But as soon as we enter the psycho-spiritual spheres of others, we struggle constantly with every thought and feeling they emit and represent. Imagine rain on a lake and each drop cross-rippling with all the others. Emotionally, we wash into each other in just this way. As the apprentice learns, the fiber of our integrity is tested more in community than in solitude. How often do we sit before another and experience their emotional reflection cross-rippling into all that we fear? How hard it is to truly experience who or what is before us, the way we experience the sun in the desert.

We all experience this buildup of perception, which, as it grows, creates a dark pocket between our spirit and our skin. Unrelieved of this, we begin to live farther from ourselves. Unrelieved of this, we begin to live smaller than we really are. This dynamic is inescapable. We’re left with the need to somehow gather what we feel and know and then to somehow release its buildup. No one can escape the ever-pregnant need to soil ourselves with experience and to then cleanse the residue; again and again, soil and cleanse, experience and release—flint work of the soul.

What seems key to all this is a willingness to find new ways to bleed what Carl Jung calls our shadow, that is, the buildup of that dark cloud of repressed feeling we all carry.

As we struggle with all we carry, we discover that what is not ex-pressed is de-pressed. It seems the more we express, that is bring out what is in, the more alive we are. The more we give voice to our pain in living, the less buildup we have and so, our inner life fits our outer life more fully.

The more we depress, the more we push down and keep in, the smaller we become. The more we stuff between our heart and our daily experience, the more we have to work through to feel the directness of authentic living. Our unexpressed life can become a callous or bark we carry around and manicure but never remove. And so, unexpressed experience can insulate us from the essential tenderness and poignancy of life, as we mistakenly conclude that life is losing its meaning. To a man unaware of the cataracts filming his eyes, the world seems dimmer, not his seeing. How often do we find the world less stimulating, unaware that our heart is diminished because of its encasement in all that remains unexpressed?