The blizzard
I find myself at a pause. And in a snowstorm.
Since leaving traditional church over a month ago, when I sit to meditate, to wait on the Light or Spirit, my inner world is a blizzard of images.
I often receive images when I meditate. I used to think - and was told by meditation/contemplative experts and books - that any images that come in meditation should be treated like automatic, unbidden thoughts; noticed, then gently dropped, before returning to ‘the anchor’ - the breath, or sacred word, or simple openness to silence, stillness, and the Presence.
But since practising “Experiment with Light” and engaging in more Quaker-inspired contemplation, I am more curious and open to receiving and discerning spontaneous images and visions. Quite often, like dreams, the images I see in meditation develop and unfold in colourful, dramatic sequences. They bring me surprising guidance, meaning, and refreshment. They have provided invaluable counsel for the last few years. They have saved my bacon on a number of occasions. I would be even more hot-headed, fearful, and bumbling without them.
But once in a while, it’s a blizzard, a glitter-ball, a bombardment of constantly moving images and visions inside. So many faces, voices - most I don’t recognize. So many stories and little scenes. Everything going so fast. Nothing settles into something coherent and meaningful. No wholeness it seems, just fragmentation.
This usually happens when I’m going through an overwhelming time, or when I’m at the end of a big piece of inner labour or work - like the end of the year, when I take a break from months of psychotherapy practice and general life busyness.
Sometimes the inner blizzard comes when I’ve overextended my psychological, energetic, and spiritual boundaries - where I’ve been pushing beyond the integrity of my own limits and have gotten lost in others’ psychic and spiritual worlds.
It always appears at the same time as I’m feeling exhausted.
The blizzard resembles what Thomas Keating called “the unloading of the unconscious” - a moment, or phase, in contemplative prayer involving “the spontaneous release of previously unconscious emotional material from early childhood in the form of primitive feelings or a barrage of images or commentaries.” (1)
Except the images inside me don’t look like they’re from early childhood. Some are of the present. Some are of the past. Most are of people I’ve never met before, or scenes I’ve never been in. They feel much more ‘inner’, mysterious, and fantastical that memories of personal and interpersonal life. If I wasn’t such an observer of the inner life, or a believer in its value and purpose, I would say that the blizzard (and all inner images) are just a load of foamy, imaginative rubbish. That’s what our dominant materialist worldview view says. Sometimes I believe that, too.
Carl Jung, a profound believer in the ‘objective reality’ of the inner world, might interpret ‘the blizzard’ as the ego being “flooded” with the contents of the personal and collective (or “transpersonal”) psyche, often as a result of some significant psychic shock, rupture, intrusion, and loss or fragmentation of personal boundaries. To cope with this and stabilize, the ego (i.e. conscious personal self) needs to access more basic support and grounding structure - and discover and come to know that the blizzard isn’t the whole.
Or the blizzard and exhaustion is a message from the whole: you are overwhelmed and need to rest.
Otherwise, if the injury is particularly significant, and basic support isn’t sufficiently robust and flexible, a person might become very anxious, dissociated, depressed or even psychotic (to defend against such trauma and lack of containment). (2)
I once attended a tohi ceremony - a religious initiation ceremony that is part of traditional Māori spiritual and cultural process. Various people processed up to where the tohunga (expert, seer, priest) was sitting, where they would receive their new tohi name from him. Strikingly, the tohunga’s face was covered with a very thin, transparent green cloth - a green veil. Afterwards, he told us that the veil was to screen out all the ancestors and voices that appeared when each person came up, so he didn’t get distracted by the bombardment of faces and words that rushed at him, and so he could remain focused on the task at hand.
I’m in a blizzard again. In the outer world, I have landed happily at our local Quaker Meeting. More and more, the Quaker path is feeling like home ground. But my inner world is still reeling from leaving my spiritual home of forty-eight years, with its familiar themes, contents, boundaries, and people (which may or may not, ultimately, be my own - be mine, be ‘me’).
And I don’t feel like blogging on complex stages of consciousness at the moment!
When I’m in the blizzard, I find the Light not so much in images and inner scenes but in the simplicity of body, breath, and stillness, in the wind and trees, and in the vast luminous background that is within, without, above and below, that comes forward in silent waiting.
I am also enormously grateful for my little family, house, and living where I do, for the food that sustains me and holds me together, for the life and rhythm that very basically holds me together.
I have left my original spiritual home. At the same time, I haven’t gone anywhere. Deep down, I haven’t moved an inch.
There is a layer of our being deeper than the outer world of church membership and the ‘subtle’, inner world of dreams and visions. In a completely mysterious way, it seems that the animals and the wind and the hills and the stars and me and my little family are deeply rooted in this layer too.
John 1: 1-4.
References
(1) Thomas Keating, Foundations for Centering Prayer and the Christian Contemplative Life (2002), p.250.
(2) “Basic support” includes biological (healthy diet, nervous system functioning, breathing, oxygen, posture, exercise etc) and psychosocial (human contact, empathy, love, understanding, housing, community connection etc) aspects, as well as spiritual dimensions too.
Image at top of page: A swirly, whirly snowstorm” - illustration by Helen Oxenbury, from Michael Rosen We’re Going on a Bear Hunt (1989).
