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.
