
RED IS BAD BAD BAD!
In our very first session, Susanne — a feminine-focused counselor recommended by dear friends — had me lie down and breathe deeply until I entered a light trance. Then she asked my subconscious a simple question: “Sera, how do you feel about embodying your soul?” Immediately, my inner vision filled with Red mixed with terrifying darkness, and I answered in a horror-stricken voice, “BAD BAD BAD BAD BAD!” My strange vision and strong reaction shocked the hell outta my conscious self. What was going on inside me?
In Soulcraft, Plotkin informs us: “The soul is our inner wildness, the intra-psychic terrain we know the least and that holds our individual mysteries.”7 To kick-start the journey into his own “intrapsychic terrain,” Carl Jung went into a light trance by imagining that he was digging down into the earth of himself (much like a shaman journeys to the lower world), until he entered a cave filled with black water.
In the deepest reach of the stream shines a red sun, radiating through the dark water. There I see — and a terror seizes me — small serpents on the dark rock walls, striving towards the depths, where the sun shines. Deep night falls. A red stream of blood, thick red blood springs up, surging for a long time, then ebbing. I am seized by fear. What did I see?8
Through his underground adventures, Jung realized that embodying his soul involves shadow work, what Masters describes as “the practice of acknowledging, facing, engaging, and integrating what we have turned away from, disowned, or otherwise rejected in ourselves.”9 Shadow work is shocking and profoundly mysterious because it has been “shadowed,” hidden for years (decades, lifetimes) for good reasons. Our psyches simply couldn’t handle dealing with our shadow elements in the past, so we tucked ’em beneath our conscious awareness until we were ready to take a peek and experience a whole helluvalotta BOO! As Masters admits, “If we are genuinely engaged in such work, we will likely feel very uncomfortable at times, as old wounds surface and our sense of identity shifts in unexpected or challenging ways, perhaps asking for authentic answers to the question of who and what we actually are.”10
While I was still in a trance, Susanne gently asked me what I could do to help ease the “Red badness.” The inner vision I immediately voiced was of me flying up up and away from Earth. There was a brief pause, where I could sense Susanne sensing me, and then her breath caught: “Sera, are you willing to stay? Stay here on Earth? Sera, are you willing to live?” Again, the conscious part of me was completely befuddled. Even my divorce from spirit and the dramatic downturn of my life didn’t bring me anywhere close to suicidal. But in that trance state, I suddenly became aware that whatever the hell was going on with me was a life-or-death matter.
In fact, when I met Sofia Diaz at this time, right after her angel comment, she said I was on my “last exhale” and that I needed help inhaling life again. Sofia told me that all our past lives spent meditating in a cave or enlightened in a monastery obviously didn’t work. We’re all back and having to deal with life. She said, “Enlightenment is a woman’s body, Sera.” Sofia told me my spiritual path was to descend now, to come home to my female body, to breathe life into my belly, and to come to know an entirely different way of “being spiritual” and connecting to the Divine. It was time to give birth to myself.
The annoying thing was, I knew well what Sofia was telling me. I had preached these ideas for years. I just wasn’t fully living them yet due to myriad unconscious reasons. As Mariana Caplan reminds us,
If what many of the world’s great psychologists and spiritual masters have suggested is true — that we are 90 percent unconscious and 10 percent conscious — then those of us who are deeply committed to spiritual life face a monumental task: first to learn what it is that is unconsciously running us, and then to learn how to discern clearly in relationship to that.11
What was becoming clearer than the night sky over the land of truth was that unconsciously …
I was completely and utterly terrified of embodying my soul.
(I was completely and utterly terrified of the Feminine.)
I was so terrified of embodying my soul that I would rather die than do so.
(I would rather die than be alive with Her.)
And, all this terror appeared in my unconscious as
RED
COSMIC FAMILY THERAPY (PART 1)
I was pointed to another respected counselor during this time. At the end of our first session (during which he ignored much of what I was saying and instead expertly watched my shallow breath, my trembling body, my flashing eyes), he told me that although he was used to his Western clients fearing life and trying to escape their human condition in some form or another — especially those who had had a rough childhood or suffered physical, mental, or sexual abuse or participated in more transcendent forms of spirituality — the severity of my inner terror exceeded these cases.
He suggested we try a “family constellation” to see if we could locate where my extreme fear of embodiment derived from. This unusual experiential process involves you and a dozen or so people sitting in a circle, witnessing a few others who have volunteered to role-play around your issue (in the center of the circle). Here’s where it gets interesting: There is no script or history or detailed personal information given; instead, the role players intuitively “act out” the unconscious reasons and hidden roots underlying your current issue, which offers you (watching from the sidelines) a new perspective. This is one of those seemingly woo-woo processes that people don’t fully understand with their minds but that nonetheless has proven to be tremendously insightful. Therefore, it is being used more and more in traditional therapy.
However, I’m not gonna lie — my family constellation starred the woo-woo.
The first five minutes involved three role-players in the center of the circle, intuitively acting out powerful but typical unconscious dynamics between my mom, my dad, and myself. Suddenly, witnesses sitting in the circle not assigned roles cried out that the entire floor “felt/looked” like it was two feet deep in Red blood. The complete stranger intuitively “role playing” me in the middle of the circle ran to an empty chair and curled up in the fetal position, terrified. Meanwhile, a witness silently started to rise up until he was standing on his tippy toes on top of his chair. He stretched his arms out to either side and let his head loll. He looked like he was being crucified. Almost at the same time, my friend Liyana, also not originally assigned a role, ran into the bloody circle and stood on her tippy toes and reached reached reached up with her arms as she burst into heartbreaking sobs. Meanwhile, the original people assigned the roles of my ordinary mom and dad moved to the sidelines, watching in awe as what appeared like my “cosmic family” took center stage.
“Well, this is new,” my surprised counselor muttered under his breath. My fear of embodiment didn’t appear to be rooted in my immediate family dynamics or even necessarily in my ancestors (another common source).
He started working the room and brought who he called “the couple” (crucified man and reaching, sobbing woman) together and had them lie down on the floor in surrender, peacefully holding hands in the Red. He had me trade spaces with the woman “playing” me. As I took her fetal position, I immediately felt gut-wrenching, inconsolable terror. He then asked me to unfold my clenched body and place my feet on the ground, deep in the Red “blood” of Life. I did so, shaking and sobbing and feeling more vulnerable than I’d ever felt before. Oddly enough, four witnesses slipped off their chairs onto their knees, facing me, their hands folded in prayer.
Then my family constellation was over.
My counselor shook his head, smiled at me compassionately, and said, “Sera, you’re pretty out there.”
SOUL WOUNDS
I was pretty out there. So out there, in fact, that a few weeks after my family constellation, during a late-night journaling session, a wispy voice stated:
I’m not here.
It was a strange declaration to be sure, but it made me think about a close girlfriend who had recently told me that whenever she hugged or touched me, she didn’t feel me. It’s not like I was spacing out or not being present with her, but that my Being, what I Am, the Essence (or soul) of me, didn’t feel like it inhabited my body. Another recent encounter flashed behind my eyes: A man told me that even though I acted human like a pro, I felt “ghost-like,” intangible, more than most. Now, I was used to being called witchy and angelic and being told I was ungrounded, but becoming ghostly was incredibly unsettling.
Although I was becoming more aware of my spiritual-bypasser tendencies and wasn’t that interested in denying the psychological elements of my Red night of the soul or how I, as a modern woman, had repeatedly dissed my soul, I also felt like I was tussling with why I, as a soul, was unwilling to completely touch down in a human body. This determined disembodiment, this radical refusal to fully incarnate and yet this equally strong ache to do so — to finally “come home” — felt epic and bizarre and painful beyond measure. It felt like the cosmic Novocain that had been numbing me for lifetimes was suddenly wearing off, and the Soul Ache I’d had since the beginning of time was finally being felt, in every cell in my body and on every level of my being.
I. Hurt. Everywhere.
I was an open wound.
But not just any wound.
In my experience, we each have a sacred wound. While this sacred wound most definitely bleeds through our current lives and psyches, it’s actually anchored in our soul and tells a much larger story — our cosmic story. In many ways, every wound we have is related to this sacred wound, so when we discover it, every other wound begins to make more, well, “sense.”
I want to be careful here, because as you might have experienced, in today’s overly therapized culture, some people can get a little too attached to their wounds, making them the centerpiece of every conversation and the means through which they relate to others and define themselves and live their life, thereby turning the wound and the healing of the wound into their new profession and raison d’etre. Caroline Myss wisely labels this phenomenon woundology. However, when you’re a spiritual bypasser like me, who never realized she actually had any wounds to heal, the opening and exploration of my sacred wound — the wound around which so much of my life was created — has been mandatory on my soul path. As Plotkin writes, “The risky task with your wounds is to open them so soul can come through.”12
Something to be aware of: The opening of our sacred wound lies completely beyond our conscious control. You can’t make yourself open or close your sacred wound. It’s either time for it to open, or it isn’t. But if it’s time for it to open, hold on to yer sanity as best you can, because sacred wounds take you where most therapy isn’t willing to go.
Now, although essentially our soul can never be wounded, on lower dimensions of this universe, it feels and appears as though our soul is wounded and even fragmented. In fact, there’s a common shamanic practice called “soul retrieval” in which shamans travel to other realms in order to locate and “bring back” wounded pieces of a person’s soul to help reintegrate these soul fragments into the human body, thereby providing healing on multiple levels. More often than not, a person’s soul has fragmented due to a trauma that was too unbearable to “stay through,” such as abuse, rape, war, an accident, a loss of a loved one, and so on.
At this time in my Red night, I was beginning to recognize that my soul’s trauma didn’t appear to come entirely from my current life. I also realized that I had to be my own shaman. I had to retrieve my own soul and integrate her back into my body. It was clear that I couldn’t continue living in this disembodied way anymore. It was time to make a fundamental choice: embody my soul or skedaddle through some sort of “natural” means (illness, car accident, earthquake, rotten hair dye).
I know this might sound strange. I’m not trying to make some ultimate metaphysical claims for you. All I know is that this life-or-death choice was very real for me at this time. As Marion Woodman confirms, “It’s truly a shattering experience to realize you don’t want to live, and an equally shattering experience to know you do.”13 Although embodiment felt absolutely terrifying, I realized that if I didn’t try to incarnate now, I would just have to do it in my next life.
So, I stopped resisting what it felt like I had been resisting for eons of time and started to surrender to the slow process of my embodiment.
In other words, I chose to live.
MUD PITS AND MARRIAGE
For months and months, I felt like I was living in a mud pit.
My middle world and lower world were receiving some long-overdue visits, and they felt very different than my usual haunt — the light and airy upperworld.
During this revealing period, I seriously thought about creating a new twelve-step program called “Disincarnates Anonymous.” All my previously unconscious habits that had held me “disincarnate” — not fully inhabiting my female body or my life — kept arising in front of my surprised eyes to be delved into and processed with my counselors and journal and then slowly and awkwardly implemented in my daily life. Bottom line: I was beginning to take responsibility for my life (and lives). I was starting to become a spiritual adult.
A quick acknowledgment: I’m beyond grateful that I actually had the means and the time to Fall. In what I can see only as a grandiose act of precognitive grace, two dear friends donated a large sum of money to me for my Redvolution work, two weeks before I met Marion. Also, I was not married nor did I have children or others dependent on me, nor did I have a nine-to-five job. I know others who have “fallen” while having all the above responsibilities firmly in place, and they have still made it through to their other side, safely, and without putting their loved ones in jeopardy. This is a unique experience for each of us, perfectly timed and prescribed by our soul. During Jung’s Red Book years, he continued to work and pay his bills and attend to his family during the day, while processing and documenting his dramatic soul voyages during the night. He said that what transpired during his inner excavations formed the basis for his entire life’s work.
Six soul-working months into my Red night, I retreated to Harbin Hot Springs, a rustic hippie hot springs in Northern California, where I soaked, slept, and did absolutely nothing for nine days.
My last night, sitting in the middle of the woods under the bright moon, something shifted. What happened wasn’t complicated; it was really very simple — I felt Mama Earth. I experienced Her … not abstractly, as “nature,” but personally, as a Being. She did not feel like my beloved, still-absent Red Lady, but She did make Herself known as a darkly wild and glorious Feminine Presence, a singular earthly organism that I was undoubtedly a part of, and that I loved, oh how I loved, and that I missed, oh how I had missed. For the first time in a long time, I felt an intimate, grounded, bodily connection to Her. My cells sighed. My organs gurgled. My heart pressed against Her. The sensation of our re-connection was not unlike hugging one of my dearest and oldest friends with whom I hadn’t been in contact with for ages. Oh yeah, You. The overflowing love exchanged through our reunion astonished me.
I began to feel what it might actually be like to make love to life — not to reject it or idealize it or simply endure it, but to actively and lovingly give to it and receive from it. I began to understand that it was not enough to just face reality; I needed to embrace reality.
Years earlier, at this very same hot springs, I had married myself, with soul sister Maya as my witness. So, now, on this Redvelatory last night of my retreat, I decided to update my wedding vows. There, with Mama Earth as my witness, I married my physicality. I ceremoniously and with full intention and heart
committed myself to my body
to my soul
to the earth
to life
to the Divine Feminine.
And in those magnified moments, they believed me.