Where Does Depth Live?

The light doesn’t just get in through the cracks. It gets out through them too.

Photo by Liu JiaWei on Unsplash

Forty years ago, a psychic said something that I have been working on ever since. I had asked her about my mother, whom I judged to be shallow, and was puzzled by how effortlessly loved she was, and quietly wounded by how different I felt from her. The response was not what I expected and felt more like a scolding at the time: “Your mother gives everything she has. Unlike you, who has so much depth to offer and gives so little.”

My parents were genuinely caring people. But social norms were upheld above authentic contact—and whenever something real tried to surface, it was skirted or denied before it could land. So I learned to create a self that could belong more comfortably in life’s shallows. And so began an entangled, complicated life of living outside myself—an increasingly unconscious habit of self-betrayal at its root.

Even through four near-death experiences and several profound mystical openings, I stubbornly clung to the map of belonging as defined by my family. As this belonging map became an imperative in my body, heart, and mind, it became increasingly difficult to slow down and face what I was avoiding. Yet something in me persisted.

Like many, my heart had built a defensive cage around my most precious self—the loving self. None of us do this out of malice, but out of necessity. Love that has nowhere safe to land learns to stay hidden, and eventually becomes invisible.

We are living through a collective crisis of depth. Not a crisis of intelligence or information—we have more of both than we can absorb. But a crisis of the kind of knowing that lives below the thinking mind, in the body, in the ancestral field, in the silence between words. The knowing that life is all one.

When we are truly here—fully present with all parts of ourselves—we begin to discern the difference between our conditioned parts and what is essential. One could be called the personality self, and the other the essential self. Eventually, we understand the personality self as necessary, but never designed to be the main player. This realization often brings a massive relief and a sense of homecoming as we stop feeding the personality self’s efforts to be here. That is certainly a case of the cart pulling the horse.

The light was never missing. It has always been inside us—in the soul’s dimension, in the body’s ancient intelligence, in the timeless knowing that predates our conditioning. What the cracks allow is not the light coming in. It is the light—and the love—finally getting out.

This is what I have learned through sixteen years of facilitating inner silence and the Inner Constellation Mobile—while documenting and tracking it for a PhD in inner science. The ICM is built on the sacred geometry of the Merkaba, what sacred geometry scholar Aristopoulos calls “the flowering of life”—an ancient symbol that appears across cultures and throughout the natural world.

When we practice creating conditions of safety, presence, and relational depth—and it does take practice—the cage around the loving self within begins to soften and open. We begin to experience ourselves as the love we have been seeking outside. The Universal Heart, at the centre of the Inner Constellation Mobile, has always been here. Inside our own hearts. Waiting.

Our world needs this very good news more than anything right now, because we have forgotten who we are. I am more keen than ever to share it with anyone ready to receive it. Sometimes the best news of all is the hardest for us to hear—that we are beautiful beyond measure. That we are here to be happy and loving. That is our natural state. In Sanskrit, this is called Lila—divine play. We are here to engage in divine play.

Once this PhD is behind me, I look forward to writing a book, and I hope it finds its way into the hands of those courageous enough to walk the ancient, sacred path of discovering how the very cracks they judge and deny are exactly where the light comes out.

Thank you for reading. I appreciate your comments and your likes.

I also write twice a month on Medium in a more outward or exoteric fashion: medium.com/@lauramadsen_17353