"Ordinary cycles of opening and closing are necessary medicine for our heart's integration. In some cases, though, there are not just cycles, there is a crash.
As far as we ascend, so far can we fall. This too needs to be included in our maps of spiritual life, honored as one more part of the great cycle.
A Zen koan, asked of students who have experienced a first awakening: "A clearly enlightened person falls in the well. How is this so?"
One Zen master reminds his students, "After any powerful spiritual experience, there is an inevitable descent, a struggle to embody what we have seen."
The well we fall into can be created by clinging to our experience and spiritual ideals or by holding inflated ideas about our teachers, our path, or our self.
The well can be the unfinished business of our psychological and emotional life--an unwillingness to acknowledge our own shadow, to include the human needs, the pain, and the darkness that we carry, to see that we always have one foot in the dark. As bright as it is, the universe also needs us to open to its other side."
-Jack K.
