The Love Beneath the Void

I’m sitting in my therapist’s office in Boulder County - the first time I’ve seen an in-person therapist since before the pandemic.

Finding a good therapist these days feels like finding a pearl in an ocean of crusty sea rocks, and I’m pretty convinced I’ve found the best therapist in all of Boulder. You know you’ve found the one when you’re willing to drive half an hour and pay whatever she asks just to be in her presence.

For the last few days, I’ve been in a wave of deep attachment anxiety, which is the core wound I’ve been circling for the past decade-plus, rooted in a primary natal (and after) experience of my mother being so dysregulated that my own needs as a baby/child were repeatedly met with various forms of mis-attunement - ranging from lack of presence to outright verbal/emotional hostility.

I believe that our souls choose our lives, our parents, our wounds exactly so that they can give the opening for the gifts our souls are here to give.

This understanding has been hard-wrought and only really landed in the past couple of years, and took me existentially making some shreds of sense of things like the Holocaust, or more recently Gaza, or the general state of humanity-destroying-everything.

I don’t claim to understand the mystery underneath the existence of atrocity, but somehow I found my own way out of the fuck-there-surely-is-no-God-because-this-atrocity-is-so-real state I found myself in for years after going on ancestral pilgrimage in Eastern Europe and traipsing from mass grave to desecrated graveyard to other mass grave (literally in every town) of my Jewish ancestors (to read about that incredible adventure, go here).

Back in my therapist’s office, none of this meaning-making mind-chatter matters, as Leah cuts right through this wildly developed adaptive strategy in me, naming it as just another deceptive way my ego desperately tries not to feel the deep-seated grief that sits in my core wound.

Leah believes that most of us have this deep-seated well of existential grief - both from just inherently being alive, and from being chronically mis-attuned to as children - and that this deep well of grief, coupled with the self-criticism aimed at this most vulnerable of parts, is essentially the just-so-delightful experience of shame that most modern humans walk around with as the bedrock of their emotional body.

I’d been in this shame the past few days, touching in and out of the blinding pain of attachment anxiety, which, when I do touch it, feels like I’m going to die.

It’s a pretty awful state of existence, and one that’s hard to own, given my self-image as someone who’s spent the past two decades dedicated to healing, initiation and culture-making — and especially as someone who guides others. Yes, I feel a big layer of shame that there’s a part of me that at times takes the steering wheel and is needy AF, endlessly grabbing to fill a void that feels unbearable to hold alone.

As Leah firmly but gently guides me out of all my narrative and into contact with that place of terrifying grief-void, I admit to myself - I am insecure.

I am insecure.

Tears start welling in my eyes.

In the holding of Leah and her support of my own self-witnessing, I recognize how my entire life I’ve kept this utterly stark truth at the core of my existence suppressed and hidden.

I mean, who’s going to want to be around or love a fundamentally insecure person? (so says my shame-fueled ego)

And insecure I am.

I am a simple little human, caught in a wild tangle of global supply chains where I often don’t know where my food and clothing come from, nor have any sense of the deeper reliability of these systems. I don’t own where I live, nor do I even believe in land ownership; I don’t grow much food where I live; I pay high rent; and I fundamentally exist in a system of capitalism where I don’t own the means of my production, and other vague folk benefit from my compliance in it — a system I’ve tried to depart from many times, only to run into the brick wall of how all-consuming it is, and the naivety of trying to depart it alone.

And if these systems came crashing down - which they seem to be inching ever closer to - then despite my self-image as some rugged survivalist, I don’t have any real stores of food and shelter. Only a 40-year-old hunting rifle and a self-made bow as my weapons, and survival skills that, although better than 99% of the population’s, are mostly untested and untrained, especially in any long-term scenario.

On top of that, my baseline nervous system experience was one of mis-attunement - of leaving myself to try and cajole a caregiver I could never actually affect.

This all washes over me as a feeling, and Leah guides me deeper into my body:

“What do you feel there?”

A trembling, an angst, a buzzing energy that seems persistently there in the background of my life… and in this moment it feels profoundly other, like some alien inhabitant in my system.

“That’s fear,” she names. “A fundamental terror of being alive.”

Leah guides me deeper into this feeling state as she places headphones over my ears, softly blasting bilateral beats into my audio field, which she says support the nervous system to soften and go deeper.

“Stay near it,” she gently advises me. “I’m right here.”

I go inside and let the fear start to tremble me - softly, in my jaw, in my arms, in the pit of my stomach.

After a couple of minutes of this, Leah asks me what I’m feeling, and I respond:

I feel like I’m going to die.

“Exactly,” she says. “I want you to die to this feeling… become it fully.”

Tears well further in my eyes, and Leah moves to sit next to me and asks if she can hold one of my hands and place her other hand on my heart.

I say yes, and her touch and presence help me stay with the 10-out-of-10 terror I’m feeling.

I report to her that I observe a sense of pressure from my mind that something needs to happen, that I need to emote a certain way or something…

“Exactly - that’s your mind doing all its tricks to protect you from feeling this. I’m with you… there’s nothing to do, just allow this to move out and through you.”

Leah coaches me to feel the fear evaporating out of my body, through the skin (our largest organ) - that it’s trembling in every cell and can just go out and through, like sweat on a hot day.

As she holds my hand and I imagine/feel this, I feel my jaw begin to soften. There’s nothing to do or achieve, I remember.

And slowly, with that insight, the tremors begin to soften, my whole being begins to soften, and I start to feel The Void.

It’s silent, it’s still, it’s relaxed, it’s the most simple that simple could be - just presence. I’m just here.

“Great work, John, stay with it,” Leah says softly through the still-glistening bilateral beats.

I begin to bask in this presence - and the utter relaxation of it.

A few days earlier, I was in a fairly spun-out attachment-anxiety place, and I texted Leah and she called me (again - what an epic therapist, how blessed I am).

“I can feel this gaping hole, this void, this utter despairing loneliness, Leah,” I exclaim to her, almost shaking from the discomfort of the state.

“And I see how much I just want someone else to take it away, to fill that void, to make it okay.”

“I totally understand,” Leah responds. “This is the base of our existence — of being a Soul in a Body, the original separation.

And the stark truth, John, is that the best we can hope for in a relationship is to find someone to sit next to us, and we say to them: ‘Will you feel your hole, your void, your deep loneliness next to me, as I feel mine?’ … That’s the most vulnerable and connected you can be.”

It was a powerful realization - as someone who has covertly tried to get every partner, every friend, every community I’ve been in to somehow fill the void carved out by the mis-attunement of my mother, and even deeper, just by being a soul in a separate sovereign body. A realization that reminded me of what I once read by Rilke in his Letters to a Young Poet:

“I hold this to be the highest task of a bond between two people: that each should stand guard over the solitude of the other.

A merging of two people is an impossibility, and where it seems to exist, it is a hemming-in, a mutual consent that robs one party or both parties of their fullest freedom and development. But once the realization is accepted that even between the closest people infinite distances exist, a marvelous living side-by-side can grow up for them, if they succeed in loving the expanse between them, which gives them the possibility of always seeing each other as a whole and before an immense sky.”

I am in the void - this thing I’ve been avoiding my whole life - and it’s somehow delicious in its peacefulness.

Oh, this relaxation… this is what I’m seeking in others.

Leah senses my state and says, “This is yours, John, all yours. What else are you noticing here?”

Just then my eyes well up, but this time not in pain - in some bright pulsing sensation from just below my heart.

“I feel love,” I reply.

“What does that feel like, John?”

“I can feel my disbelief that in this void, this emptiness, there is a presence. It’s subtle but clear - a presence in the void, a brightness, an original love.”

“Exactly,” Leah exclaims encouragingly. “Where do you feel that?”

I tune in again, and I feel this bright pulse, this presence of something where I was so sure for so long there was nothing, only more pain, and I feel that this pulsing brightness is coming from the base of my heart.

“It’s coming from the bottom of my heart,” I report back, wondrously amused at finally realizing why that phrase so colloquially exists.

“Exactly. Stay with that, John… this is your birthright.”

For the next five or so minutes, I simply exist in relationship with, in inhabitance of, this presence of love beneath the void. It’s ineffable to explain, but the cliché “one with everything” probably comes as close as anything to what that state is.

I observe myself softly smiling in contact with this presence in the void. “Ah, this is the soft smile of those high monks I’ve read of,” I catch myself thinking, before returning to the bright emptiness of this presence. This is the love beneath everything.

Over the next few minutes, Leah coaches me to softly open my eyes, staying 70% in and 30% out with my gaze - first just below me, and then, as I scan the room, taking in my surroundings while mostly still in contact with the inner state.

“One eye in, and even more than out,” she reminds me as I open my eyes wider and softly take in the utter miracle of every piece of matter in that room, from her plants to soft decorations I’d never quite noticed before.

Leah continues to guide me into a titration of attention with this feeling, supporting the state to anchor into my being in waking life, eventually taking the bilateral beats off my ears.

I hear the birds singing outside, the silence of the room, the vroom of traffic far away. Everything just is, in all its weird, imperfect perfection.

Finally, she guides me into presence with her, and we hold soft eye contact for a short (or was it infinite?) while, as I maintain a larger slice of my attention inside, on the presence.

“This is the real love, John. Notice how different it is from the ‘other person, fill me up, so I can be okay’ type of love?”

I smile and nod. I got the God-memo.

“I call this God-Love,” she says, “and it’s available to us always.”

We share that sublime presence for a few more minutes - I am higher than I have ever been on any medicine journey… while sober, at 10:50am on a Wednesday morning in spring, in my therapist’s office.

Finally it’s time to close the session. We bow to each other, as is Leah’s tradition, and I get up, hug her, and leave.

And I drive to a café, order a matcha latte, and write this essay - the words flowing out of me easier than anything I’ve written in a while.

Most of us modern, post-traumatic humans walk around the world ceaselessly distracting ourselves precisely because it hasn’t been safe to look inside, to be present with what’s actually there.

And I get it. I too have been on the meat hook of dopamine extraction, even as I’ve also been a denizen of the deep inner waters… but in containers… workshops, cultural immersions, medicine spaces.

It’s been scary to inhabit presence in my daily life, and workshops themselves have become their own form of consumption (per all I wrote about in my last essay).

And this fear makes sense. Going inside, outside the careful holding of containers, has mostly been a courtship with hell. I remember a medicine man I once worked with telling me that the journey is essentially draining a swamp using a tiny spoon, one little sip at a time. The metaphor wasn’t exactly encouraging.

And yet, this morning, as I went out to my daily sit-spot practice on this little patch of Rocky Mountain foothills, I felt again into that space, and I felt the fear - so subtle I’ve missed it my whole life —-and I saw the impulse to turn away from it. But because I knew now that there was an anchor of something else, something so, so beautiful on the other side, I dared to go in… and sure enough, after some yawns and yowls (how my nervous system at times moves pain energy), I again found that peace in love.

Without having first, with Leah, touched that place beneath the bowels of my pain, I wouldn’t have had the courage now, on my own, to go back into the dark and trust that something else could emerge.

I needed that anchor to then attempt the bridge work.

Without that memory of somewhere more beautiful, I would have certainly stopped partway. And this is precisely why, in the mending work of these times, we need far shores of inspiring landscapes to hold onto in our hearts as we set sail into treacherous seas.

This is why, I believe, I was led to the Tamera Healing Biotope in Portugal - and further led to spend a decade making a film about their culture. I was enraptured by the profound beauty of this far shore of possible human civilization, founded in an ethics of truth, transparency, cooperation and peace. Being there was always like a fairy tale, and if I didn’t have a deep somatic imprint that that type of cultural system was possible, I wouldn’t be anchored in the vision I have now.

And the bridge work has been treacherous - perhaps because I was still seeking that feeling outside of myself.

Having now touched this love beneath the void (especially sober), I’m holding a memory of this possibility. And yet I’m not hoodwinked into believing this state would ever be a stable, permanent thing with a whole culture surrounding me… yet I also know that bridging to that culture will never come from lack, from scarcity, from desperation.

And this paradox - that I am utterly insecure and essentially desperate for help, while also holding myself in such profound wholeness, love and peace - is not new.

Cultures worthy of that name have always understood this crazy-making condition of being human, and this is precisely why they had initiation rites: to support the adolescent to be held (as I was with Leah) to go deep into and through the fear, in the trust that the initiated ones, backed by the elders, were holding the living memory of somewhere else beyond just the pain.

And in that liminal space, initiates were guided to cry out with their desperation to another power - true power, the small-yet-everything powers of creation, the wild God-Love of Great Mystery - and ask for a vision.

For what we have forgotten in modernity is that Vision is not something new, nor out there. Vision is essentially a memory - an Earth-memory of what always was. This is why, in Indigenous cultures here on Turtle Island, this process of initiatory vision-wrangling was often called remembering one’s original instructions. And each one remembering these original instructions is essential for healthy, regenerative culture to function.

Culture, then, is a function of vision… as long as that vision is tethered to lineage - to having been held - and anchored by the cultural ecology, the soil, which allows vision to filter healthily into the people. Vision without cultural integration is like a heavy rain without topsoil on the land: the life-giving water becomes a flood, stripping the earth of stability and nutrients instead of integrating into the ecology.

Memory is our cultural soil.

And this is precisely what was eradicated when intact cultures were colonized, tribe and lineage broken, ancestral inheritance severed, and elders forgotten.

And so, although the path belongs to each of us alone - in that this discovery is always an inside job - it’s damn necessary to have guides, anchors, holders.

Leah, my therapist, was that for me in this experience, and she certainly has her own guides, mentors and elders standing behind her, who have guided her into that same place so she could then hold that space for me.

And just as importantly, I’ve dedicated the past decade-plus of my own initiatory sojourn to weaving a strong cultural web around myself. So within a day of my experience, I had many loving eyes and hearts to catch my story - to reflect me, to challenge me, to hold me accountable, and, most important, to remind me - to hold the memory of what I discovered with me. For as one of my greatest teachers, Stephen Jenkinson, said: “A culture is just a place where not everyone forgets at once.”

I walk ahead now in some deep yet soft reckoning that my profound vulnerability - my insecurity, especially in relationship - is the pathway to this God-Love portal.

I am insecure. And in that, I can access the void, and the God-Love that inhabits just underneath.

P.S. I still have two spots available for folks to work with me 1-on-1 in Threshold Coaching.

Along with holding space for you to be with your own pain, tremors, void and God-Love, we’ll work to weave a cultural web around you - so you can feel held in your own profound insecurity, working toward a well-held ritual threshold that opens the way for your gifts, your medicine, to begin to flow. This is for leaders and impact-makers undergoing a season of deep transformation (aka you’re own yet-to-be-fully-claimed initiation)

Find our more and apply here

Share