Cancer, Psyche and the Underworld

When I was diagnosed with cancer at the age of 42, I was unaware of the usefulness of supported rites of passage for people facing deep grief. I knew nothing about the use of self generated ceremony to assist with the weaving of loss and trauma fluidly into one’s life. I had no concept that I needed recognition of how the ordeal of cancer had changed me. No idea that I needed a community of elders to listen to my story and to hear the gifts and new strengths that had evolved through my ordeal. I didn’t even know that I needed a community, where there was mutual support, and where the application of my new found gifts and resilience could be applied.

 Loss is an inherent part of what it is to have form; all creatures experience loss to some extent. We human creatures are of course no exception to this. Indigenous cultures the world over used initiation of their young people into adulthood partly to ground their people into this knowing. Into an understanding that loss is to be expected; to explore how loss changes them and how to authentically incorporate those changes into their lives. 

Rite of passage, or, initiation consists of three phases:

 severance, where one moves radically away from their usual community or their usual way of perceiving the world;

  threshold time, involving crossing over into a sacred space where an ordeal is undertaken;

 and, finally incorporation where the newly birthed self brings their gifts and strengths to their community and the story of their ordeal is heard by a body of elders and peers.

After reading Petra Lentz -Snow’s article, ‘Cancer as a Rite of Passage,’ I had an absolute, ‘Ahhh’ moment. Of course, those five years of deep inner working with myself as I stumbled along trying to find my balance, were indeed a powerful rite of passage. So much of my experience during that time was mirrored by Patricia’s story of consciously working with her own cancer journey within the context of ceremony.

So I decided to examine my experience of careering wildly, of stumbling and falling along my way with breast cancer, through the lens of a rite of passage. Some of what you are to read is very similar to Petra’s work and that’s because, essentially rites of passage are a universal archetypal knowing. It’s a genetic understanding inherited through 300 thousand years of homosapiens living a culture of hunting and gathering. Our ancestors understood the value of ceremony and community to effectively initiate people through all the major changes that occur in life. I just needed a gentle reminder of what I already knew deep within my DNA.    

It’s a sharp severance, the words, ‘You have cancer,’ an absolute defining line between who you were before you heard those words and who you are yet to become. The ordeal came very quickly and very naturally on the heels of that diagnostic severance. Crossing the threshold, seemingly, came without choice, into a solitary journey through unchartered territory. A decent into the underworld of disbelief, of fear and grief, of rage, horror and despair. All of it fuelled by wild adrenalin. A blind stumble through a landscape of overwhelmingly intense emotions where all seemed lost, unstable, unpredictable and frightening. 

I had no conscious sense that I was beginning the ordeal phase of a rite of passage; but it was an ordeal. To cope with it, without a  conscious sense of the need for ceremony, I instinctively turned to the natural world around me. Throughout those 5 years I spent weeks alone and naked in the forest around our home, lying on beds of soft green moss, weeping; leaning against smooth sun warmed sandstone, howling my resentment into the receptive mountains. Sometimes sitting quietly in mediation, eyes open; eagles soaring overhead. I took all of myself out into that wild and expansive ecosystem and I was never too much for it. I saw no other humans during my time within the community of trees, rocks, sunlight, mist and creatures of the Australian bushland.    

This wilderness time gave me the opportunity to descended into the darkness of myself, to confront the apparition that our society is so afraid to acknowledge....the inevitable and unavoidable face of Death. I experienced my vulnerable mortality, my inescapable impermanence, which was the first tiny glimmer of guidance towards some sense of meaning, but, that solid comfort was still an unimaginably long way away. 

There were so many deaths that spontaneously occurred following my cancer diagnosis. The death of my persona. The stripping away of the masks that I once wore. The mask of eternal youthfulness and immortality, the mask of ‘Shouldness,’ of what, I should do, and the mask of the ‘Good Little Girl,’ who validated her life by the approval of others. Also the death of the carefully constructed neutrality that I began to wear sometime during my childhood and which effectively dampened my authentic response to life from that moment onwards.

Moving through the underworld of fear and facing imminent physical death allowed all those carefully controlled and suppressed ways of being to come flooding up, to be released in an overwhelming torrent. I was dancing with the total annihilation of self as I once knew it. With this threat to my continuity these wild emotions demanded their rightful place within my psyche and I let them have it.

There was no room for pretence any more, there was no time left for playing safe. Standing on the precipice of Death, there were no longer any ‘rules of the game.’ I was free to be real, free to be raw. I had permission to rant and rave, to weep and gnash my teeth, to curl up in the dark and not speak for days....an excuse to ignore the needs of everyone around me. To drop untethered, deep into the dark wilderness of self.. into that place of lonely chaos, which feels so all consuming. Slowly, ever so slowly, the writhing, twisting resistance in me that didn’t want to face it’s own destruction began to let go, to unwind, to unravel, until finally there was nothing left to rage against and I found, to my surprise, that I had passed through a violent storm, into ‘the eye;’ into a moment of great stillness. 

In that still place I found other ways of seeing, of feeling my way forward, towards the surface, but before I left that momentary silent inner world I experienced one of many  fundamental shifts that invariably followed my many little deaths....

 The cells of my body united with the consciousness that permeates all existence and spoke to me. The millions of cells that make up my body co-ordinated themselves in such a way that they were able to show me their incredible health and intelligence. I perceived the cancer cells themselves as messengers, martyrs even, that allowed themselves to morph into a rapidly growing colony or mass. The mass of cells, the lump, alerted me to the deep knowing that something was deeply and persistently out of balance. Making me aware that I needed to change, to let go of something, to surrender to the death of a no longer useful way of perceiving and being, and to move forward into embracing a new life. 

During the five long years of struggling with myself, I surfaced regularly from the deep well of darkness, with profoundly new realisations about myself and my place in the world. I often had the sense that I’d made it through, that I had found my balance. On one level, I had, as balance is dynamic. I was increasingly able to I recognise when I was beginning to lose it. The more quickly I was able to feel that I had swung out of equilibrium the more rapidly I was able to do ( or sometimes, not DO)  what I needed to swing back into momentary poise.... these moments gradually increased. 

 Having padded down the path of decent deep into my own underworld, my sub-conscious self, so many times I began to recognise that path and to hear the insistent calling of hidden parts of myself that were yearning to be seen. There was a sense that I hadn’t come face to face with the gnarly hidden crux of what had initially motivated the cancer cells unchecked growth. An unexamined place inside that continued to fuel the cancer cells rapid reproduction. 

At times it seemed that the ordeal, or the threshold time, would never end. The cancer re-occurred not once, but twice; three separate manifestations of the same old way of being, of the old skin that needed to be shed, I re-applied myself to my practise of bare attention; of mindfulness meditation. I realised that I need to let go of the judgement that I held against myself for having a human life. I needed to let go of the crippling condemnation of myself as a member of a plague species - a species that is destroying it’s own nest through it’s rapid, unchecked expansion. Was I ready to be curious about myself as a human, rather than critical?

So down I went again, into the chaos inside. This time I left my judgement behind and took with me a newly honed tool - my curious attention, with which I was able to see more deeply. My curiosity, instead of my judgement, allowed deeper grief and resentment to appear out of the shadows where they had been hiding. They weren’t afraid of curiosity.

 As they shuffled into view I witnessed them quietly. Then the thoughts that I had in relation to those emotions spontaneously began to rage through me. The dam wall finally broke.There was an awesome, torrential flood of weeping.

 I was in the bath, aptly enough, and my loud distress drew my kind and patient husband Jon to sit on the bathroom floor beside me and listen to the agonised outpourings of my mind and heart. The dogs came in too but they were a little more nervous about the wailing creature in the tub.

     ‘I don’t even want to be here,’ I cried, ‘I don’t  want to have a human life.’ After a few minutes, when I had settled a little, Jon said,

     ‘I’d really like to have you around for a long time yet but if you feel that you need to let go, if you feel that you want to die, well maybe you should let yourself do that.’

What a gift that was! Handing absolute freedom and control of my life to me, allowing me my death, if that’s what I needed. This letting go of me by the person in my life, who is the most important person to me, was a turning point in my healing.

My psyche felt released by his clear listening and his offering to me of absolute sovereignty over my life and my death.

In classic rites of passage there is always a death of some part of the psyche before the initiate moves more deeply into a new perception of self. That’s what happened again and again for me during my five years of dancing with those three bouts of breast cancer. The person who I was died so many times. There were so many descents into the underworld of myself  and so may returns to the surface, bringing with me gifts of clearer sight of myself, clearer understanding. Slowly I began to accept that I have a human life and that it is as beautiful a part of creation as everything else in existence. 

My purpose as a human came to me more slowly....it is only in the last year that I have understood that my personal reality of the alert awareness of trees and rocks and the other creatures around me, is a valid way to perceive life. This perception seems to be the oldest way of perception of our species, of a sense of awe and intimate relationship with the spirit(s) in everything. 

I used to indulge this way of seeing in myself as just my imagination, I didn’t want to get dogmatic about there being only one way to see the world. I’ve come to realise though, that my imagination is a powerful tool for perceiving possibilities and when I allow myself to drop fully into engagement with the tree spirits and the bird spirits, and the mist and rock and fire spirits, that I am the most happy version of myself. It makes me feel deeply connected to and part of the awesome mystery of life and death. 

And the action bit, connected to the purpose .....is to simply ‘be,’ in the conscious forest, here at Inanna and to share my love of the wilderness inside and outside of myself, with as many of my own species as I can. To be a midwife for those undergoing their own initiatory rites of passage; to make a space for them in the forest. A place where they can be alone and create self generated ceremony around the death of part of their psyche. A sacred space within which to descend into their underworld and then find their way back to the surface, laden with new understandings of themselves and their place within the world. To hear clearly and witness the story of their ordeal and their transformation and to mirror that story back to them. 

Finally, the purpose of this transformation is not just for the individual undergoing their rite of passage. The initiate, ultimately, returns home, further empowered and more able to contribute to the wellbeing of their community with their newly recognised strengths and gifts.

 My vision is that more and more of us remember who we are when we are whole within the Heart of nature. That we connect more deeply with our vulnerability, our compassion, our power. That we remember all of what we are and express it authentically and powerfully to our people, to our world... so that all humans may begin to remember their own ancient Cradle within the arms of Earth, Water, Air, and Fire and be renewed within their Wild Heart....