The Gift of Darkness

The ocean of Sorrow 
croaks and sloshes-
breathes beneath 
the sails of my heart.

I wrote that in my journal Feb 9th, on a plane headed to Medford, Oregon. I felt a mixture of timid hope and faint dread as me and my partner headed into a darkness retreat for 6 nights. I was 2.5 weeks post-explant surgery, and my inner experience had been rather brutal, to be honest. I anticipated a shock with the change in my form, the soreness of stitches under my breasts, and a few days of groggy downtime, followed by the resurgence of energy that so many women on Instagram described of their breast implant removal experiences. 

After two years of sporadic symptoms and chronic brain fog, pain, and fatigue, the surgery was my ‘Hail Mary’.

I was atoning to my Mother-body for mercy: I’m sorry for what I have done to you. Please forgive me. Let me make it right. Help me mend this violation and restore harmony.

What I felt when I came out of surgery was anything but harmonized. It was more like I had opened Pandora’s Box. I emerged trembling violently, teeth chattering, body shaking. They told me it was anesthesia wearing off, but in the days that followed I knew it was my body remembering..

…Remembering the night in 2005 when I was hit by a car, and I could only move my arms (the fear, even the certainty of death that I felt)
…Remembering how I survived (the hope! and the gratitude) 
…Remembering 8 months later when they had to reconstruct the metal rod in my leg because it broke inside of me (the surgeon’s error, and the broken trust)
…Remembering the shock of the gashes all over my legs at 21 years old (the trauma, and the grief)
…Remembering the way my breasts looked in the mirror after losing so much weight in the recovery process, using a cane to walk, and feeling my confidence stolen (the shame)
…Remembering, somatically, the invasion of my chest wall a year later as I implanted those saline bags to reclaim that beauty I thought I lost (again, hope!) 

And at the edges of my mind, I simultaneously processed victims of war suffering unfathomable injuries without the anesthesia that kept a wall of insulation between me and the loudness of my pain. The collective violence and violations of our sacred bodies resounded through my psyche like a gong bath of horror. 

Everything in the history of my own life, and in the ongoing life of the world, was apprehended all at once by my drowsy consciousness in those first few days of my recovery. 

Surgery is different from ‘violence’, of course. But it is still a violation to the body. I sensed this, and was remorseful to mine to choose it. She had already endured so much. 
“I am doing this for your own good!,” I hoped and I prayed. 

But new violations often awaken memories of old ones. And this seemed to awaken all of the old ones, for me. The physical pain resurrected the emotional pain of that 21 year old who was crushed between two cars and retaliated at fate’s thievery with a boob job. The somatic memory of violations of my 30 year old self, 14 year old self seemed to rise from a psychic grave; along with, I could sense, a number of other innocent ghost-selves inhabiting my body of unclear ages.

To add to this, my freshly explanted breasts looked nothing like the ones I had given a surgical makeover in 2006. The ego death I thought I graduated years ago reactivated, and a deep mourning of the sexual confidence I had worn like full body armor for my entire adult life commenced, too. The truth, I discovered, was that I loved my body all along, more than I ever let myself feel. It looked disfigured, and injured. 

I looked in the mirror, and felt all the layers of unexpected pain every day, fearing: What have I done? Have I harmed her? Hail Mary, Please forgive me. I am trying to undo the damage we have done. Sisters, Mother, Earth.. I am trying to help you heal through my body.

I tried to use logic to assure myself that this was part of the process, to be patient. To just trust. But the old stories that had awakened in my nervous system didn’t seem to trust surgery, or life.. or even ME. 

My logic was not winning. It began to expose a surprisingly fragile faith under my magical beliefs.. Deep down, I realized, some part of me wasn’t sure that I truly believed in complete healing.. or whatever the miracle of salvation might be. There was so much evidence of irreparable wounding, far and wide that I suddenly couldn’t unsee it. And there was suddenly little hard evidence I could find of the miraculous.

My rose-colored glasses were finally lost. 

In the pain of those first weeks, I began seeing the world through the perspective of my past, and (as it tends to when in survival mode), my mind was hunting for proof to support it. My nervous system was shot, and my wounds were seeking confirmation of these old fears that my deep subconscious had been tracking over the decades of my life.

In present time, I facilitate breathwork and guide ecstatic dance, along with numerous other emotional healing tools, mindset practices, and initiatic ways of living. In my work with Fit For Service, I lead people out of the labyrinth of lost hope and into the bright side of love- for a living. My career is centered in catharsis. I am passionate about emotional expression as a means for freedom from this sort of suffering. 

So I was surprised, to say the least, to be taken over by these old complexes I thought I had integrated. As my health struggled and symptoms of chronic stress continued to increase over the past 6 months, I sensed that there may be something in the deep waters of my shadow beginning to distort my vision, but I perceived the stressors as external. I really had no idea how much my body was still holding onto. But the physical challenges didn’t shock me as much as the intense emotions that came like tidal waves as my body processed the disruption.

For all of these reasons, that faint dread battled with my timid hope as I settled into the Skycave retreat center. As a lifelong ADD kid with an adult habit of pushing myself to burnout, the prospect of a full week of relief from all of life’s demands and distractions sounded deeply soothing. Like I could finally give myself a break from a great pressure I could no longer remember not feeling. And I could sleep as much as I wanted in there! Dear God, I could finally rest to my heart’s content! 

With a bit of cowardice, I half-hoped I would sleep my way through most of it. 

Because, the truth is, I was afraid. Of the dark? Yes, a little bit, if I’m being honest. But I was far more afraid of what I might meet within myself.

The ocean of Sorrow 
croaks and sloshes-
breathes beneath 
the sails of my heart.

The ‘Ocean of Sorrow’ I wrote about here was something I have touched before.. 

Its foamy grip crept back up to my feet 2 months ago in Sweden as I sat at the fire of my friend Gwairoch holding my rosary, with tears in my eyes, realizing what it symbolizes: That life is a sacrifice of love. Everything I love, I will lose. 

Hail Mary, Our Lady of Sorrow.. 

I waded in it when my first engagement ended, and continued to as I proceeded to nearly sell my soul for survival in Las Vegas. 

I swam in it when I lived in my parents house for two months in 2020, watching my mother sleep on an air mattress next to my father’s hospice bed in his final days that nobody saw coming. 

And I felt I might drown in it as I held his feet for the last time before the coroner took him away.

I submerged again in a mushroom ceremony last year too, bombarded with visions of people suffering, none of whom I could save. But then, like always, I pulled myself out.

Because I'm strong enough (and have enough access to love) not to let myself drown. 

I’ve continued throughout my adult life to get stronger, and more brave. I’ve done all of the healing things; from yoga to ayahuasca, from accepting heartbreak to falling in love again, from funerals to baby deliveries. 

And poetry. Lots of writing it out. All of it helps, and in time it all adds up to growth. It all really does heal.

But it never ceases to amaze and humble me to discover how deep the layers go. 
The psyche is an infinite onion, shedding only what it is ready to surrender. 

As I’ve healed and strengthened, I’ve also gotten busier, exponentially broadened my network of friends, and committed to taking on exceedingly more than I ever have in the history of my life. Fill in what’s left of my time with the rat race of productivity culture and this new dopamine screen addiction we all share, and well.. I have every great excuse to never have time to visit the Ocean of Sorrow and relieve the pressure by returning some of my salty tears to their source.

Which is a relief because, well, who wants to go swim in an ocean of sorrow, am I right?? 

And, since I fear I might drown in the pain of that feeling, my psyche has good reason to avoid it. 

We often avoid feeling emotional pain because a part of us (usually a very young part), believes that if we go all the way into it we will never come back. We end up oscillating between long periods of avoidant anesthesia and then getting stuck in prolonged states of distress because whatever has been repressed  tries to come up all at once, eager to be welcomed in the door, and it overwhelms an already overwhelmed system.

And, we don’t have good tools to practice being with it without freezing in it: letting it ebb and flow, like a rhythmic tide. Because culture generally does not hold sorrow sacred. Grief, anger, and sadness are painted with judgment and stereotypes, and perceived as various forms of weakness.

Our culture doesn’t honor the willingness to feel these emotions as the badge of virtue that it should be. And the ominous, perhaps bigger picture is that culture doesn't make space for them. Time is money is survival. So, onward we trudge in survival mode, distancing ourselves from the perceived threat of feeling deeply, driven by a culture built on survival mode.

If people were encouraged to prioritize and value feeling their sorrows as much as they do feeling pride, validation, or success, the system that keeps us on overdrive might not hold. 

It certainly would hold less power. 

The secret we are just beginning to collectively realize is that these emotions actually FREE us. And with some practice at riding their waves (recognizing that they do always pass and leave us purified and reconnected to our hearts), we discover that we don’t drown after all. 

We flow with them, and they deliver us from the storm. 

That is what I learned in the darkness.

At home, surrounded by familiar things, with work alerts popping up on Slack, and the light of my inbox scolding me for being a bad friend, and the mirror of my fresh incisions reminding my brain of bright red lightning bolts across my legs in 2005, I did get stuck in the emotions that arose from my surgery. 

Unless I made myself busy. When I kept myself busy, I felt better. 

In the dark, there was nothing to remind me of my mind’s stories (though I did spend a lot of time with them, too, until I found a way to move through them- which I am going to share with you). 

But there was also nothing to distract me from the feelings underneath those thought loops. 
In fact, the darkness was only feeling. All I could do in that room was feel my way through it.

For the first day, my physical pain screamed. And I could not numb it. Then came boredom, resistance, anxiety, and self-judgment; each one more uncomfortable than the last. 

But each one passed.

And then, on night 3, Grief made its way from the depths to the surface. The ocean of sorrow roared from my heart through my eyes. But there in the velvet darkness, I had nothing to do but let the wave come. And I noticed something I had forgotten in my long time away from its waters.. It felt GOOD. I felt my internal pressure dissipate. I could breathe deeper. My anxiety was gone. I felt more connected with my Dad, and my sense of God.

For a moment, I thought it might be too much. But then I realized that I never could have let myself express what came through me without the permission that the darkness provided. I could not be self-conscious there. There was no reason to inhibit anything. Nothing to rush through and bottle up for. I loved the darkness for this gift of remembering that feeling isn’t life-threatening. It’s actually life-saving.

I went on to face Fear, and Rage, but those are stories for another time. What matters most today is the urgent message I now want to ride around the world waving an enormous banner that reads: FEEL! 

FEEL IT NOW, LET IT IN, LET IT FLOW! 
Before you get sick! 
Before you try to sell your soul to feel secure like I once did! 
Before you sabotage your dreams by avoiding it! 
Before we destroy each other with our suppression! 
Before it’s too late to save the world.. 
Hail Mary, Full of Grace. Grant us the mercy of living in our hearts...

I want to live this prayer and plea across my chest in every way that I can.

I left that place with my sanity, feeling clear, bright, and restored of the life force I was missing for a long time. And I continued remembering in there.. Not the stories of my past, but the truth of a good reality that is present here, now. Nothing had to change except my willingness to embrace emotions that I learned a long time ago to temper.

The benefit of my surgery, and the gift of the darkness, was MY PAIN. 
..my sorrow, my grief, my anger, and my hurt; all of my well-armored, still-open wounds. 

As I wrote this just now, like magic, that hauntingly beautiful Mary Oliver line came to mind. I looked it up to double check the quote for this letter… I knew the words, but not its source until my Google search moments ago. The synchronicity of the poem title makes me smile :) And God winks.
 
The Uses of Sorrow
"(In my sleep I dreamed this poem).

Someone I once loved gave me 
 a box full of darkness once.

It took me years to understand 
  that this, too, was a gift.”

- Mary Oliver


It’s been a breathtaking winter for me. A few weeks ago, I would have said it’s been hard. But “hard” sometimes turns out to be the best thing that could have ever happened, depending on what we are prepared to do with it. 

Francis Weller talks about “metabolizing” grief in his exquisite book The Wild Edge of Sorrow. This is what I did in the dark, and what I feel we need as a collective. To not vomit our sorrow and anger onto one another in projection and reaction. To not carry it heavy in our bellies for decades, getting sicker and sicker. To instead, digest it. Let it be converted back into life force energy through our body’s wisdom.

It’s a great ask, and task, at a time when the world’s sorrows feel like too much to consume, let alone digest. Violence wants to meet violence. Violation breaks trust. Our world is steeped in it. We carry these wounds from our parents, ancestors, and communities. Our media inundates us with the insurmountable volume of it until it's all we can see. We are addicted to horror on our screens, and miss the daily wonders that bring us levity and health balance. We are sick in isolation from nature and separation from each other, and we have become sick together. 

But we are in this together. And if we want to save each other (the way I know we do, because that is the longing at the heart of our outrage), we have to start inside. Metabolize the sorrow we carry, to make space to bear the weight of the world, and to be prepared to metabolize that, too. 

I know personally how an individual psyche will repeat its wounded stories, living in a sympathetic response, tracking fear, and collecting evidence against trust. I lived that for much of the past month, and honestly, most of my earlier life. And when it sees the world through the stories of the past, history repeats itself.

The individual psyche is part of the collective psyche. How have we come here, back to this place of horror, unable to trust our governments, and entire other populations?

Our collective psyche is still playing out the stories of its past. The transformation starts with us, now, or we might not survive long enough to break the cycle before we destroy the world with our blame.

If you got this far, thank you. I hope that this touches you, and inspires you. 

I’m going to teach some tools for metabolizing sorrow and changing the inner relationship to pain in a special workshop tomorrow evening. It’s free to attend. And I am going to share more about a program I began designing last year that offers MANY tools for valuing and harnessing the power of our emotions to experience personal freedom that can support collective freedom. Not only grief, anger, and sadness, but also pleasure, passion, and bliss. After this winter, I’ve never felt more prepared or inspired to serve.

Please join me tomorrow tonight to learn more tales from the dark and receive a compass to navigate your own ocean.

I am praying for us all, Hail Mary. 

With Great Heart,
Caitlyn 

Captain Your Life: FREE Fit For Service Masterclass 

REGISTER HERE TO ATTEND
**All registrants will receive the playback on Thursday.** 
So, if you cannot make the live call, please, still sign up! 

I will share book recommendations, practices, special announcements, and more about the Emotional Fitness program I am hosting in Fit For Service starting this March. I will also offer some Q&A time at the end.

Join me now in Fit For Service 2024

If you feel a ‘Yes’ in your heart already to join an amazing supportive community and work intimately with me this year to metabolize the emotions that have been weighing you down, making you sick, or hijacking your outlook on life, please sign up right away! I would love to support you with this work. We are going to make it a lot of fun, and celebrate the journey with a 5-day summit experience in Montana, featuring Dirtwire, all of the Fit For Service guides, and a vast network of new best friends.

Space is limited, and I have never offered such a deep experience with all of my tools, teachings, and attention before– 

CLICK HERE TO LEARN MORE or Register Now! 

(Scroll down to 'Emotionally Fit', and peruse the other tracks as well!) 

Poem of the Week:

When your eyes are tired
the world is tired also.

When your vision has gone
no part of the world can find you.

Time to go into the dark
where the night has eyes
to recognize its own.

There you can be sure
you are not beyond love.

The dark will be your womb
tonight.

The night will give you a horizon
further than you can see.

You must learn one thing.
The world was made to be free in

Give up all the other worlds
except the one to which you belong.

Sometimes it takes darkness and the sweet
confinement of your aloneness
to learn

anything or anyone
that does not bring you alive

is too small for you.

– “Sweet Darkness” by David Whyte, House of Belonging