In the Belly of the Whale
Hope you and your family are safe and well.
I have been reflecting on the mass experience of sheltering in place. It has certainly interrupted what many of us take for granted – unlimited freedom of movement and association.
For many of us, this experience is a welcome respite from a frantic world. For others, the enforced isolation is daunting.
Indeed, we are seized by a powerful transpersonal Myth. In a metaphorical sense, we are like Jonah, swallowed by the Whale.
To help you make sense of this experience and use this time well, I’m sharing a free chapter of my latest book: The Only Certain Freedom. Hope this helps you to discover your deepest values and best self.
Excerpt from “The Only Certain Freedom”
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The Jonah Lessons
You can’t keep a good man down. Proverb
The story of Jonah teaches us—those who have been plunged into the darkness—that there is work to do. It does no good to rage at our plight, make bargains, or plead for mercy—all stages before acceptance.
The darkness cannot be dispelled by emotional outbursts. We must accept that we have been overtaken. We can complain, rail, and gnash our teeth, but it gets us no closer to locating the light switch.
The Jonah story teaches us that darkness is not a place where we are sent for punishment. Had that been God’s intention for Jonah, drowning would have provided capital punishment in spades.
Instead, Jonah is swallowed for purgation, a process that demands reflection, surrender, and a change of heart. An omnipotent force swallows us, placing us in a mythic cycle of death and rebirth, where we are called to face who and what we are. Only when we understand our true calling, when we’ve connected to a higher vision for our lives, can we be reborn.
Soul searching is the hard labor of every Jonah. First, we must purge ourselves of the illusions, fears, and false values that have led to our arrest.
Then we must examine the past, recognize our errors, and repent. From this we are able to gain enough clarity to return to the world with a renewed sense of purpose and direction.
Our release from darkness comes only when we commit to doing what matters most. Even in mythology, a spontaneous enlightenment seldom occurs. We are in the best company with Siddhartha, the enlightened Buddha, who had to put in serious time and effort under the Bodhi tree before he attained his transformation.
The teachings of darkness can take many years to harvest, and gathering them is hard work. It certainly was for me. There are five key lessons that I learned from reflecting on my own dark night of the soul and from the story of Jonah and the whale:
1. Stop
When we ignore the warning signs and are plunged into darkness, we must stop doing whatever it was that led to the crisis in the first place. Many of us are so invested in a point of view, a course of action, or a pattern of behavior that we cannot stop because it is all we know. I bypassed the first opportunity to change by throwing myself into work and speeding past it. Like Jonah, my escape attempt was driven by fear of the unknown and the familiarity of habitual behavior. Sometimes, doing the wrong thing seems like the easier path. The very habits that had led me astray also insulated me from asking the hard questions.
Change can seem difficult and scary. Confronting the future without the structure of the past—even when that structure is a rickety scaffold doomed to collapse—required a faith that can be hard to summon. Instead, we chose to ignore the warning signs of unhappiness and bully our way through.
When darkness overcomes us, attempting to move in any direction is reckless. Stripped of our ability to see a way forward—or a way out—we are gripped by a transformative process that we do not command. All we can do in the belly of the whale is give up any notion of control, let go of our agenda, and surrender. That surrender can take three days, three weeks, or three years. It is up to us. Fear or stubbornness dictates the length of our stay.
Once we surrender, we learn to access stillness. Stillness is the place within us, beyond the ego’s reach, that can only be found once we let go of stress, anxiety, anger, resentment, ambition, and other drivers that keep us locked into a particular pattern and disconnected from our own inner guidance.
“Within you there is a stillness and a sanctuary,” wrote Hermann Hesse, “to which you can retreat at any time and be yourself.”
Stillness was not easy for me to find. My mind was constantly churning, planning, and scheming. But learning to quiet the mind is one of the most important apprenticeships of the dark. It takes commitment and a set of practices that we will explore later in the book. And it takes the fruit of a long stretch in darkness—patience.
Ultimately, stillness provides us sanctuary, and once we have entered it, we know that we can return there anytime, that we can come home to ourselves. With dedicated work, we see what is most heartfelt and meaningful, what is most important to our lives.
2. Manage Your Fears
Jonah was scared, and fear led him to make bad decisions. His fears were undermining his best interests—represented here by the God of the Old Testament—and those fears were carrying him in the opposite direction of his highest purpose.
The lesson here is that we must never make life choices when we are afraid. When we allow our fears to overcome us, we are carried off course. Like Jonah on the boat to Tarshish, we are unable to discern what is in our own best interest, the interests of the people we care about, and the interest of our mission in the world.
Fear never helps us when we are in the dark. It only promotes greater terrors by seizing our imagination and turning it against us, demonizing the future. As long as we allow fear to control us, the work of surrender, reflection, and discernment cannot be accomplished. Our energy is diverted to feeding fear instead of searching our hearts for guidance.
Neither the past nor the future hold the power to quell our fears. The only place we can find solace is here and now. Learning to stay in the present moment helps us meet reality as it unfolds, rather than succumb to terrors of what might befall us.
3. Trust
The remedy for fear is trust. Jonah mistrusted God, mistrusted the Assyrian reception of God’s word, and mistrusted his ability to carry out God’s orders. Because he didn’t believe he could accomplish God’s task, he ran away.
I too was on the run. I hopped on a plane to Europe rather than trust that I could find the answers that would lead me to the better self that I had abandoned for misguided notions of “success.”
My failure to trust what I knew in my heart to be true accelerated an inner conflict, and I faced that conflict only after I had exhausted myself enough to stop running.
This, of course, is a central lesson of the Jonah story. In myth, the inner conflict is extroverted. While it is unlikely that a large fish will swallow us, the possibility that we will be cast into darkness by our own actions if we do not listen to inner guidance is far more realistic.
We are imprisoned there so that we have a chance to change course. This “sea change” requires that we replace fear with trust. We are asked to trust that, even though our situation may be difficult, we have what it takes to find clarity.
We must also trust that we have the inner resources to carry out our mission and find a pathway to greater happiness and peace of mind. Trust delivers us from self-abandonment, the destination that our fear would set for us. Through trust, we begin to see a direction home to what has heart and meaning in our lives. Even when we can’t see this clearly, we must.
4. Listen
There is no record of what Jonah did while he was captive in the whale’s belly, though he did repent. We can speculate that he was in shock at discovering himself in solitary confinement and that he felt frightened, overwhelmed, and alone.
Those who have experienced the dark night of the soul can undoubtedly empathize with Jonah’s plight. They recognize the horror of entombment in the past, in old ways of thinking and being. They understand the futility of breathing new life into a fallen identity. Also, they know that trying to resuscitate the drowned corpse of the past is futile.
The belly of the whale is a paradox. It is the one place where the price of liberty is complete surrender. When we cannot figure things out or see a way forward, we are forced to surrender to guidance from a source other than the ego or our old bad habits. This requires us to listen. But listen to what?
In the Old Testament, Jonah was required to listen to God’s direction and take action on the promises made. We too have a covenant to keep. Beneath the chatter of our fears and the mistaken agenda of the ego is another voice. This is the wisdom voice of the heart. It is always available to us, providing guidance in accordance with our highest values.
In stillness and through reflection, its messages can be heard, directing us toward what’s most important to our lives—whom and what we love, what work is worth doing, and how to be happy no matter what our circumstances might be. We must act on these instructions.
Of course, the refusal to obey a power greater than his own fear was Jonah’s undoing. The calamity that befell him as a result is a reminder that there are always consequences of our choices.
In his book The Power of Myth, Joseph Campbell suggests that Jonah’s mistake is a common one: “The world is full of people who have stopped listening to themselves or have listened only to their neighbors to learn what they ought to do, how they ought to behave, and what the values are they should be living for.
That would have described me thirty years ago. I had been caught up in the pursuit of “success,” driven by values that led me further and further away from myself. Those values led me to a state of exhaustion and burnout, to a profound unhappiness.
Arrested by the darkness of exhaustion in my hotel room in Paris, I was no longer capable of chasing what I thought I wanted. I was forced to confront the false values that I had accepted so easily as the currency of success. I wished then that I had stayed connected to my heart and listened to its directions. Instead, I allowed that guidance to be drowned out by the cacophony of my own ambition and the allure of a high-consumption lifestyle that I thought was the chief measure of a meaningful life.
5. Make Changes
Ultimately, the lesson of Jonah is about change. Those who have been plunged into darkness through their allegiance to personal gain, or by a turbulent world, have a choice. We can remain in the belly of the whale, held there by the confusions of the ego, or we can choose to align ourselves with the wisdom of the heart.
With that choice a fundamental transformation comes about. We are no longer solely governed by the material values of the world around us. We are no longer subject to the willful struggle to uphold the ego’s agenda. We begin to hear the soft sounds of the heart and begin to understand that there is a deeper guidance available to each of us.
The more we attend to the voice of the heart, the stronger its direction becomes. That surrender accomplished, our salvation begins. We are deposited, like Jonah, on a new shore. There, what we must be and what we must do begin to form. Freed from the turbulence of the mind and the world, we gain the ability to start to re-envision life.
Arrested for Transformation
After days of lying immobile counting the ceiling tiles from my hotel bed, my will to live began to return slowly. I managed to bathe, feed, and clothe myself. Eventually, I was able to leave the dark hotel room and venture out onto the dark streets of Montmartre, a neighborhood in the north of Paris. I was not yet a new man. In fact, I was more like a wobbly ghost. While Jonah had been bleached white by gastric acids, I had been rendered almost transparent by exhaustion.
Walking the cobbled streets, I thought, would allow me to collect my scattered thoughts and feelings. They were still washing up like debris on the beach. I passed the bars and bistros, the boulangeries and fromageries. I passed sex shops and peep shows. I passed the windmill of the Moulin Rouge. I wasn’t looking closely at any of it. Since the whale had disgorged me, my gaze was turned inward, focused on the wreck of my former life.
Walking, I told myself, was exactly the medicine I needed to put myself back together. So I walked and walked and walked. I thought about my former boss and mentor meeting his end in a hotel room in London. My demise in the hotel room in Paris was not quite as final. I had lost an identity but not my life.
This international PR assignment was a rocket, my boss had told me when I was first assigned to the account a couple of years earlier: my career was going to take off to new heights. That rocket had fallen from the heavens and crash-landed in Montmartre.
I was surprised by how little I cared about any of that now. I felt oddly detached, as though the past three weeks were a dim memory of a fever dream. I didn’t care anymore about “hits”, the articles I had placed in the media on behalf of my clients. I didn’t care about winning. I didn’t care about “making it.”
What I cared about, as I walked the streets, was my family. I missed home, my wife, and my daughter. I missed our house, our bed, and the smell of coffee in the morning. I missed walking in the park across the street and watching the children play at the playground.
I cared about putting myself back together, but I didn’t know how to accomplish it. My life was a puzzle, and there were pieces broken and missing: things that no longer fit together. The model for living that I had been busy building had been lost in an ocean of ambition.
Raising the wreckage didn’t seem like the thing to do. What I needed was a new model. At the time, I had absolutely no idea what it would look like. What I was sure of, though, was that I would need to take a long hard look into my heart to uncover it.
And I would need to act.
