The Birth of a Descent
Last year, I watched a film called The Deepest Breath that had a life-altering impact on me. It follows free divers who descend into the dark depths of the sea on a single breath, sometimes reaching 100 meters below the surface.
One moment stayed with me. Alessia Zecchini describes reaching a depth of around 30 meters, where a gravitational pull begins to draw her farther down. She said it was her favorite part. It felt like flying.
Whenever I share this with someone, they tend to gasp at the thought of it. The idea of surrendering to a force that carries you deeper into the unknown can feel terrifying.
But I found myself wondering: What if there is something to be discovered in the descent itself? What if going deeper into our own experience could offer something other than the danger we imagine?
For more than a decade, I had felt a calling to develop a body of work around this very territory. Watching the film helped me recognize the shape of what I wanted to create.
Learning to descend
Many of us have learned to fear what lives beneath the surface of our experience. We may be comfortable discussing our lives, analyzing our choices, and understanding our patterns intellectually, yet feel less prepared to encounter the emotions that accompany them.
Grief, anger, shame, longing, fear, these can be difficult places to enter, especially when we have spent years learning how to keep them contained. We may become adept at functioning, achieving, caring for others, and moving forward without ever feeling fully at home in ourselves.
I know this territory personally.
My work with the body has taught me, gradually, how to inhabit my own experience with greater honesty. The body can become a place we return to rather than something we manage from a distance. It can offer us a different kind of knowing, one that emerges through sensation, emotion, and the willingness to stay present with what we find.
This has been a long process for me, and it continues to unfold.
I have come to understand that the journey inward is not about forcing ourselves to confront everything at once. It is about developing the capacity to meet what arises with vulnerability, honesty, patience, and compassion. Sometimes we move deeper. Sometimes we need to pause, find our footing, and return another day.
There is no prize for descending the fastest. We don’t want to get the bends!
What matters is learning how to remain in relationship with ourselves as we go.
The imagery of the deep
Around the time I watched the film, I was studying with Todd Jackson, a bodyworker, teacher, and yogi in Portland, Oregon. His approach to biodynamic massage and craniosacral work emphasized meeting the body as it is, without imposing a preconceived idea of what should happen.
I was drawn to the quality of listening this required: a willingness to set aside the urge to direct, interpret, or fix, and instead become attentive to what was already unfolding.
As I trained in these modalities, images began to arise in my awareness as I worked. I saw caverns and coral reefs, landscapes that seemed to belong to an inner ocean. The imagery felt mysterious and strangely familiar, as though I were discovering a geography I had always sensed but had not yet learned to recognize.
And then the pearl emerged.
The pearl became a powerful symbol for me. I wear pearls every day, sometimes even to sleep. They remind me of something I have come to value deeply: what can be discovered through a willingness to enter the depths of experience.
A pearl is formed over time. Its beauty is not separate from the process that brings it into being. It carries the suggestion that something meaningful can take shape around an irritation, an intrusion, or a circumstance that was never chosen.
I don't think this means every hardship produces a gift, or that pain needs to be justified by what we might eventually learn from it. Some experiences are simply painful. But I do believe that what we encounter within ourselves can become part of a richer understanding of who we are, if we have the time and support to meet it honestly.
For me, the pearl has come to symbolize that possibility: a kind of beauty that cannot be hurried into existence.
The leap into the unknown
Recently, I was reflecting on this with a friend I have known for more than twenty years. She reminded me that I have always been a risk-taker, someone willing to leap into the unknown, get messy, and endure a few bruises in the search for truth.
Her words made me reflect on how often I have found myself drawn toward the edge of what I know. I am interested in what happens when familiar explanations no longer suffice, when an old identity begins to loosen, or when something new asks to take shape before I can fully understand it.
There are rewards in this kind of exploration, but there are challenges, too. It can be disorienting to move beyond what is familiar. We may have to relinquish an identity that once served us well, tolerate the uncertainty of not knowing what comes next, or recognize that the life we have built no longer accommodates the person we are becoming.
As I write this, I find myself in the midst of such a leap. It feels as though I have been preparing for it for years, though I could not have known exactly what it would ask of me.
This leap is particularly personal because it requires me to trust my own perception and take responsibility for what I feel called to create. I cannot wait for certainty to arrive before I begin. I have to move while some of the questions are still unanswered.
It is the very territory I hope to help others navigate.
There is something humbling about realizing that we cannot guide someone through a landscape we are unwilling to enter ourselves. We do not need to have completed every part of our own journey, but we do need to remain willing to meet our lives honestly.
Sometimes the work asks us to go first.
The places that call us home
The ocean has always held a particular place in my life. I lived along the northern Oregon coast throughout my twenties, and it remains a place I return to, to visit my father, reconnect with a community that feels like family, and find myself in the presence of something much larger than my daily concerns.
I was once asked which place on Earth I loved more than any other. My answer was Arcadia Beach.
There is a cliffside there that I call my conception point. When I am there, I feel a deep sense of belonging, as though I have returned to the womb of the Mother, to the Earth itself. The place carries a meaning for me that is difficult to translate into ordinary language. It reminds me that I belong to something beyond the individual life I am trying to shape.
As I grow older, I find myself recognizing connections that were invisible to me when I was younger. Places, experiences, relationships, and seemingly unrelated moments begin to form a pattern. I could not have understood the significance of each piece while I was living it. Only later does the larger image begin to emerge.
I have learned to appreciate this quality of hindsight. It reminds me that we do not always need to understand the meaning of an experience while we are inside it.
Sometimes we can only live it, pay attention, and allow understanding to arrive in its own time.
What wants to be born through you?
The more deeply we commit to what feels true at our center, the more freedom becomes available to us.
I don't mean the pursuit of a fixed, perfected identity, or the discovery of some singular destiny that we must follow. I mean the gradual recognition of what matters to us beneath the expectations we have inherited, the roles we have learned to perform, and the versions of ourselves we have maintained to feel safe or accepted.
There are things we may long to create that other people cannot understand. There are choices that may appear impractical or frightening from the outside but feel quietly necessary from within.
Other people may question what we want. Sometimes their concerns deserve consideration. Sometimes they are responding to their own fears, limitations, or experiences. Learning to discern the difference is part of becoming more fully responsible for our lives.
No one can offer us a guarantee about what will happen if we follow a particular longing. We cannot know in advance how the journey will change us, what we will have to relinquish, or whether the destination will resemble the one we originally imagined.
We can, however, become more attentive to the quality of the longing itself. Does it persist? Does it reflect something we deeply value? Does it ask us to grow beyond an old limitation, or is it an attempt to escape something we have not yet been willing to face?
These questions do not always produce immediate answers. But they help us approach the unknown with more discernment than either blind faith or reflexive fear can offer.
Perhaps bringing something new into the world resembles birth in this way. There may be anticipation and excitement, but also vulnerability, uncertainty, and a profound surrender of control. We cannot force the process to unfold exactly as we wish. We can only participate in it as honestly as possible.
Learning to move with the waves
We can spend a great deal of our lives trying to remain on the surface, where the terrain is familiar and we have a better sense of what to expect. We may organize our choices around avoiding discomfort, preserving an identity, or maintaining the appearance that we have everything under control.
There is nothing inherently wrong with stability. We need safety, rest, routine, and periods of ease. But when our definition of safety becomes too narrow, it can begin to restrict the range of experiences we allow ourselves to have.
We may avoid a necessary conversation because it could change a relationship. We may remain in a familiar role because we do not know who we would be without it. We may keep ourselves busy enough that we never have to sit quietly with what we feel.
Over time, the effort required to avoid uncertainty can become its own kind of confinement.
To descend is not to seek suffering or abandon our judgment. It is to become willing to encounter more of our experience, including the parts that complicate the stories we tell about ourselves. It is to learn when to lean in, when to pause, and when to seek the steadiness of another person who can help us find our bearings.
We do not have to be fearless to explore our inner lives. We need enough safety to become curious, enough patience to let understanding develop, and enough support to remain present when the familiar ways of navigating no longer work.
The ocean is never entirely still. We cannot control every wave, but we can learn to relate to the movement differently. We can become less frightened by the fact that the water changes, and more capable of finding our balance within it.
Perhaps that is one of the gifts of going deeper: not that life becomes predictable, but that our capacity to meet it expands.
This is the territory at the heart of my work. I am interested in what becomes possible when we approach our inner worlds with care and curiosity, when we begin to recognize the patterns shaping our lives, and when we have a consistent place to explore what we might otherwise face alone.
The descent is not a single dramatic moment. It is an ongoing relationship with the truth of our experience, unfolding over time.
And sometimes, what we discover below the surface is not something we need to become.
It is something we are finally ready to meet.