Do you Dare?

Can you bear to face yourself without your masks on?
Without your pleasing face, your fixing face, your sham of strength?
Do you dare to turn in wards to meet yourself?
To turn towards your pain, your frustrations, your howling grief and your longings to be seen?
To actually spend a moment with your bleakness, your blackness,
without turning your face away and searching for someone or anything that can fill your void?

Let me tell you something.
It isn’t as terrible as you’ve conjured it to be.
You won’t descend into a hole never to escape.
Your tears will eventually cease and not drown you in their torrent.
You will return again.

And you’ll return with this-
Knowing your cries of loneliness can be no more
because you no longer abandon yourself;
that your longings to be fully seen have been fulfilled,
that the place inside you that you believed was full of terror, of guilt and shame that would devour you
is your place of sanctuary,
of touching a grace that lives deep within your being
a place of utter stillness,
profound possibilities undreamt of.

So next time the bleakness descends, the fear escalates,
take a moment, a breath,
to stand still and turn towards it.
The unimaginable awaits.