I haven’t written very much in a long time. It’s been a couple of years, I guess, at this point. At least not on this blog or in the way of creative writing. Most of my putting words to pages has all been academic or technical…. mostly freelance writing on some of the most recent ophthalmological advances, aimed at a physician readership. This hasn’t been because I haven’t wanted to write, but because something within me needed to be quiet for a bit; I needed to let all the questions and ideas and shadows within me sort themselves out and settle a little in the silence.

The last two years of my life can be best described as a great unraveling and coming to the end of myself. Maybe not THE END of myself, but AN END of myself. The first many months of that time were a deep, dark night of the soul for me; but not in the sense of complete hopelessness, meaningless depression and despair. (I’ve been to those places many times before, and know the dread and terror that accompany them. This was not that). No, this unraveling was hard, a journey mostly traveled in solitude, but in this particular case, I knew where I was going the entire time. I didn’t know how long it was going to take, I didn’t quite know what the terrain would be, but I was confident that I would reach the destination awaiting me, one of hope and personal growth and wellbeing and “OK-ness”.. I knew these things because of the great cloud of witnesses that have been forming me and cheering me on for years….poets and thinkers and mystics, most of whom are now long dead and gone, who wrote about having gone through these same unraveling themselves. Fortunately, they have graciously shared their stories with all of us, so that when our turns came, we would not despair, and we could find our paths just a bit more easily.

Now, after that long dark period…after unraveling all the way down only to ultimately discover the REAL ME, I’ve slowly floated back up to the surface again. I have so many things bottled up in me that I want to write about, lessons I’ve learned, some new perspectives I have on life, being, meaning. Mostly they are things I want to put out into the world for myself, because writing is a cathartic way to process and solidify what I’ve been pondering for so long. Maybe these things that I ramble on about in this blog will be a help or interest to others. Today I specifically want to talk about the metaphor of caves and why I think there is something useful in embracing the art of internal spelunking, both to really explore the depths of our humanity, but also to be able to transform our deepest wounds.

Be patient with me as I wobble about and try to find my writing legs once again.

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When I was in high school, I went on a trip with a group of teachers, parents, and students to Andros, an island in the Bahamas. This island, at least at the time, was not very developed or touristy, and we went to stay at a research station with the goal of learning about the ecosystems there and snorkeling around every reef we could. Andros is mostly.a big limestone rock that boasts complex underwater cave systems that attract adventure seekers and skilled scuba divers who want to explore this underwater world. On my trip there, we were taught by staff at the research station about the sport of cave diving, which is not for the faint of heart. A study published in 2016 determined that in the last thirty years, a total of 161 American cave divers (both trained and untrained) died while out on dives. Most of these deaths occurred because the divers drowned: they ran out of oxygen in their scuba tanks or became lost or disoriented due to poor visibility from silty, murky water.

Let me just say this: there is no way in hell that I will ever go cave diving. No, no, no, no, no. Wasn’t interested back then in high school, still not interested now as a more adventurous 44-year old.

Andros is known for its Blue Holes, where the extensive caverns beneath the surface of the island open up into into vertical shaft sinkholes, where the top layer of limestone essentially collapsed inward. These holes can be hundreds of feet deep, and are popular with island visitors as swimming spots. My high school group visited one of these famous blue holes (Uncle Charlie’s Blue Hole, made famous by Jacques Cousteau in the 1960s) for an afternoon swim on one day of our trip. The experience was an adventure in itself: the sides of the hole were sheer, rocky walls; the only way to get in was to jump off a platform (or via spread-eagle belly flops onto the water like the pre-frontal cortex-lite teenage boys in our group chose to do), and then scramble back up out of the hole using a flimsy ladder. The entire time we swam in this incredibly deep hole (417 feet deep, to be exact), we knew that below us was the grave of one of those divers who had run out of air and was never recovered from the caves. I don’t have any pics anymore from that trip, but I found a YouTube video of the Uncle Charlie’s blue hole:

Cave diving in areas like the Bahamas or Florida can involve miles of swimming horizontally, but it is also deep enough that oxygen tanks need to be stashed at different places along the route to account for decompression stops. And, in certain areas where fresh water meets salty ocean water, a halocline can develop and result in poor visibility for the diver. The underwater ecosystems also produce hydrogen sulfide gas, which can permeate scuba gear and sicken divers when at higher concentrations.

The fascinating thing about cave diving ( even though I personally have minor panic attacks watching video of deepwater cave diving) is that people who do this are seeing areas of the Earth that have been largely untouched or even seen by humans. They get to view and explore ecosystems that are incredibly unique and don’t exist elsewhere in the world. But, this exploration comes with incredible risks…like running out of air, not stocking a sufficient number of oxygen decompression tanks, getting lost in a halocline, not being able to find your way out of the caves if you didn’t use a guide line, OR, getting tangled in your guide line and not being able to free yourself. (Panic attack…breathe Julie…you’re sitting at your kitchen table). Cave diving is not for the faint of heart, which is why there are only a few hundred cave divers in the world, with only a tiny percentage of them being considered expertly-trained divers.

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Moving now to a completely different sport, one that I love: ultra running. Courtney Dauwalter has charmed the ultra running world, having won the Ultra triple crown, among numerous other races: Western States, UTMB, and the Hardrock 100. This 39 year old is amazing, both as a runner and as a human being. Every time I seen her in an interview or a race, she always has a smile on her face and is always just exuding gratefulness and humility.

A couple of years ago Rich Roll interviewed Courtney on his podcast. It was really good; I recommend a listen. At one point in the podcast, Dauwalter brought up the idea of a “pain cave”. (Any of you who have done endurance sports or long races know the pain cave; it’s that place you get where you just feel spent, everything hurts, and you’re not sure if you’re going to make it. It’s mental as much as it is physical). Rich had asked her about her experiences of just completely crushing her sport and blowing by her competitors in races. How did she get there? How did she maintain her mental and physical stamina? She, in her typical diplomatic way, said it was a reframe of the pain cave. The pain cave, to her, was that place in her running that originally she thought should be put off as long as possible. And then, when one does hit the pain cave during a run, one should just try to survive and endure it.

Courtney decided change her understanding of the pain cave as something that just has to be survived. She now views it as a place that should be celebrated when it is reached in a race, with the understanding that now the real work is going to be done. That work involves an excavation deeper into the pain cave, stretching her limits and mindset, so the result is that her capacity for pain and hard stuff in a race just keeps becoming more expansive. I loved this idea so much, and when Courtney announced she was having T-shirts made up that displayed this idea as a graphic, I totally stepped up and bought myself one.

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I think most of us are taught, either intentionally or passively, by our families and culture, to avoid looking inwardly too much. We are encouraged to distract ourselves, stay superficial, avoid our pain caves at all cost. And so we buy more crap we don’t need, we doom scroll on social media, we busy ourselves with petty things and entertainments. Honestly, I know that much of my reluctance to cave dive into my own pain caves was influenced by my conservative Christian upbringing. I was afraid that if I looked too closely at my deepest self, that I would find only broken-ness, sin, and unworthiness there. Best not to go deep, I believed. Better just to look outwardly for someone to save me…whether that be Jesus, or a husband, or a good career path, or something else.

I used to be afraid of looking into my pain, the emotions and memories that I tried to keep stuffed down as deeply as possible. This was all because I was afraid that if I went there, I would get lost. I would find myself disoriented in the haloclines of my personal traumas, convoluted worldviews, lack of faith and trust in myself, and the oily, black nightmarish beliefs that I was never wanted and didn’t belong here. I feared that I didn’t have a solid guideline to pull me back out to the surface if I ventured too far into the labyrinth of caves within my psyche. I had been taught not to trust myself.

But now….everything has changed. I want to dive deep, I want to explore my inner landscapes and ecosystems because, not to sound all over the top or anything, that is where I have discovered real life. There is as much to explore within ourselves as there is a great universe outside of us. Over the last couple of years, when I finally got brave enough to jump into the deepest blue hole of myself, I didn’t find death. When I started facing the pain, and chiseling away at it one layer at a time, the caves didn’t start crumbling in on me. I didn’t get lost. Instead, I found abundance, and fresh springs of creativity, and most importantly, I found mySELF. And I discovered that I really, really like her.

I hope to write more about these things I’ve been learning from my long dark night of the soul, soon….