Coming Home: One’s Journey of Separation, Transformation and Growth

We are born into the world as pure, innocent, and vulnerable divine little humans. Anyone who is spiritually aware, who has been in the presence of a newborn, can attest to being a breath away from the divine, a feeling quite pure and magical. However, very early and upon entering the world of adults, we learn that our divinity needs protection, for the world of adults can seem quite confusing. The invisible shield we unconsciously create is known as personality, and we can have multiple ones that mature and develop as we do (Firman & Gila, 2002).

Our personality is likely to develop to fit, in one way or the other, the demands and the laws of our immediate environment, our family, which is simultaneously impacted by its own family—the culture that itself is a product of a yet larger family of social, political, economic, and other influences and relationships (Bronfenbrenner, 1992; Miller, 1976). However, the emphasis, as has been theorized (Bowlby, 1979) and empirically evidenced through numerous observations and meta-analyses (Le Bas et al., 2019), has been placed on the primary caregiver and the bond between the primary caregiver and a child, being the most important and long-lasting influence in the child’s further development.

Even before we are born, the very first environment, our mother’s womb, plays a significant role in our further development (Gyllenhaal, 2015). If the womb felt nurturing, and we felt connected to our mother with all our needs being met, perhaps, those babies are likely to have difficult birth experiences because they do not want to leave this safe haven. They may as well decide to stay a little longer, sometimes resulting in a C-section delivery. It is common knowledge that although change is inevitable, we are prone to resisting it as humans. Therefore, the more we resist this separation, the more painful it will be for both the mother and the baby resulting in birth trauma.

The first to give importance to birth trauma was Otto Rank (1929), who suggested that the basis of all human anxiety stems from this very first traumatic experience that a human spends his lifetime overcoming. Rank was also the first to point to the importance of emotions, relationships, and the irrational nature of humans while himself trying to break free from:

the intellectual ideology that worships knowledge in order to control and predict human behavior. To suggest that order and prediction are possible, Rank pointed out, would deny an individual’s will and emotional instability and ignore the large part that chance plays in the area of psychical life. (Hecht, 1994, p. 8)

It takes 50 years for an oak tree to produce its first good crop of acorns and 100 years to grow into a majestic adult; about the same time, it took people to recognize the importance of his work. Rank’s birth trauma opened the door to much of today’s research, and we now know that the trauma may even occur during our stay at the “Womb Hotel". Suppose the quality of the hotel and its neighborhood (i.e., mother’s environment and her stress levels) and the treatment we received during our stay (the quality of nutrients) were inadequate. In that case, we will likely check out earlier than planned (i.e., be born prematurely or abruptly). If we decide to stay until the end of our reserved period, we may feel no apparent distress of separation upon leaving. We may feel nothing; because the primal wound and a feeling of non-being (Firman & Gila, 1997) have already occurred. “She was always very quiet and shy. She didn’t even cry during birth”, we hear some mothers speak proudly of their, in fact, wounded children. According to psychosynthesis practitioners, the primal wound refers to:

A break in the intricate web of relationships in which we live, move, and have our being. A fundamental trust and connection to the universe is betrayed, and we become strangers to ourselves and others, struggling for survival in a seemingly alien world. In psychological terms, our connection to our deeper Self is wounded. In religious and philosophical terms, it is our connection to Ultimate Reality, the Ground of Being, or the Divine that is broken. No matter how we elect to describe it, the fact remains that this wounding cuts us off from the deeper roots of our existence. (Firman & Gila, 1997, p. 2)

Undoubtedly, the origin of our existence continues to attract much debate, which is beyond the scope of this article. However, something must be said about the more recent inclusion and widespread interest in studying the ancient traditions, the non-ordinary states of consciousness, and all the mystical experiences previously deemed unfit for the “normal” model of mainstream psychology. With these new interests, we are being reminded that psychology, in essence, is the study of the soul. Thanks to the Exceptional Human Experiences (EHE), a term coined by Rhea White (1994) to describe unusual, albeit frequent, human experiences (Palmer & Braud, 2002), and the work of Grof (2008), we can see the limitations we, as a larger society, have imposed on our basic sense of self as well as the shortcomings of the logical, orderly, hierarchical striving worldview we grew up in. Studying different states of consciousness is of utmost importance, not only because of their healing potential for the individual but because they can open the door to the spiritual world and lead us back to our soul, our deeper Self. In such a state, as some have reported, feelings of oneness arise, and all that previously was considered separate comes into union with everything else—a feeling quite ineffable.

Could this be pointing toward the original separation, even before we arrived in our mother’s wombs— separation from our cosmic mother? And if so, we can perhaps begin to understand much more deeply the ways in which so many people spend their lives seeking this union, albeit unaware and in all the wrong places.

The Original Longing

Are you searching for your soul? Then come out of your prison. Leave the stream and join the river that flows into the ocean. Absorbed in this world you’ve made it your burden. Rise above this world. There is another vision…

—Rumi

Almost every spiritual tradition follows a similar account of longing and seeking for this union. Nevertheless, for many individuals who grew up influenced by the paradigm of a one-sided, “human project” (Tarnas, 2006, p.28), in which humankind, human consciousness, and rational thought were deemed superior, separate from more significant influences of the nature, physical body, meaning-seeking and stripped from all that is spiritual; the disconnect that the new world order created pushed this distant memory of the original longing further into the unconscious, contributing to individual and collective shadow material (Jung, 1936). Now, what is interesting about the nature of the shadow material, is that it continues to operate out of our awareness, satisfying its need and purpose in whatever way available, but most certainly, compulsively.

Now that most people do not have a religious focus, the religious focus will go on to something material. They may think it’s food they want, for example, because they experience themselves as starving. Well, the soul is starving; it’s true, because it’s not being recognized, and it’s being continually starved. They then try to feed it with food, which usually symbolizes the loving mother who can accept them as they are…Spirit, the longing for the light; whereas food grounds you, puts you back in the body, alcohol will take you out into the light. I think the positive side of addiction is that many addicts are profoundly religious people. They have immense energy, and they are not satisfied with the world as it is. They think it is a dreadfully cruel, ruthless place, and they want meaning in their lives. (Woodman, as quoted in Parabola, 2019, April 13)

Addiction, in any form, is then a symptom of a starved soul. And a hungry soul became a modern-day disease.

Another Separation

The time when we finally awaken to the source of our original longing, and our true nature, is when another separation begins to take place. This time, we are breaking free from all that has been familiar, our defenses, and “old-fashioned services of the body/mind” (Science and Nonduality, 2020), recognizing that we are not our Survival Personality (Firman & Gila, 2002). No matter how difficult and long this period may seem to be and how much we want to resist it, when we lean into the experience, moment-to-moment, with absolute kindness and compassion toward ourselves and toward whatever surfaces, we are at last touching on, liberating and entering a relationship with our deepest Self through whose embodiment we feel finally at home. A word of caution here; just like we do not spend the rest of our lives inside the newly purchased house, but instead, we come home every day (i.e., from work), the same is valid for our innermost home. Once we find it, we cannot stay inside forever out of fear of losing it or not remembering the path to it; we must leave and make our way out in the world regularly until walking back home becomes second nature. Moreover, if something happens and we lose the key, we will remember that there are many ways, and many doors, floors, and windows, through which we can enter our home.

Conclusion

It is not helpful to tell people to transcend their ego until they have developed one. It is not useful to tell people to transcend desire until they have allowed themselves to fully go for what they want. —Carol S. Pearson

While I have intentionally avoided using the word ego in this paper, the message is the same—transcending that which has not yet been fully developed or experienced is not good advice. It is through our personal histories and humanness that we reach transpersonal, and once “there,” we no longer, nor do we try, distinguish between the two. The split between personal/transpersonal, ego/soul, mind/body, and culture/nature begins to heal. And as we heal, we show others how to do the same. As our communities heal, so do our societies and our planet. If we continue in this direction, we might survive global warming after all.

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