It’s okay to shut down : some reflections on inward turning

I just received a meaningful comment speaking of how there is a valid need to shut down at times. I got a hard time for family when I started to withdraw and go inward back in around 2002. They wanted me pulled back out into the world, doing things to prove my existence had value, maybe because they felt that was the best way to move on from loss but not one of them had suffered as much trauma and loss as I had at that stage. With the benefit of hindsight what I also see now is that my true deeply buried feelings powerfully started to break through after 9 years of sobriety and that seemed to confuse and scare the living daylights out of them as it most probably did me.

While writing this I think of a comment Carl Jung made once about the fact there is a psychic regression for the purpose of deepening into our interior soul life. He went through one after breaking with Sigmund Freud just prior to the outbreak of the First World War and many of his most powerful insights into the nature of both the personal and the collective psyche came out of that intense period of introversion and breakdown/through.

I would say what Carl Jung suffered and what many of us are suffering right now is a kind of spiritual emergence and is why I named my blog emerging from the dark night, the dark night being not just the darkness of despair, trauma, neglect and depression but the wider collective dark night we are coming out of collectively : the Kali Yuga which the ancient masters spoke of ruled over by the Goddess Kali.

Many of us are being called during our inward turning dark night experience to embrace, understand and enter into a deeper relationship with our interior life, our collective and familial inheritance. We are being called to explore and undertand old patterns of separation, distancing, emotional shut down and abuse. I do not always see the psychiatric community taking this on board when drugs alone are used and no deeper meaning sought into the deeper roots of suffering and anxiety and depression as well as the devastating and widespread prevalence of soul loss evident in our life and world. In many ways we find ourselves at times living in an increasingly denatured environment where we are further from the organic and natural and many of us are carrying collective trauma both as a result of personal, familial and wider deeper collective historical and sociological influences.

In my own life and family struggles I see vital life force as trying to emerge out of this darkness after years of repression as individuals fight for their right to be free and true and REAL!!! I see this as I watch people publically embrace their gay or different sexuality, I see it the fight for reconciliation amongst our First Nations people and to have their deep intuitive soul wisdom and knowings of the ways of our ancient land recognised. I see it as people work to become freer of addictions and carried trauma, struggle to achieve more emotional intimacy and greater internal self intimacy. I see it in the challenges so called ‘bi polar’ and BPD sufferers go through to no longer be stigmatised for conditions that arise not out of ‘illness’ but as an impact of trauma suffered on and to a sensitive soul. I see it as people share about their shame, internalised negative voices as well as about feelings of spiritual isolation and exile, scapegoating, struggles in narcissistic relationships and with emotional abuse. I see it as those who have undergone great loss turn within to explore and value and express their feelings.

So yes, an inward turning for many of us represents not aberration but a gestation cue, a turning within in order to understand more, to then to be able go back out into the world in a new way to embrace and express through vulnerability and shared experience what was found as we turned inward. For many of us it may lead us onto an artistic soulful pathway.

So thanks Marc so much for your comment. It is natural to turn within and to shut down at times. We do it to incubate, to silence all the external cacophony of voices that drown out our own. As we turn within in meditation or isolation we do hear many voices and some of them are angry, some are critical and some are destructive and then there is also the still small quiet silent voice we hear when all those other voices quieten down or after we have absorbed into us their knowledge. So many of us are undergoing this, and we are not as alone and as separate from each other as our ego minds would have us believe, we wont share this experience with everyone never the less we all count and we are all just a part of an evolving human journey. Our inward turning serves a valid and most necessary process right now.