My main project for this year is Grow Your Depth, Nurture Your Brilliance – to do this work and see where it takes me.

The only way that depth work is predictable is that you can be sure it’s going to lead you right into the thing you want to explore the least.? This weekend, it led me to DESPAIR.

Despair often comes up in response to setting a clear intention to move forward.? Not because it’s an asshole and wants you to be miserable, but because your clear intention is asking you to deal with the despair that lives within you.

For me, this weekend, I noticed that one of the things that really bothers me about despair is how familiar the energy of it feels.? Like yes it’s always there, beneath everything else, waiting for it’s change to spring up and devour me.

And because I find the energy of it so uncomfortable, I avoid actually working with it.? Instead I focus on finding ways to feel better – which doesn’t change it or move it at all.? It keeps it right where it is in my inner world – it feels like kind of an underground river, only made of something much heavier than water.

So, I did what I am always telling my Circle members to do – I took it into the Un-Sticking Station.? This is what happened:

Oh, hello despair.? Wow, you ARE an underground river.? A very sad underground river.? That’s interesting – I didn’t realise you would be sad, I thought you were just mean and wanted me to be sad, but you’re the one who is sad.

(the river just kind of sighs and frowns)

Well, I’m sorry I have avoided you so much, you scare me.? But I didn’t mean to leave you here, all sad and alone.

I spread out my pink blanket on the grass and sit down beside the river.

“So, what do you want?” I ask.

At first, the river just looks sad.? I can’t tell if it knows what it wants but is shy about saying it, or if it doesn’t even know what it wants.? Then it shows me:

Light.

This was meant to be a river of light.? Flowing, underground, through the depths of my inner world.

Possibility and hope and love and light and all things sparkling and magical.

But every time I hoped for something and didn’t get it and my heart was crushed, some of that crush fell down and the river got a little muddy.? And I’ve been here for forty years so I have been crushed a few times and here it all is, clogging up the river with despair.

I just sit with that for a while.

The river starts to lighten up.

And I start to see how it was never really a river of despair.? It remains a river of light and the despair is just silt.? Really, anyone with a despair-magnet could just pull the despair out of the river and clean it right out.

And tiny little chunks of despair start to lift up out of the river and as the dust lands on the river banks and I notice something really interesting… the despair/silt can actually be used to build the river banks.? To hold and shape the river.? To direct the light.

I can use the crushing experiences to direct the river of possibility that flows through my inner world.

Will keep working with this in my Grow Your Depth journal…

(For Circle members: I’m going to post this in the Un-Sticking Station and update it there to hare how I work with it and what else I learn about it.)