The most arduous terrain we ever cross is not on any map — it lies within. Unlike the outer world, the inner journey is invisible, filled with unseen shadows and subtle misperceptions. We battle not external foes, but the hidden ghosts of our own awareness. As Carl Jung said, “Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.”

The greatest challenge is not the darkness, but our unawareness of it. And yet, facing it requires something rare: boldness. Boldness to turn inward, to look unflinchingly, and to begin again. But boldness alone is not enough. Beauty softens the journey. As Khalil Gibran wrote, “Beauty is not in the face; beauty is a light in the heart.” This union — boldness and beauty — makes the journey possible and meaningful.

I didn’t know I was on this inner path for much of my life. It wasn’t until I turned 50 — on a journey to India — that I fully recognized it. That single visit revealed a truth more enduring than any place. India stayed with me. It taught me: there is nowhere to go. Everything essential is here. Now. “Wherever you go, there you are.” — Jon Kabat-Zinn.

The turning point came through surrender. Not the passive kind, but a courageous release — the letting go of false identities, flawed self-concepts, and expectations of others. In that surrender, a deeper self was revealed. Not a better version of “me,” but something timeless, present, aware.

This is the mystical dimension of the inner journey. It begins not with achievement, but with relinquishment. It is a homecoming, and yet, nothing outwardly changes. As T.S. Eliot said, “We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.”

The journey inward is rarely comfortable. But once begun, it divides life into two parts: before and after we awaken to it.

Photo by Davide Cantelli on Unsplash

Photo by Redd Francisco on Unsplash

Deep listening is an inner-science technology that connects us to the mystery of life. Practicing listening aligns us with life and cultivates faith or trust in unseen worlds — the organic intelligence of oneness that exists behind our conditioned human awareness. As a deeper dimension awakens in our nervous system, we relate to the complex entanglement of our human wounds with remarkable simplicity and generosity. Thomas Keating has described this inside-out form of healing as divine therapy. Though not fully understood by our minds, it serves as mind medicine; listening to the divine cadence calms our thoughts, fostering a contemplative connection and allowing the nervous system to rest. For a time, we feel free from fear-based separation patterns.

It is a remarkable privilege to be alive during these times of profound change. Many of us feel called to serve — to be present in ways we have not been trained for or ever dreamed possible. Such is the nature of our human inner development amid times of change. For instance, in 2018, after eight years of silence practice facilitation, I received a powerful sixth chakra download of a Merkaba symbol. Despite having no Jewish heritage, I continue to facilitate an inner-science technology based on the integrative intelligence of this sacred ancient symbol. For me, facilitation arises from an intrinsic relational depth rather than an external technique.

Our soul’s true calling is timeless. It resides in the depths of non-duality — a state of knowing through unknowing. Most human suffering arises from our investment in the unconscious divisive patterns we inherit or accumulate within ourselves and our relationships with life. Divine restoration occurs as we enter a vast field of non-duality that brings life to the framented cracks. The resulting spaciousness allows the breath of understanding to touch our human wounding with compassion and grace.

As divisive wounded patterns have intensified globally, they have also led to a collective crisis where the structures built upon our wounds are no longer sustainable. As these outdated and unethical frameworks dissolve, a profound restorative intelligence becomes accessible to our hearts, bodies, minds, and psyches. We uncover an inner wholeness that does not oppose life but listens to its restorative flow. When we trust life enough to embrace our personal, ancestral, and collective wounds, a new relationship with life informs our nervous system. We may feel an ecstatic sense of coming home for the first time.

However, experiences of ecstatic union transcend this world. Therefore, we must remain grounded and present during this profound existential shift in our human potential. As Teilhard de Chardin said, “We are not human beings having a spiritual experience; we are spiritual beings having a human experience. “ Perhaps another way to convey the primacy of spirit is to suggest that we are light beings remembering our home while embodied.

Go back and take care of yourself. Your body needs you, your feelings need you, your perceptions need you. Your suffering needs you to acknowledge it. Go home and be there for all these things. (Thich Nhat Hanh gems, instagram.com)

As a deep lifelong Buddhist practitioner Thich Nhat Hanh speaks his simple truth with clarity and compassion. In our western culture of rugged individualism most of us find instructions to “go home” disorienting to say the least. To a mystic, the instructions are orienting. While it is true that we are all mystics (and I hear this often now), it is not true that we are all practicing or even aware of that inner-ability.

We are afraid of what we don’t know. Even the spacious home-base of a mystic becomes a fearful experience. This points to a thorny conundrum in our spiritual evolution of mystic embodiment. It goes something like this: as we don’t know ourselves in spaciousness, we are afraid of it and avoid it at all costs. Constant social media distraction begins to feel like a safer home then the one Thich Nhat Hanh encourages us to go back to. Jesus also told us to “go home” by reminding us (in the language of his time) that “the Kingdom of God is within you” (Luke 17:21) when the Pharisees asked him when the Kingdom of God would come.

The strong message among all mystics is that we are missing the mark in our search for meaning by looking outside of ourselves. We wait for outer-sceince to lead the way while remaining ignorant of our inner-home. A soul-home where everything we ever wanted is met unconditionally in a beauty and grace far beyond our wildest imagination. A beauty that takes our breath away. A grace that makes us weep in sorrow and joy because our heart finds the soft welcoming of home.

In the west, and increasingly in the east, we are knowing ourselves through a separation between the world out there and me. From this separation we grow a life-is-happening-to-me, rather than through-and-with-me. Without the inner listening capacity of the mystic, we know ourselves only through concepts and structures external to ourselves. We often wait for “outer-science” to prove what “inner-science” knows intuitively. We have become very comfortable — even insistent — that the truest reality is outside of ourselves.

Relentlessly seeking on the outside through our consumerism, our constant travel, and even our habits of war: we know ourselves through possession of something outside ourselves. The tragic nature of our external seeking is that we are consuming the body or vessel of our own mystical nature and true home. We have forgotten who we are and our journey to our true inner-home has become mired in confusion and darkness.

We need a more spacious container; either through a group or through our own inner spaciousness. In silence we encounter places of rest that are beyond the everyday-self of our lives. It is the most gloriously refreshing encounter one can have. We know life and ourselves differently in this timeless reunion. Its beauty and wonder can literally take our breath away.

A vertical resource allows us to be vulnerable in life and yet held firmly within a landscape of greater possibility. No matter how grim the world looks, a vertical listening within the heart walks with us. We are never alone. The naked vulnerability within our vertical connection resembles a kitten being held by the back of the neck by its mother. Our nervous system relaxes when life reveals its true nature as “perfectly imperfect” (Tao te Ching translation, Stephen Mitchell).

A vertically-resourced nervous system is also the first commandment of the three monotheistic traditions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. In biblical language the name given to vertical resourcing is “God” and we are instructed to love “that” with everything we have — mind, heart, body, soul. In each of these traditions it is the mystics who embodied this commandment through their surrendered inner-listening and ecstatic praise. Mystics are not distracted by hierarchical power-structure outside of themselves in order to “achieve” spiritual status in the world. They are listening to their inner and outer world as one movement. They simply belong to both and are grateful for the opportunity to be here.

The Tao and monotheism’s primary instruction point towards an unwavering inner-trust and a willingness to let go of the known. Not for the faint of heart, listening to the timeless vertical-flow living within our own body, heart, and mind is a radical departure from our conditioned inner-operating system: vertical transmission transports us into a spacious inner-landscape that softens contact with the trauma living within our body, heart and mind. Ironically, a vertically resourced relationship heals us from that which we were “intent on healing” and even from the very concept of “fixing.” Surrendered listening transforms life into a landscape of divine belonging where an unconditional inclusion of our hurt places allows them to find rest. 

As our suffering finds its place in life we come to understand it as part of the process of life discovering itself. We are the kitten being held by the great mother as we learn to trust that our personal, ancestral and collective traumas are not separate from the path of our soul’s embodiment and the evolution of life. Vertical resourcing is a digestive-aid that converts trauma into embodied wisdom and compassion. As this process occurs in the ICM workshops, I frequently find myself humbled by the simple realization that I am here to walk with life and learn from life—however much I may stumble in that walk.

In order to digest and transmute the grid-lock of human trauma we are now facing, the next phase of our human evolution necessitates intimate encounters with our innate vertical resource. Here, we can rest in a quantum field of unconditional intelligence where insight, depth, and compassion inform our personal, ancestral, and collective landscapes. With his timeless quote, Rumi continues to invite us there: “out beyond ideas of wrong-doing and right-doing, there is a field. I’ll meet you there.”

Kabbalah, Beyond the Self:  Discovering God Within the Struggle

The following two sentences were written by Arthur Green, one of todayʼs most respected teachers of Jewish mysticism, in his book EHYEN: A Kabbalah For Tomorrow.

“This God knows us because our struggle to integrate love and judgment is not ours alone, but the reflection of a cosmic struggle. The inner structure of our psychic life is the hidden structure of the universe; it is because of this that we can come to know God by the path of inward contemplation and true self-knowledge.”

Far from a mere intellectual grasp of the meaning, Greenʼs words threw a wrench into the workings of my mind and I experienced a moment of spontaneous insight into Godʼs completeness within the fragments of my own life. A shocking harmony reverberated between my heart and mind (love and judgement, Gedullah and Gevurah) and an inner stillness enveloped me. It seemed as though my whole being woke up with the bold truth of Greenʼs statement.

If our human struggles are the very ground and means through which we can find God and through which God can find us, then our psychological struggle ceases when we know God. We begin to see with the eyes of our heart into the non physical or transcendental realm of Kabbalah and the mystical traditions. Green succeeds in cutting through centuries of mistaken cultural and religious identities that regularly obscure our immediate relationship with God. He awakens us to the reality that we are God, and that through our struggles, we are held in a sacred covenant within that reality — irrevocably and completely.

Experiences of “reality beyond the self” have been a regular “intrusion” into my ordinary consciousness. It has been an ongoing challenge to know how to skillfully incorporate these experiences into the ordinary consciousness of my everyday life. Ordinary consciousness is just that — ordinary. As such, it includes the cultural and familial conditioning that fosters the “us and them” mentality of differentiation. The centrality of “me” eventually leads to clear definitions of “us” and “them.” Over time, this can easily lead to a personal identity that relates to other “identities.” Our skills of differentiation and judgement are quickly supported and validated within the culture. If we relate to God in this way, as an “identity” outside of self, as many religions do, then we inevitably distance ourselves from God. God is limited to a mental concept rather than a lived experience in the mystical sense that Green speaks of.

The following experiences, although varied through different ages, have all contributed to my overwhelming acknowledgement of communion with another reality and/or another way of being in the world. All of these experiences have involved struggle in one way or another and they have vastly expanded my self-knowledge beyond my ordinary understanding. At times the physicality and directness of my experiences have been frightening because the “ordinary I” is simply not featured.

Over the years, I have frequently had the sense that I am being guided and taught through a deeper understanding then I had reason to have. Often in a rather formless way, I could feel the Truth within my body as a sort deep calling. I have therefore found it reassuring when various teachings validated my undeveloped understanding. Kabbalah is one such teaching.

Rabbi Laura Kaplan describes Kabbalah in one sentence: “Everything in this world and every other points beyond itself.” (2) I hear these words with a good measure of relief because the burden of a conflicted “self,” reinforced by a well developed judge, is incapable of pointing anywhere but to itself. In the crowded quarters of personal struggle there is little room for movement beyond a personal pre-understanding. (For a complete reading of this 2008 paper, please visit https://lauramadsen.ca/papers/ and scroll down!)

… Awareness of light …

… awakens and expands our point of contact with life. It also carries the frightening potential to liberate us from habits of who we think we are. If we are willing, light holds immense potential for updating individual, ancestral, and collective shadow.

Shadow remains frozen without light’s touch; but when seen and felt, shadow melts into a fertilizing presence of new possibilities. When informed by light, our bodies, hearts, and minds literally become pollinators of new life. Through our enlightened contact we seed and nourish new growth. Light touching shadow is a series of life-changing events as we participate in the mysterious process of life waking up to itself!

Light enters soul, heart and mind through the mystery of spaciousness and inner-listening. Traditional Silence practice took us beyond shadow by removing us from life; but light courageously turned towards shadow allows life to awaken from within our bodies, minds, and hearts. Our life-purpose begins to embody us through a series of mysterious synchronicities. We become sacred activists as we work with life as it is, and life in turn, works through us.

Embodying light evokes a power with life, not over or above life. It touches life where it is without trying to fix it. During last Saturday’s Inner Constellation Mobile (ICM) it was through participant’s precise seeing and feeling of shadow that light entered the constellation and allowed more movement.

Light touching shadow is built upon an inner-trust or knowing that life is good. Shadow cannot be present for shadow because there is not enough spaciousness in shadow and fear overwhelms us. Mystical light (within spaciousness, listening, & soul) is a refined resource for touching shadow structures (within culture, ancestors, and the human condition).

Our lack of felt contact with shadow can leave us feeling that life is happening to us, rather than through us. We may feel more like a victim than a participant. Learning to include shadow is therefore a vital resource for evolving from a sense of victim to participant. We find our fulfilment through participation. As Meister Eckhart said, the mystery of God is what turns base metal into gold. 

Inner-listening is a quiet revolution of contemplation and meditation that births a new world from the inside out. With light touching the base-metal of shadow, shadow becomes life’s golden ally. No longer opposites, but on the same embodied path, we begin walking shadow back into the light.

In closing I will share a mystical moment I had while struggling to write about the recent ICM. After several days, I awoke to three phrases mysteriously humming through my nervous system: 

1. I see because I am seen.
2. I know my place because I am known.
3. I love because I am loved.

Time stopped within a deepening stillness as I contemplated: I see with seeing … (breathe) … I know with knowing … (breathe) … I love with love … (breathe) … Light was seeing/knowing/loving itself through me while gently disentangling me from my struggle.

When inner-light is embodied (experienced in our body) conditioned structures recede. I could not write about light without light infusing my mind and heart. For a blessed moment I experienced the intimate fullness of being seen, known, and loved through the grace of “light touching shadow.”

T-shirt Art — Keira Madsen at vaedderstudio.com

Within the Inner Constellation Mobile (ICM), there is a Field Intelligence that can be perceived, witnessed, and felt. The most trustworthy way to attune to this intelligence is through our bodies. Why? Because our bodies are innocent in the simple direct way that they store information. There is a witnessing presence within the ICM container that allows the innocent hurt places to emerge in such a way that invites a deeper contact with our soul’s impulse. The invitation and the challenge are miraculously woven together as the beauty of our spiritual embodiment.

Our bodies are like listening to children before they have learned to layer over and identify with the habits of their family and culture. The language of innocence-speaking is simple, direct, and fresh—and often wise beyond the years of that body. In this open transparent state our bodies have an organic resonance with what is true: whether that be my unintegrated 3 year old fear, my grandfather’s depression, or the legacy of my culture’s unintegrated burdens.

However, our innocent contact with life only surfaces where there is a sense of safety that allows habitual defences or numbness to lay down their arms, rest, and begin to thaw. If our healing modalities are not connected with deeply embodied truth, we are prone to bandaid-solutions and wishful thinking. In other words, without embodying the truth of our wounding, there is no reconciliation. 

Deep work always includes past and present, the ancestors and the collective, because the intelligence of our bodies is all of that. Our body is nothing less than the pulse of life living itself into a gazillion different forms. We may have become frozen in particle and forgotten our wholesome belonging; but if we slow down to feel and witness, we begin to understand that our wounding and our innocence are partners in the path of reconciliation. The pain we have resisted—sometimes for lifetimes within our lineage and collective—becomes the precise medicine for our soul’s embodiment.

When a small group of people are committed to standing together in the fire of that medicine, we become one-life-healing. In so doing, we shake the roots of our known universe that is currently built upon habits of fear and division. Within the Universal Heart there is spiritual blessing that allows us to be with the wounded innocent of life. This deep medicine restores the division between our soul and our body and allows life to begin walking us home.