I’m home now in my little ‘womb room’ after a rich and nourishing weekend on Bowen Island. I was there co-facilitating a residential retreat with dear friends Susan Wright and Sharon Halfnight, that was held at our friend Julia’s beautiful Lodge at the Old Dorm. We call the workshop Weaving the Web and it was birthed over dinner many months ago when five of us met to explore the topic of dark nights of the soul—both on an individual level and that of the world at large. The question Susan posed was, “What role might we play in hospicing the death of the old and midwifing the birth of the new?”

Susan is no stranger to dark nights. Her own experience was so relentless and so profoundly disorienting that she finally had to write about it. Over a span of several years she wrestled with and teased apart some of the common elements we all experience during these largely unwelcome passages and her resulting wisdom is a soon-to-be-published book entitled, Dark Night: Reclaiming the Discarded Other on the Journey to Wholeness.

Death certainly played a part in Susan’s descent into the dark night and it was death that brought me to Susan’s door in the fall of 2016. At that time she was offering a workshop called The Art of Dying that I promptly participated in and I have been a devoted fan ever since. Dark nights and death seem to go hand in hand, whether they are literal deaths or metaphoric ones. Something has to die in order for something else to be born. Sitting in the gap between the two can be the absolute hardest thing to do.

In our Weaving the Web workshop we use Otto Scharmer’s brilliant Theory U as a guide. Following the U down the left side, we begin by sharing our stories. Otto calls this ‘downloading,’ and for many of us this sharing in itself can be profoundly healing. Once words have been put to our inner experience some level of spaciousness can emerge, and with that an opportunity for some tightly-held patterns to start loosening their grip.

As this loosening happens we discover there are big holes in our story. These holes or gaps can be experienced as a chasm or an abyss that must be traversed and it lies at the bottom of the U. Letting Go and Letting Come is what’s at play here. Life as we know it no longer makes sense. What worked previously doesn’t work now. But the future has not yet arrived…

As we begin the ascent up the right side of Otto’s U we are stepping into the field of the future. The whispers we can barely hear are invited to come and find us. Clear answers rarely emerge but with our intuition finely honed we can get glimpses of a vision or feel more able to form intentions to guide us moving forward. Small action steps are encouraged to help us test the waters. What is the future that wants to emerge?

As I sit in the gap myself, between my old life and the new that hasn’t yet fully arrived, I find myself regularly turning to my oracles for guidance. Yesterday’s rune “carries the warning not to be seduced by the momentum of old ways while waiting for the new to become illuminated in their proper time.” And today’s followed on with “When your inner being is shifting and reforming on a deep level, patience, constancy and perseverance are called for. So stay centered, see the humor, and keep your faith firm.”

We left our Weaving the Web weekend on Bowen Island reminded of how much we need each other. How together, we are so much more than the sum of our parts. As Susan wrote: The dark night and the dark feminine have much in common: healing through transformation, destruction before reconstruction, the unconscious becoming conscious, all in the name of producing a new wholeness. We hope you will be interested in beginning a conversation to explore these and other ideas that create some fire in our beautiful bellies. This is exactly what we did at Julia’s beautiful Lodge at the Old Dorm, and I am richer by far for the experience.

Where are you at in the U? Let me know, I’d love to hear!