Encountering the Nexus

When confronted with the seemingly unconfrontable, we can find ourselves lead down empty streets and lonely roads along which all certainty dismantles and the threads of our life unravel. ​More often than not we enter into a perplexing nexus of contradictiory views and perspectives, undigestable experiences and recurring destructive life events.

Different names have been given to this experience: spiritual emergency, shamanic initiation crises, the dark night of the soul, or simply a hopeless life situation. I call it the nexus. I do so because I have come to realize that it isn't just a desperate place. It is also a space of incredible potential. Finding a path out of the nexus is not an easy task. Only those who are successful in fundamentally recasting their ideas about the world and themselves will escape it.

The nexus can be a curse or a blessing: everything turns on whether you find a path out of it or stay trapped here.

16 years I spent in the nexus studying it, mapping it, before I found my path out of it. If there's something I learned about the nexus it is this: Don’t make camp here. Don’t delude yourself, you cannot find your path alone. None can.

Better you enlist someone who is familiar with the place.