I recently watched a beautiful docudrama about two English men who faced a perilous journey as they climbed Siula Grande in the Peruvian Andes. I am not a climber myself, but there was something about the thought I climbing to a height no other human had and overcoming life-threatening challenges that drew me in. As the story goes in the film, the two men climbed for several days to the top of the mountain in the hopes of being the first to achieve the feat. They climbed through horrendous storms, attached to the mountain only with a few clips and some thin climbing rope. They were frigidly cold, tired, and dehydrated but eventually made it to the top. The hard part was over and they just had to begin their descent back down the mountain.
However, as they made their way down one of the men slipped when coming down a steep cliff, landing on his feet and instantly breaking his leg and knee. He was in excruciating pain and thought he was going to die. There was no way to call for help. There was no one looking for them. His friend could have left him behind to save himself, but together they devised a way to create a pulley system so the injured climber could be lowered down by his friend several hundred metres at a time. Each time he was lowered, his leg was injured further and his pain expanded, but he knew it was the only way to save his life. On their way down another storm came in, but they could not stop. They kept pushing through the snow with frozen hands and ice-ridden faces. However, during one fateful descent, the injured climber went over a cliff and was dangling only by a thin piece of rope over a huge crevice. He couldn't drop down nor could he climb back up. So he simply waited to die, as his friend up the mountain tried to hold both of them up without any knowledge of what had happened.
Eventually the friend atop the mountain had to make the hardest decision in his life and cut the rope to save himself. This sent the injured man hurling down deep into an ice crevice in the mountain. He survived the fall and awoke completely alone in a dark icy cave, one of the worst possible ways to die. He tried desperately to climb back out, but his broken leg made it impossible. He only had two options; stay there and wait to die, or head deeper into the crevice and hope it would lead him out. So, he made the brave decision to throw his rope deeper into the unknown and headed down into the dark. I won't ruin the move for you here, but would like to discuss what a wonderful metaphor this story offers for personal growth.
Our greatest moments for transformation and survival are not when are warm and comfortable in base camp, but when we are completely alone with ourselves in the deep, icy caves or our inner psyche. So often we are faced with the options of simply giving up and wallowing in our pain with no hope of ever surviving, or we can decide to take a leap of faith and travel deeper into the depths of our soul. As the climber said about his own experience, sometimes it does not matter what your decision is or whether it is right or wrong, but simply that you make a decision and keep on moving. When we choose to explore our inner world more deeply, we often do not know what we are going to find or where we are going to end up, but sometimes it is the only option we have if we choose to live.
When we experience distressing emotions in our lives, it can often feel like our friends or family members have cut our life line, dropping us into that deep crevice. We may experience hurt, pain, and abandonment in those moments and we often first look for someone outside of ourselves to save us. We hope they will hear our cries for help, throw us a line, or even just lay down and suffer with us. But when no one comes, we quickly realize that we are on our own and the only way to escape these emotions is to go deeper into them. Instead of trying to ignore or escape these emotions, we take a couple of deep breaths, and we go deeper into them. When we go deeper, the emotions become less unsettling and we eventually see the bottom, we get clarity on their depth, and ultimately find another way to work through them. This experience then makes us stronger and we find it easier to jump off into the depths the next time we feel swallowed up by our emotions.
What moments in your life have represented a deep icy crevice? Did you choose to sit and wait for someone to rescue you or did you take the leap into the depths?
Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Jennifer_Kavanagh
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