It takes a lot of bravery to explore our inner underworld. Those places inside our souls and psyches that harbor our shame and our pain and our most difficult emotions.

It’s scary down there in those dark recesses of what we have tried for so long to keep hidden. Even from ourselves.

We want the light. We hunger for the bright shimmer of what we believe to be our best selves. Forgetting again and again that the dark is where all life begins. That the dark places sustain and nourish us.

We forget that we all came from the womb. That everything that feeds us begins in fertile soil. That there is no growth without the hidden power of roots to ground us deep into the earth.

We can’t find our way home without first returning to the darkness. Without first feeling our way through what we can’t see with our eyes or know with our minds. Without trusting that there is something inside us that knows the way. That has always known the way.

We need courage to embark on that underworld journey. And an openness to everything we find there.

We don’t need brains as much as heart. Just a sacred willingness to howl and to melt and gnash our teeth for as long as it takes to sink down fully into the bedrock of our felt truth.

And to claim our one way ticket to the powerful core of our being that can only be bought with the realness of our tears and the revelation of our holy rage.