01: The Cabin
Over a decade ago, I found myself on the couch in a therapist’s office for the first time, and to be honest; I had a lot of work to do! I was a busy body; driven, hardworking, and always on the move. Even if my body was still, my mind was never quiet. All of that changed, however, shortly after a book found its way to me: Abba’s Child by Brennen Manning. I could write post after post about the significance of his work, but for the sake of brevity, I’ll focus on one vignette Brennen shares that I found life changing.
Throughout the book, Brennen reflects on his experience where, for 20 days, he “lived in a remote cabin in the Colorado Rockies and made a retreat, combining therapy, silence, and solitude.”[1] During that time, he met only with his psychologist, and reported, “I realized I had not been able to feel anything since I was eight years old.”[2] I found Brennen’s experience Inspiring and as fate would have it, I had a friend who – out nowhere – offered to let me use his family’s off-the-grid cabin in Maine. Needless to say, with the help of my therapist, I planned an 8-day trip to the middle of nowhere in Maine to be alone with myself.
So, rewind to when I said I was “a busy body”- being alone with myself terrified me. If anything, the constant busyness of my early 20’s was an effort to keep my deeper feelings and grief at bay. All I took to the cabin was some food, my Bible, a pen, and a journal; no phone, no laptop, no way to communicate with another human. By day three, I thought I was going to lose my mind. There was nothing to entertain me, nothing to work on, nothing to distract me; to echo Brennen’s words, by the fourth day, I began to feel. And to quote Brennen once more:
“The story is often told of a man who made an appointment with the famous psychologist Carl Jung to get help for his chronic depression. Jung told him to reduce his fourteen-hour workday to eight, go directly home, and spend the evenings in his study, quiet and all alone. The depressed man went to his study each night, shut the door, read a little Hermann Hesse or Thomas Mann, played a few Chopin etudes or some Mozart. After weeks of this, he returned to Jung, complaining that he could see no improvement. On learning how the man had spent his time, Jung said, ‘But you didn’t understand. I didn’t want you to be with Hesse or Mann or Chopin or Mozart. I wanted you to be completely alone.’ The man looked terrified and exclaimed, ‘I can’t think of any worse company.’ Jung replied, ‘Yet this is the self you inflict on other people fourteen hours a day.’”[3]
I was alone in that cabin for six long days. All the feelings that had gone unfelt found me and by the end, I made peace with what I once perceived as a threat to my very self: my internal world.
This internal world, the place where our mind, body, and spirit meet, can present as terrifying; but it’s us – an important part of us. It’s all too easy in our modern and technological world to obscure the path that leads to the inward journey. Most of us are too busy and too distracted to even let our feelings catch up to us, and thus we live life not knowing who we really are. I left that cabin in Maine on the seventh day, for the first time in my life, a friend to myself. I’d learned to enjoy my own company and so can you, but you must tread the treacherous path inward, step into the wilderness of your own mind, and journey to your own inner wilds.
References:
[1] Manning, B. (1994). Abba’s Child: The cry of the heart for intimate belonging. Colorado Springs, CO: NavPress.
[2] Ibid
[3] Ibid