ON JOURNEYING DOWN A CAVE

I led a guided visualization about descending into a cave as part of our Discover your true earth based Jewish Purpose class. I first want to share something about why I gave the options I gave as a way of sharing something about how I teach. Then I want to reflect on people’s choices about light.

I had people descending into a cave as part of our exploration of the West direction, mostly following Plotkin’s orientation in his book Wild Mind. The West is the direction of darkness, death and transformation. Some of us crave working in that direction, some of us don’t resonate at all, some of us fear working in this way (you can both crave and fear at the same time). Yet there is no escaping working that direction if we want to be more whole and if we want spiritual breakthroughs. The visualization took us to a circular ritual room where we were charged with listening for a lesson to take back to our everyday reality.

At the same time, my teaching beliefs and style is that I want my fellow participants to have whatever degree of control they want on this descent. I’m not interested in celebrating how disorienting it can be or how radical it is. I’m completely not into pushing anybody hard--nudging is much, much more my style.

So I had people choose torches at the entrance to the cave. The range of torches included ones that would light up the whole cave to ones that would cast minimal light. I also had us descend to a circular ritual room where I had provided the possibility of a fire to make people feel more comfortable with the dark and dampness of a cave into mother earth.

Some of us chose the biggest possible torches, some towards the smaller end. Some people immediately lit the fire and were very grateful for it and some of us didn’t light it at all. Personally, I took a small torch and did not light the fire. The next time I do this visualization, I’m going to see if it feels right to take no torch at all and to trust the well worn path of our ancestors, male and female alike, who have descended into mother earth and sat with her.