Touching Core Emptiness
Over the past couple of months, I descended into the absolute bottom of my own woundedness. I touched the core emptiness that has sabotaged relationships throughout my life—the void that caused me to prop myself up on others rather than stand sovereign.
The break came during a near-three-mile walk along the Erie Canal trail. I was having a bad day, swallowed by anxiety over an inability to manifest something I deeply wanted. The anxiety gave way to tears on the trail, and I was overcome by that gelid sense of self I associate with self-pity and woe-is-me emotion. I tried to do some shamanic work while walking, but I couldn't escape the agony. I wanted to claw my way out of my own skin.
The breaking point hit in the car on the way home. I was shouting, screaming at other drivers, completely consumed by the volatile energy. And then the bottom fell out. I realized I was experiencing my own absolute emptiness. This was the root of a woundedness I have carried not just through this lifetime, but through many, extending far back into my ancestral line.
I could feel that there was simply nothing there, nothing to hold onto but my own vacuity. There was no one I could latch onto for safety, no external source to make me feel valued or loved. I had used other people and objects to fill this existential void for as long as I could remember, driven by a central, unconscious thesis: love equals loss.
But in feeling that ultimate bottom, there was also a profound relief. In a subsequent journey, I returned to the Emperor imagery I had been working with. But this time, the archetype evolved. I was forged as an entire diamond, without a single fissure. I became the Diamond Emperor.
The synchronicity of this vision struck me later. Every morning and night, I had been practicing a physical and energetic discipline called the Vajra Draw. When I later consulted Mircea Eliade's Patterns in Comparative Religion, I learned that Vajra in Sanskrit translates to "diamond" or "thunderbolt." I hadn't consciously known this when the imagery arrived.
There were many correspondences like this throughout this period. They occur not by coincidence, but because through this brutal descent, I was finally touching the sacred.
Rebuilding the Inner Kingdom
My life ruptured this past August. An unhealed wound--one that had secretly structured every relationship I've had--finally collapsed the foundation. I was forced inward, while grieving the greatest loss of my life, to confront a brutal truth: in trying to use the relationship to protect the old hurt, I was hurting the one I loved. I thus created a ruin instead of a castle.
The spirits who guide me were clear: I needed a throne, a seat of interior stability to ground me in my own power so that I no longer needed to rely on partners or externalities--my massive collections of books, music, and movies--to hold me upright.
The wound originated in abandonment: an absent father at birth, a perceived loss when I was a teenager, and karmic losses before this life. To survive, I adopted a "nice guy" armor to avoid being left again. Behind this "nice guy," however, was a resentful shadow who didn't know how to get his needs met, who didn't even know what his needs were much of the time. I was thus ungrounded, dissociated, and lacking in the core self-love required to be the King on his throne. I was a doormat because I was terrified of the door closing.
When I journeyed to my internal throne, it was cracked and broken. My guides and I repaired it. I was given Arthurian gifts: Excalibur to speak the truth no matter the cost and the Grail, which held pure self-love and self-worth. I did the painstaking work, visiting the throne sometimes thirty times per day, drinking from the Grail until my somatic reality shifted. Over the weeks and months, I moved from drinking the power to becoming the Grail, thus learning bodily that I'm loved by the divine without qualification.
The result? I have real power in the world. I no longer resist my poetic and shamanic gifts out of shame. I built this business, and I write (revise) with intensity every day. I have cleared the energetic roots of the abandonment wound to find a self that is independent of props. I'm not finished--the integration continues apace--but I’m far from where I was in August, for when fear shadows me now, I don't hide like a child. I sit on the throne and feel the Grail-love.
What wounds do you need to heal? How do they structure your life? Where is your Grail?
Welcome to Green Shamanism!
Welcome! This journal is where I will share reflections on the healing path, insights from the spirit world, and the published poetry that arises from this work.
Healing is not simply a destination but what we live every day. I look forward to sharing what I learn with you.