What Happens When There Is Nowhere Left to Hide? with Scott Berman from Skycave Retreats

Defenses, strategies, ways of managing my experience, different ways that I saw how I took spirituality as a way of shifting and changing and managing my experience as opposed to moving closer to my natural, authentic, kind of spontaneously emerging experience.

I love that.

That makes sense.

Yeah.

We're quite clever in ways that we can duck and weave sitting with ourselves and the big emotions that come up, right?

Totally.

On that note that you shared, like, Something that tends to surprise people, and it certainly surprised myself, and it's been a learning curve as we've seen it over and over again, is typically spiritually oriented people who have a lot of history in spirituality, who have a lot of their sense of worth and meaning in spirituality, they tend to more often than not have a harder time in the dark than people who don't have that much weight of spirituality in their lives.

in their personality, in how they hold themselves.

And

a lot of

people tend to be like, whoa, like, why would that be? And what's happening there? And it's not to say it's not all the time, but it tends to be that.

And I fit into that category as well.

And so it tends to be that there's a lot more filters of how we're supposed to be.

We all have our cultural filters of how we're supposed to be, what we've grown up with, what culture teaches us.

Like for a man, maybe showing sadness and fear is typically not really a welcomed thing in our culture.

And showing fear as a man certainly tends not to be good for survival because one's like vulnerable and exposed.

And so, you know, as a woman, there's anger and then there's whatever else we grew up with in our family, in our peer group, in our culture.

And then bring in spirituality, which brings in a whole other lens of maybe how we romanticize spirituality, how we idealize spirituality.

Most people didn't get into spirituality to feel their discomfort more.

They got into it to transcend, to awaken, to move beyond discomfort, to move beyond fear, to move beyond sadness, to move into bliss and ecstasy.

And when that is how spirituality is organized, if it is, in somebody... then there's almost a turning away from what may spontaneously or naturally be here in the backdrop that doesn't align with our ideas of how we should be or how we want to be within a spiritual context.

And so there's that.

And people with lots of spiritual techniques have developed very nuanced and sophisticated strategies managing their experience we can breathe through we can like do a certain kind of practice we can control our experience and our awareness and our focus by adding overlaying and not that there's anything wrong with any of that it's just an interesting thing to kind of explore that there are more sophisticated nuanced techniques for holding ourselves together and moving through discomfort as opposed to and not that this is better but just as an alternative Of not doing that and having oneself be totally vulnerable and exposed in the discomfort and allowing our system to digest it without us, through our ideas of how we should be, trying to fix and change it.

For sure.

And that makes absolute sense to me.