Inside the Belly of the Whale

We continue from yesterday's post on the hero's journey …

In 2009, at the American Psychiatric Association annual meeting, I heard behavior expert Robert Cloninger frame recovery in a thermodynamic context, with energy shifts between two stable states: A (where you don't want to be but where you feel most comfortable and where psychiatry tends to keep us) and B (where you need to be). The catch is getting from A to B involves a painful struggle, through a valley of tears. Speaking of which ...

The name, Israel, means “struggles with God.” You may recall that Jacob wrestled to a standoff a mysterious entity in the dark, who turned out to be none other than the Main Man, Himself. In recognition of his opponent's efforts, God bestowed on Jacob the new name, Israel. Lesson: You’re not going to win against God, but you’re perfectly within your rights to put up a fight. And the lessons you learn from that struggle will imbue you with the qualities you need to take stock in yourself and lead your people.

A parallel tale exists in Norse myth. Here, in the Land of the Frost Giants, Thor thought he was wrestling with an old hag. After he got bested, the King of the Giants revealed the opponent’s true identity as Old Age. Old Age always wins, but there is absolutely no shame in taking up the challenge and losing. Thor and his two companion gods did a lot of losing that day, but it turns out that in their failures they learned an awful lot about their strengths.

My good friend Therese Borchard wrote a terrific blog post on failure. Literally every successful person, she wrote, has a string of failures to their name. Back in Kansas City, for instance, Walt Disney was fired from his local newspaper gig. Later, the first company he founded went belly up and he had to file for bankruptcy. Decades later, Steve Jobs faced the supreme humiliation of being booted out of the company he founded. Both Disney and Jobs asserted that without these personal disasters, they never would have achieved their later success. In 2005, Jobs told a Stanford graduating class that the most productive and instructive time in his life came after Apple fired him. The path to success, says Therese, is not linear. There will always be setbacks, indeed crushing ones. But success, it appears, is forged in failure.

You may have first heard of Disney’s and Jobs’ experiences from a motivational speaker or writer. If you draw inspiration from these sources, by all means keep doing so. But also consider viewing these stories as personifications of the hero’s journey. Motivating yourself to action is fine, but motivation is a nonstarter if you’re working with a brain where your operating system refuses to boot up. You may find yourself stuck in failure mode for a lot longer than you want to be. You’ve signed a long-term lease in a very bleak spot, and you may as well give it a name. Joseph Campbell did - the belly of the whale. You have been swallowed whole. You cease to exist. But this is precisely where you need to be, as extinction sets the scene for rebirth.

Back in 1999, when I was finding my way out of a suicidal depression, I drew great comfort in an internet post I came across by an unsung individual, Traute Klein. Ms Klein compared her emergence from the darkness of depression to an arisen Jesus emerging from the tomb. The Roman Catholic faith places tremendous emphasis on his suffering in the hands of his captors. Its churches and cathedrals, either outdoors or in, feature “Stations of the Cross,” where people off the street can pause at fourteen different waypoints to ponder and reflect. On Good Friday, the day of his crucifixion, the altar is draped in black, with the celebrants in black vestments. So powerful is the narrative that when the clock strikes three, the hour of his death, one almost expects to encounter a total eclipse of the sun.

Significantly, the Gospels are silent concerning the time Jesus lay in the tomb after it was sealed, but his entire mission to this point lends a sense of inevitability to what is about to occur. Earlier, Jesus had foretold he would enter the belly of the whale (or fish), just like Jonah, only with a far more spectacular result. The whale released Jonah when the time was right. Did the tomb, in a similar fashion, release Jesus?

We will never know, of course, but let’s run with the proposition that his release was conditional upon his finding a level of comfort in his current surroundings. There was no sense in him fighting his situation, in putting up a struggle. Joseph Campbell in his classic Hero of a Thousand Faces compares the belly of the whale to the womb, a place of nurture. Seen is this regard, there are no expectations, nothing more to prove We are free at long last to lay down our present burdens. In the process, we shed a layer or two of our old identity – various attitudes and beliefs that are no longer working for us – and free up our energies to take on whatever the next phase of our journey may bring. When time is right, we feel a sense of rebirth. The rock rolls away. The tomb opens up, letting in light.

But this is never the end of the story. On our own journeys, there are no true endings, only new beginnings. This new beginning of yours presents its own set of challenges, but what you have going for you now is that you are in a story that you belong in, with yourself as the hero.

Take heart, you are on the right path.

John McManamy is the author of Living Well with Depression and Bipolar Disorder and is the publisher of the Bipolar Expert Series, available on Amazon.

Follow John on Twitter at @johnmcman and on Facebook.