Learning to navigate in the Depths of our Inner Forest
What to expect when you decide to start Therapy
“the adventure is always in the dark forest.
You enter the forest at the darkest point,
Where there is no path.
Where there is a way or path,
It is someone else’s path.”
Joseph Campbell
I have had the fortune to travel a lot in my life and this is why I like to think of the therapeutic process as a journey; a journey in the depths of ourselves instead in the external world.
Putting an Intention as the Destination of our Journey
Every journey, starts with a certain destination in mind.
In a physical journey the destination, of course, is a place we want to reach. Just to simplify, let’s say someone decides to travel to India, maybe they want to see the Taj Mahal or the temples of Hampi.
In deciding on undertaking a therapeutic process, we can think of the destination as the reason that bring someone to therapy. It might be feeling sad or unsatisfied with your life, feeling unhappy in your job, a lack of peace with your self image, suffering of chronic pain medicine has no solution to and other issues that harm the person’s well being.
Of course, in order to get somewhere, it is important to know where you want to reach. So this initial destination, that we might call intention is very important.
Yet as we start the actual physical travel, like let’s say traveling to India, soon enough, we realize that the value of the journey is not in seeing the Taj Mahal or the temples of Hampi. The most exciting and nourishing part lies in the path itself: the local people we have conversations with, the various landscapes we pass on our way there (mighty trees, little hay huts in which people live, the eyes of the people we encounter as we head in the direction of our destination). The goal becomes to explore who we are in different circumstances rather than the destination itself.
Undertaking a therapeutic journey is deciding upon traveling in the depths of ourselves and exploring what lies inside of us; it is wanting to know more of who we are and how to live our life with more freedom.
The Landscapes of Our Psyche
In therapy, we discover that our inner reality can turn into metaphors, into images in our mind. It is easier to know our inner state by turning it into images. These images might be landscapes. Inside ourselves we might encounter:
sun-washed hillsides covered with beautiful flowers to depict inner freedom and lightness;
rivers might reflect among other things a state of flow;
lakes that wash our hearts from all hardship and
caves as spaces in which we might find protection from the outer world.
These various landscapes are a more tangible way to represent the ways we perceive life situations, what happens inside of us as we meet a certain person or face a certain situation. That is, allowing us to discover who we are, what we are made of, how we perceive the world, our strengths and weaknesses. The various people or animals we meet in this kind of journeys inside our inner world, can be people from our past or present whose voices live strongly in us, our different personalities, and even our inner demons. It allows us to uncover our needs and heart's deepest wishes, which we sometimes don't dare admitting even to ourselves. We look with compassion at our vulnerabilities and the protective blockages we've constructed.
The difference between making these journeys by yourself or accompanied by a psychologist
The beauty of a journey, that when we are traveling, away from our familiar environment, even the more challenging situations are met with more curiosity and ease; it is a state of being often free from judgment, guilt and blame, because in the new place we are in, no one knows us any way and we don’t know any one, so we are more free to explore who we really are. We kind of explore our inner realities by ourselves every day, we have the same tendencies, the similar thought patterns. Waking those familiar inner landscapes accompanied by a psychologist is like having a little bird on your shoulder, allowing you a new gaze on what you thought you already know, allowing you to be a traveler in these realities that do not look so familiar as before. This little bird emphasizes the voice of your inner wisdom; being in therapy is like being with someone else and being with yourself at the same time.
A journey of this kind allows us to charge our inner system of new energies, of new points of view. I do believe therapy should be as interesting and nourishing as a journey.
The Inner Forest and its Inhabitants: getting to know your subconscious mind
Many psychologists and sociologists describe our inner world using the metaphor of the forest. The forest nourishes us with its mystery and magic, but it can also contain mystery and even be dangerous.
How does our subconscious might be described as a forest? In the depths of the forest magical creatures reside such as fairies and gnomes, magic mushrooms and fairy dust; the same in our subconscious images from our imagination and from collective history, myths and fairy-tales reside. In the depths of the forest we can build hope and the unshakable knowing that things are possible beyond what we can imagine; the same if we learn to collaborate with our subconsciousness. All this is true, it is also true that we might find ourselves lost, with paths disappearing or leading nowhere, not knowing how to get out of the forest; this is exactly what might happened entering into our subconscious mind.
The Shadow Side
The monsters of the forest and its disappearing paths represent our shadow parts–inner realities that were too intense to keep in our conscious mind, so we put them in a place where we have no conscious contact with them but influence us from within our subconscious. Since these are contents that we have no contact with, they might change form and become a kind of inner monsters.
From the therapy room: a young woman in her 30s comes to therapy feeling a lack of confidence in her body and the way other people see her. She doesn’t know why it is so. During therapy, traveling along the lane of her memories, she remembers that when she was around 10 years old a group of boys called her fat when she was in the sea with her parents. She remembers feeling ashamed of her body and powerless in front of this negative attention without being able to answer (when we feel like we are unable to react to an unpleasant event, our distress increases and there is a greater chance of trauma creation). She remembers another moment, when she was 20, getting out from the supermarket and a group of teenagers at the entrance calling her fat. This time she felt less helpless, she looked at them as to say “this is an inappropriate behavior”, but she walked away feeling an uncomfortable sensation in her belly- again (less chance of leaving a trauma because she reacted, but still an event that left a remarkable sign in her psyche).
Remembering these two events helps her to gain a choice over the inner monster that was created in her subconscious by those same events and grants her the freedom as to how to relate to them in her inner narrative. The monster of these events is not in the shadows any more and so it loses its power over her.
Examples of outer realities that might transform into monsters are:
🍄memories of things that happen in the past that hurt us;
🍄fears about the future; limiting beliefs;
🍄uncompassionate inner dialog;
🍄uncomfortable emotions such as guilt, shame, destructive anger, anxiety etc.
Naturally, we prefer not to meet our monsters. So why enter this forest at all?
Because, like the house of Baba Yaga in Slavic folktales, this forest has legs. It finds us, no matter how hard we try to escape, it will always reach us, because it is part of us. The reality we encounter in our daily life is deeply affected by the mastery we have of our inner forest.
I see therapy as gym for the moments when our inner forest takes hold of our reality. It helps us navigate the depths of our subconscious mind and get to know the monsters that reside inside it. Some may become allies, others may be sent to the light. Facing them allows us to live a life in which we have more freedom, of which we are actively creators of our life.
Many times at the beginning of a therapy journey, people can’t wait to enter the forest and to get to know their inner demons; but the forest can be a dangerous place.
Our own inner monsters can eat us alive: we can lose our path, our faith, get into despair, loneliness or fear and believe this is the only reality that exists. This is why it is important to get ready before we enter the forest.
How to enter the forest safely?
To safely enter the forest we need to take two safety measures:
🍄The ability to be present in the here and now, grounded in the present moment. To go beyond ideas, assumptions and judgment, to listen and trust what we feel: our physical sensations, our needs and desires as well as our intuition.
🍄To be very much aware of our resources that have the function of an armor against the inner demons. Resources are considered places, objects, memories, people, body sensations, or spiritual practices that contribute to our expansion and help us have a more positive perception of ourselves and help us feel better in general. They give us the freedom to choose not to be consumed by our inner monsters. They allow us to anchor ourselves in light, walking towards a brighter future with every breath we take.
What are this resources? Listening to certain songs or dancing can enhance our emotional well-being. Also getting a hug from a loved one or to light a candle makes everything look clearer. Sometimes shifting our gaze to the monster can make it appear less monstrous, but other times, focusing on the light empowers us to confront our emotions and face the monster without succumbing to it.
The Magic of the Journey
The forest itself, with all its magical creatures, is neither good nor bad—it simply is.
It's the journey we make inside that allows us to know ourselves better, to learn to navigate its depths, to connect to its magical potential, and to make its creatures our allies.
There is a deck of tarot cards, I love it’s reading of reality and the magic that it brings; it is called the Forest of Enchantment Tarot by Lunaea Weatherstone and illustrated by Meraylah Allwood.
In the tarot, the cards of the great arcana depicting the journey of a human being through various life lessons. He enters as the full and gets out as the world. In this deck the traveler is a dear and it travels through an enchanted forest where he meets various magical creatures. As you can see in the images bellow, he enters all white and fluffy to a dark forest of which he does not know much and he gets out, the horizon is clear, the whole valley is open to him, but he is thinner, a bit more experienced. He is wiser then he entered and not as naive as before.
As we journey through our inner forest, like this enchanted deer, we also emerge changed. We learn to dialog with the mystery, unlocking the magic in our depths.
