Into The Cave | Vital Roots 001

The idea of retreating to a cave sounds pretty lovely to me. You know, a mossy, dank-smelling, moist kind of cave where the air is cool and the light at the entrance hardly seems to exist. Just the other day I remembered the concept of a total darkness retreat and it is really drawing me in.

I once read about a tradition where women would enter a cave alone to give birth in total darkness, and only once the baby was born would the two emerge back into the light. I have heard birth itself be described as a cave before; a cave in terms of the shift in consciousness, awareness, and physiology that a woman goes through.

Of course birth is an initiation and yet, imagine the symbolic significance of birth if you knew that the birthing way of your people was to go into a dark cave by yourself for the entirety of labor?

As a woman, you are incredibly strong and full of ability. Often the mind has been trained to think the opposite, and your life can quickly begin to resemble whatever the belief of the mind is. However, you are so much more and I wonder what you would discover if tomorrow you brought yourself to the edge of one of these dank-smelling, dark caves, and just went in for a few days – totally alone?

Being a woman involves confronting a lot of fears, for we are gifted with certain qualities that seem to be part of our destiny. There isn’t a choice in some of our inherent initiations. One day you started to bleed, and one day you learn you can grow an entirely new human being from all that you have become… the choice is present in how you handle the responsibility of that truth.

Going into the dark cave seems like a fierce way to confront some primal fears and stumble gracefully into the truth of who you are – strong, able, and always finding your way back towards the light.