Our own darkness… the painful, confusing, sometimes agonizing places in our history, life, mind and spirit… our nightmares, our relationships with violence, death, addiction and abuse… it is here, in the places we would most desire to avoid… that the seeds of profound transformation and growth are hidden.

In this way, the crisis or nightmare is an opportunity, a signal from the depths… the gesture of a stygian angel, calling us to recognize and surpass our habitual limitations and boundaries. Experiences of loss, darkness, isolation and void are the very signatures of the path beyond our insipidly impoverished expectations of material reality.

Perhaps most unexpectedly, death is the needle of the compass that the spiritual pioneer depends upon … to point the direction toward the retrieval and development of our most astonishing potentials for learning and relation.