How a Journey into the Underworld Brought Me Home at Last

Down town Glenorchy

by Kara-Leah Grant, Musings from the Mat

I’m leaving Wellington soon, and part of my impending shift down south to Glenorchy is about wiping the slate clean.

Starting fresh.

Letting go of everything, and then allowing back in only what truly matters.

People keep asking; ‘Are you moving down for good?’

Good? What does that mean?

I know I’m going for a couple of months. After that… who knows? I don’t know what will arise in these two months.

This is the letting go. This is the opening. This, it is surrender.

Eight years ago, to the week, I returned to my Mum’s house in Glenorchy under very different circumstances.

A week out of a psych ward, two weeks out of being dumped by my fiance, and I was a wreck. Then, I came home feeling like an abject failure, buried under all kinds of aspects of Self I’d successfully stuffed away in the basement of my psyche for the eight years I’d been a carefree traveller.

Coincidentally, or not, I had returned home to my mother’s house exactly eight years to the day since I’d flown out of New Zealand.

Two eight year cycles. And each so different. I have this sense that those eight years of traveling overseas were like an external quest, seeking out that within the material world which resonated with me. In seeking the external, I denied the internal and it ended in implosion.

The second eight year cycle was fronting up to the internal quest, and facing the demons and shadows of the underworld within.

I’ll arrive back in the same physical place as eight years ago, but it won’t be the same. Eight years ago, I couldn’t bear to be in Glenorchy because I couldn’t bear to be with myself. There’s very little to distract oneself in the middle of those mountains, in a town of 400. Now, I’m so excited to have space, surrounded by mountains and lake and forest.

Then, I fled Glenorchy as soon as I could – heading to Auckland hunting fame and fortune as a writer. I lasted barely a month as the compounded grief of my year caught up with me and threatened to drown me in tears. So I fled south again, this time to my grandparents’ house in Blenheim. There, comforted by routines and furniture and ways of being that hadn’t changed since I was a child, I allowed myself to grieve.

That time in my life was almost unbearable. I have snippets of journal I’ve kept, snippets where I cry out to God, begging for release, for mercy, to feel a smidgen better, to have a day without tears.

When will this end, when will this end, when will this end, oh God, please let it end. Anything, anything to not be here, anywhere but here, please, anywhere but here. I can’t bear it, I can’t be here, I can’t.

But I could.

And I did.

And I see now that it wasn’t the circumstances of my life that undid me, but my own undeveloped character, and my resistance to what was, and what it told me about who I was.

That, and the ideas I had about how I was meant to be and my ideas about how life was meant to be. That’s what really undid me. I undid me. But in the un-doing, I created an opportunity for myself to emerge.

When the iron is placed in the fire and heated, how it must scream with the agony.

When the red hot iron is beat, and beat, and beat, how it must scream with the agony.

When the sword is put to work, doing that which it was born for, how it must glory in it’s existence.

To be all that we are, to release the hidden depths of our character, to allow our potential to arise… we too must face the fires of our lives. We too must bear the beatings of our circumstances. And like the sword that emerges, so too do we arise, born anew as all that we are.

Perhaps this is all that life is – an opportunity to reveal our glory.

And when we avoid and deny and run away from the difficult and the turbulent and the nasty and the awful, we do ourselves a grave injustice. We run away from our own glory.

Next Sunday, I go home. Not just to a physical home, but home to me. To where I’ve always been and where I’ll always be. From that place, all else will arise. Nothing to do. Nowhere to go. Nothing to fix.

Home at last.

(Anyone else notice I keep saying that? Article after article… at different times, in different places, Home at last. Another layer shed. Another deepening. Another arriving.)

Look.

There I am.

Again.

And you? Where are you?

For the Astro-Geeks among you… this eight year cycle has also coincided with the eight year Venus Transit cycle. 

From an astrological perspective, Venus represents the emotional energies in our relationships with others. When Venus eclipsed the Sun [in 20004], it blocked some of the Sun’s light and exposed the dark side of Venus, which represents the shadow side of our emotional natures. This began an eight-year process of uncovering the shadows in our emotional relationships.

These shadows are the unresolved, repressed, fear-based psychological energies that unconsciously cause dysfunctional and unhappiness in our relationships. They cause us to behave in ways that undermine our relationships, block intimacy, and cause breakdowns in communications. Essentially, these shadows block our ability to truly love another person. Astrology with Govinda

And yes, I’ve spent the last eight years examining the unresolved, repressed, fear-based psychological energies that unconsciously caused dysfunction and unhappiness in my relationships…