I am powerless: Stage 6 of our Journey

Entering into this stage...let's just say it is usually done by crawling and crying...until we finally stop and learn to sit. Just when you thought the pain and humiliation would stop it doesn't. But why? What is the point to all this raw pain and suffering? It is here in this Stage that we learn to accept and acknowledge our powerlessness. In Stage 5, we are faced with our immense shadow and / or our brokenness. Finally we are learning to fully let go. We come to accept and live with this feeling of powerlessness. This feeling comes from our Smaller Self, also known as our ego. As Richard Rohr states regarding this stage, "Almost any attempt to save yourself by any superior behavior, technique, belonging system, morality, role, strong ideological belief, or religious devotion will not work....that some event, struggle, relationship, or suffering in your life has to lead you to the edge of your own resources." Little did we realize till now that all our religious performing, meditation techniques, self help plans, academic knowledge and even should I dare say "Biblical knowledge" does not work. It is not that those things in and of themselves are the problem. The problem was that our Smaller Self was in charge. We were living out of self will. 

This may sound crazy but we are learning to have a relationship with darkness or emptiness. Rohr explains, "darkness is a much better teacher than supposed certainty or rightness" or light. David Whyte shared, in his audiobook Midlife and the Great Unknown, that so much of the journey is embracing the unknown. Whyte states, "We learn to have a relationship with the unknown [powerlessness] that all the work in reality has been done. Now we must learn to just let go...Me, myself I will throw away...to be humiliated means to return to the ground of being". Suffering comes from all the things and attachments we were trying to hold onto that were just not ours to hold in the first place. Rohr states that "suffering is optional pain is not". Pain are those tragedies and events where life interrupts and rips aways things we held dear. Suffering is the unnecessary longings we mistakenly take as satisfying. There is a phrase in 12-step communities that we stop trying to force solutions. And instead we learn to wait. We begin to befriend the pain and suffering. During this stage, it will feel less like a friend and more like a distant acquaintance. But that experience will soon change in Stage 7. 

The point to all this is that we are learning to let go, so that something in us and through us can lead. It is similar to what happens to seeds before they germinate. The seeds are buried in the ground in complete and total darkness so that something can grow out of the soil into something new. The same is true with us but we cannot skip this process otherwise we are back to living out of the smaller self. Words cannot adequately describe this state of being. It is filled with contradictions of both death and hope, pain and optimism, waiting and longing, anxiousness and peace, addiction and grace, betrayal and love, and so on. The great paradox is that our first half of life is dying off and we are in many ways returning to a womb of darkness so that we can experience a birth of transformation.  John O'Donohue gave a beautiful discussion in his audio lecture series "The Inner Landscape" where he speaks at length regarding suffering. John stated, "Wounds aren't sent to make you small, they are sent to you to open you up to make you more kind, gracious, and beautiful....Real suffering is where the contractions within us harmonize." It is not smallness we are after. We all want to expand but to expand is so painful that is why so few if ever choose such a path. The beauty is that the path, in many ways, chooses us if we will honor and stay true to the journey. David Whyte so poetically wrote, "the antidote to exhaustion is not necessarily rest...the antidote to exhaustion is wholeheartedness". This is what is happening and allowing us to move to Stage 7. It is an expansion of heart which allows us to move to Stage 7: I am my(larger)self.

There is a beautiful poem by Christine Lore Weber called Mother Wisdom Speaks that encapsulates this stage in life.

Mother Wisdom Speaks

Some of you I will hollow out.
I will make you a cave.
I will carve you so deep the stars will shine in your darkness.
You will be a bowl.
You will be the cup in the rock collecting rain.
I will hollow you with knives.
I will not do this to make you clean.
I will not do this to make you pure
You are clean already.
You are pure already.
I will do this because the world needs the hollowness of you.
I will do this for the space that you will be.
I will do this because you must be large.
A passage.
People will find their way through you.
A bowl.
People will eat from you.
And their hunger will not weaken them to death.
A cup to catch the sacred rain.
My daughter [son], do not cry.
Do not be afraid.
Nothing you need will be lost.
I am shaping you.
I am making you ready.
Light will flow in your hollowing.
You will be filled with light.
Your bones will shine.
The round open center of you will be radiant.
I will call you brilliant one.
I will call you daughter [son] who is wide.
I will call you transformed.