Drinking From the Source of Life

Our oldest archetypal image – the World Tree – has roots that reach deep into the earth while its branches stretch upward to the sky. At its base, a spring – representing the Source of Life — bubbles up from beneath the ground, providing life to everything in “the garden.” Institutional spiritual traditions of the West habitually look up… to the heavens. Primal and shamanic traditions commonly focus on the Earth, recognizing that the height of the canopy depends on the depths to which the roots sink.

I’ve been guiding “Soul Journeys” for 32 years, and I’m intimately familiar with many methods for “going down” — processes that open a portal to insights and deep springs mostly unrecognized in our conscious daily life where vision remains focused “above the ground.” Those techniques include vision quests, shamanic practices, new and ancient methods of dreamwork, plant-medicine journeys, holotropic or integrative breathwork, and a large toolkit of ritual and ceremony. These practices – all portals to the unconscious or “Unknown”—are often required to break free of cultural conditioning or see past habitual defenses developed in response to childhood trauma.

The Well of Grief:

“Those who will not slip beneath the still surface on the well of grief,
turning down through its black water to the place we cannot breathe,
will never know the source from which we drink…
the secret water, cold and clear
nor find, in the darkness glimmering,
the small round coins… thrown by those who wished for something else.
~ David Whyte, “The Well of Grief

In the poem above, David Whyte urges us to go down, to “slip beneath the surface” of the water. This descent into darkness can evoke fear – “the place we cannot breathe.” But, once we commit to that journey, we have the possibility of drinking from the Source – the “secret springs” – and regain our connection to life. We can also discover our purpose and direction; light (and hence, vision) appears in the glimmering coins – lost and unavailable to those who stayed above the surface, who remained comfortable and invested nothing — tossing a token into the well while making a wish — hoping their lives would change.

In the diagram on the left, the large circle represents the “capital-S” Self, the totality of who we are and can be. The horizontal line close to the top divides everything above — the conscious self — from all the rest. We’re trained to live above the line, keeping our attention within a small percentage of the whole. Actually, it’s worse than that, for most stay within the small rectangular box – the ego – and avoid exploring even that which can be consciously accessed, like our personal shadow.

Below the line lies the Unknown, sometimes labeled the Unconscious, dream or soul realm, a domain that’s best exemplified by Nature, the wild. It’s home to vast and powerful energies, and the source of dreams, altered states, and the archetypes or “gods.” To gain deep insight, regain wholeness, and access our wild and original nature, we must journey in to this realm and bring portions of it back into our lives above the line.

I sometimes imagine this line to be the Earth’s surface, and to be whole, we must drink the Water of Life, mostly lying underground. Occasionally the water emerges on its own, like the spring at the base of the World Tree or a powerful dream that breaches the surface of waking life. But often we must go looking, make an effort, engage a process – like lowering a bucket into a well – that reconnects us to that immense underground lake below.These processes are many. We can carry our bucket to the well of Dreamwork, undertake a vision quest, access altered states via shamanic journeying, breathwork, or plant medicines, or immerse ourselves in and surrender to Nature.

Though familiar with all, I have a deep abiding love and fondness for the vision quest because it engages multiple transformative processes – fasting, immersion in Nature, ritual and ceremony – processes that merge together and grow ever-more profound over days.

I also appreciate the importance of intention, the balance between conscious and unconscious, will and surrender. On vision quests, I don’t lay on a mattress and let something “happen to me.” Within ritual space I’ve spoken to death and had my last conversations, washed away shame in a river, and buried garments of victimhood in a hole that blistered my hands to dig.

There are many ways to lower one’s bucket into the well.

Some may speak to you more than others, and there are guides and teachers for all of them. It’s been my great joy and love to find my “song to sing” and most natural self within this particular ceremonial passage into the Unknown, the realm of Soul. May you find a pail that can hold water and a rope to carry the weight, while remembering we’re here to drink from the Source, not worship the bucket.

~ Sparrow Hart, March 10, 2019
.