Why Rock Bottom Is One Of The Best Places You Can Be
Becoming the alchemist and creating magic
Over time, I’ve learned it’s often true that hitting rock bottom is one of the best things that can happen to you. Hitting rock bottom, of course, means you really have nowhere else to go but up. However, that’s not all it’s about to me.
Photo by Yeshi Kangrang on Unsplash
It’s not just about going up
It’s about what happens when you are at rock bottom that counts. What happens when you are faced with nothing but all of yourself – completely cracked open and raw.
That is the place where you can figure out what your foundation is made of. If your foundation is unstable to begin with, rock bottom will feel extra uncomfortable. Not only that, but you won’t be able to build anything from it. If that is the case, rock bottom helps you re-evaluate your foundation, and then rebuild it accordingly.
This is also the place where you get to find out what you are made of, in the most general and the deepest sense. Some people choose to just bare it and survive this “place” until the tides change and they get to move up again. Others, though, decide to use it, and like an alchemist, create beauty from it.
When we are faced with our deepest wounds, it’s easy to ignore them, numb them out with substances or distractions, or just straight up deny that they are even there. However, over time, each one of them will begin to seep out of us. This has been one of the harder lessons on my journey with my skin and eczema. The true strength doesn’t lie in just surviving those wounds. It also lies in creating something out of the pain and darkness that resides within them.
So how do we do this?
Well, what happens when we are in a dark room in a physical sense? What do we do? Well, we could just go to sleep if it’s the right time or place, or we don’t feel like trying at all.
Or, if it’s not the time or place for that, and we want to put some effort in – we grab a flashlight, a match, a lighter, a candle – anything that will bring some light into the room.
Now, one match or candle is so powerful that it is enough to illuminate almost an entire room, at least well enough to be able to see our way around it.
Think of that match or candle as your conscious awareness. So the first step to healing a wound, is simply noticing it. As the saying goes: “knowing is half the battle”. We can’t do anything unless we are aware of it, and awareness itself is a big part of healing.
When we become aware of something and shine a light on it, it no longer has power over us. The darkness releases its tight grip on us. Awareness itself, is also completely neutral. It does not judge. Judgement creates resistance, and causes us to store these wounds in our bodies.
Most of the power our emotions have on us is that we judge ourselves for it, and thus resist it and create more suffering, instead of simply accepting it. Which brings me to the next step.
Acceptance
Accepting the situation, emotion, event, whatever it is – just as it is. Without judgment, without resistance, without commentary. Simply seeing the current reality of the situation just as it is, in this moment. Not labeling it as “good” or “bad”, which our minds are so quick to do.
By accepting our emotions, or even what we perceive to be our “faults” or “negative” traits, without judgement and without labeling, we begin to transmute and transcend them. I can’t stress how much of a key this step in itself is.
This is something I still struggle with daily, as my mind is so quick to jump in and label and over analyze every little thing, but I am human after all.
Letting go of resistance
This acceptance must be done from a place of love. Without the NEED to change it, which again, would create resistance. Resistance can be our biggest enemy times. As the famous psychologist Carl Jung said: “what we resist, persists.” When we have resistance to an emotion, a wound, a trauma, a thought, whatever it may be, it will only tighten its grip on us even more. Plus, it is futile. We get nowhere by resisting, but we create waves by simply allowing and letting go.
These are all just a few of the things we can learn while we are at rock bottom, and these are incredible tools to have in our arsenal when dealing with any chronic condition, but also life in general. Combining the ones mentioned above can truly start to transform any wound, be it physical, mental, emotional, or spiritual.
The big question
Then, in order to truly alchemize it and create something out of it, we can ask ourselves one simple question. That question is: What can I learn from this? Depending on the event, circumstance, or depth of the wound, that list can be nearly endless. But only by learning something from past traumas or even what we sometimes like to call “failures” (there is no such thing, by the way), can we start to create something new from them. After all, energy cannot be created nor destroyed – only changed and transformed.
Everything we experience on this planet is meant to be a lesson, and rock bottom is usually the biggest possible one there could be. Which also means that the breakthrough, the learning, and the wisdom, is likely one of the biggest we’ll experience in this life. The farther we fall down, the farther we can be catapulted up.
Alchemy
The beauty of rock bottom, too, is it will look different for everyone. As will the healing process. We are all here to learn all sorts of different lessons, and when we do so, we empower others to do the same. When we heal our deepest wounds and traumas, we create more space for the more joyous things in life- for healing, happiness, love, acceptance, connection. And thus, we bring more light into our lives, and the lives of those around us.
None of this is easy work and requires commitment, but once we commit to our healing, and I mean TRULY commit, we start to see massive shifts and changes happen from within. And the changes within immediately projects outwards, affecting our entire reality and how we experience it.
Once we start to transform from within, we turn into the alchemist, or the magician. We gain control of our life, and are able to create a future full of everything we have always dreamed of.
If that isn’t magic, I don’t know what is.
