life radiate from darkness as well. Some kinds of energy that we need for growth and for a complete life come only from the experience of darkness. This Black Sun is a hidden resource, a font of energy that is available if we recognize it for what it is and know how to turn toward it and accept it. Being dark, its energy is hidden. We cannot explain it in the same way we can explain things in the light of the more familiar sun. The wisdom and energy it brings are less obvious, less rational.
Myths illuminate subtle aspects of the human condition and human development. The Black Sun tells us that there is value in slowing down and being patient when things seem dark and unclear. Do not run from such experiences, it says. Turn toward the difficult time. By just focusing on it and sticking with it we will discover power that radiates from it as surely as warming light radiates from the daytime sun.
The Black Sun is an apt metaphor for the deep concentration and inward focus that precedes the actual act of writing the poem, founding the company, forming the sculpture, or jumping into a radically different role at work. In all of these cases, we do not operate “in the light” or “from the light”; instead, we are going where we have not been before and are trusting an intuition that seems to rise from the depths of our selves. The successful artist and the successful businessperson alike learn how to stay with this process of being stuck in the darkness; in fact, they stick with it until a new momentum emerges from the very experience of being stuck, of being in the dark.
The problem, of course, is that we are afraid of the dark. We want to move in the sunshine, walk along familiar streets, and have experiences that are sure to give us pleasure. We want to feel that most of life can be planned and that we have a reasonable chance of avoiding pain. The idea of staying with things just as they are, without a plan, of suspending our model of how things work, puts us at a frontier of unknowing, which is to say at a place that is “dark” to our previous conception of things, to our plan for ourselves and our notion of how everything works. We avoid this dim frontier, and so we stay stuck.
Being in the dark, at an impasse, is not clinical depression. (It is important to know the difference, though; appendix B describes how to differentiate the two.) Sometimes we can’t help seeing impasse as failure, rather than as a necessary crisis in the service of larger creative movement. There is a danger of internalizing the experience of impasse as evidence of personal deficiency, as a statement about our self-worth. This can be painful. We may need the help of a friend, coach, or counselor to reflect the reality of the situation back to us and remind us that this is tough time and not a statement about who we are in the core of our being.
Impasse
When Marcy started to see me regularly after her graduation, she was not depressed in the clinical sense of the term. Her world, however, did seem flat rather than round and full. She sensed something was missing, and this feeling was all the more pronounced because she had always experienced life rushing forward, and had always known great confidence and youthful vitality.
Marcy had accepted a job in sales, an unusual choice for Sloan graduates, who more often choose positions in professional services firms or corporations that call on the strategic skills taught in the MBA curriculum. Marcy was ambivalent about her choice. She was working for a relatively small company that provided professional employees, mostly information technology specialists, on a temporary basis. She was going on the road regionally to analyze the computer programming and computer support employment needs of potential clients. She was the only woman on the sales force, but this in itself was neither new nor daunting. In fact, Marcy enjoyed the “one of the guys” camaraderie; it reminded her of times with her undergraduate buddies at their fraternity and of hanging out with her brothers before that. No, the problem was that she just wasn’t very excited generally and could not see how this work would take her toward the management roles she had envisioned when she applied to MIT.
The most creative people I know have learned, over time, to feel more at home during these times of impasse. Not that they like the experience of feeling slowed down or stuck; like all of us they enjoy the thrill of being in motion on a new project or venture. But they no longer expend energy in avoiding the experience of impasse and, most important, they no longer fear this experience. They have cultivated a capability to experience darker and heavier times as part of a larger cycle of creativity and change. They no longer identify with impasse; they are able to say, “This condition, this feeling state is “something I am going through,” rather than “something I am.”
But most of us, like Marcy, have not learned how to turn toward the Black Sun and realize the energy that is latent in times of crisis and impasse. We leave that to the poet, painter, or songwriter. (See Deep Dive: The Feeling of Impasse.)
My sessions with Marcy, alternating between career questions and uncertainties she had about her relationship with Henry, began to turn her toward the uncertainties of her Black Sun period of change. Between talk of career and relationship, as she let herself drop down into the experience of impasse, Marcy shared something else: her father was dying of cancer. I was more interested in this than she. She would grow quiet when we turned to this topic. It was not as if she were actively avoiding talking about her father, it was just that she did not have words for it. She was not in denial; she was just stuck. Her father, a computer scientist himself, was clearly an important person for her. She had a good relationship with him, but the emotionally conservative culture of her childhood had not provided her with much of a vocabulary to reexperience it for herself or convey her experience. I sensed that Marcy’s relationship with her father was an important part of her impasse.
DEEP DIVE
The Feeling of Impasse
This first Deep Dive presents us with a paradox. Deep Dive sections are the “to do” part of the book. When you first find yourself in impasse, however, there is no “to-do.” Not yet. In fact, the impasse process does not begin until you stop “doing” the things that we all do to keep the feelings of impasse at bay. We all try to get away from the feelings of being stuck and sinking. Nevertheless, just allowing yourself to accept them is the first step. Not-doing is the first “to-do.”
But you might pay attention to those thoughts, images, memories, and feelings that crop up as you read this chapter. You have been at impasse before. You know this experience of coming to a stop, this feeling of emotional flatness, and this sense of no direction. Allow these thoughts, images, memories, and feelings to arise, develop, and then go wherever they may go. Attend to this emotional climate of impasse in a personal way now, and then continue to read on. You can return to this step in the process at any time.
Images of “Stuck”
When we find ourselves at impasse, we all begin to tell a story that explains our sense of being stuck or lost. It is as if, at some level, we know that our explanation of things is not working, so we review it and try one more time to make it work. If we seek out friends or counselors, we create the latest version of that explanation, of that “story” in front of them.
But we also come bearing information about ourselves that is pre-cognition, pre-language, and pre-story. And it is that information we need next. This information comes from close to the core of our beings and presents itself first as a sense that something is amiss and we must figure out what it is. It is something that is not buried deeply but is seemingly poised right at the edge of our awareness. It is a feeling in the gut not so different from trying to remember the name of someone you recently met. The name is there but you just can’t grasp it. This information is what philosopher and psychologist Eugene Gendlin calls the implicit.3
What we know implicitly about a current situation, and about what we need to do next to live more fully, comes to us first through our body, through a vague, intuitive “hunch,” through tentative or unformed thoughts, or through our feelings. This implicit apprehension is not yet at a level of awareness where we can fully recognize it and use it. In order to take hold of the implicit we must develop it into the next level of awareness; it must become image.
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