The Way Out

Maybe the most consistent theme in my own emotional health journey and now the journey of the clients I work with is this: there is no way out (of our pain/confusion/stuckness) but through (it all). 

I roughly knew of this famous line of poetry but I always slightly butchered it. It came up for me several years ago in a psychedelic-assisted therapy session, when painful feelings and memories kept arising and I kept trying to find away to “rise above them.”

I eventually relented to these feelings and memories and the line “no way out but through” kept coming up. At first it felt like a challenge I had to meet. I remember feeling so much tension as I pushed through it, repeating over and again “no way out but through.” But slowly, I realized that it wasn’t a matter of pushing but of allowing. And the line of poetry turned from a challenge into a simple matter of fact. I can just relax into the truth that there really is no way out but through, so I might as well allow for all of the pain, sorrow, fear, grief, shame, and so on to be here without any resistance.

That day ended with an enormous tidal wave of grief crashing through me. After I had come down from the peak experiences I was starting to look at some meaningful items I had collected into a sort of alter. One of the items was a book of photographs and messages created by childhood cancer families we had worked with through MaxLove Project. 

I had never opened the book before that session because I had only received it a week earlier and I was (or at least thought I was) too busy. So it was only in this heightened and tender moment that I finally opened it. 

On the first page was the picture of a family who had lost their daughter earlier that year. I saw their faces and her face on that first page and couldn’t read a word of what they wrote before bursting into tears. The tears turned into sobbing and eventually whole-body wailing as I passed into deeper levels of grief. 

It started with grief for this family and a guilt that I hadn’t been able to access the pain of their loss. I had kept an emotional distance. And then I realized I had kept an emotional distance to every family we’ve been with who’ve lost their child to cancer (and there have been so many). And then I began to sob for all the parents who have lost their children—the depth of the loss is unspeakable and seemingly endless.

As I kept allowing these deeper and larger waves of grief to arise, I eventually came into a cosmic grief that source/god/universe/whatever-you-want-to-call-it feels for all of existence. Everything we love is going to die. Someday this planet will be consumed by the sun and some other day the sun will no longer exist. Everything will go away. 

At this moment, a peace washed over me as a realization arose, almost a voice, but a clear message nonetheless: This is EXACTLY why this moment is so fucking precious. 

This moment, this pain, this smile, this sorrow, this body, this child, this song, this smell, this texture, this shadow, this dance, this fear, this hope . . . 

⸺

The Robert Frost poem doesn’t say “there is no way out but through.” The first line is actually “. . . the best way out is through” followed shortly by “I can see no way out but through.” The narrator is at first relaying a line from her husband, but then on the second line she not only affirms that “through” is the “best” way but that there is no other way.

I think this is how most of us come to this realization. First, the way through seems like an option—perhaps there’s another way. But sooner or later we come to the realization of Frost’s narrator: “I can see no way out but through.”

Emotional health coaching, for me, is creating a container that’s safe enough to go through the wounds: the fear, pain, shame, sadness, and grief that’s been pushed away for so long. It’s not a one-time passing through, unfortunately, because no one holds just one wound. 

But it does get easier with each passing through. It’s always a beautiful feeling for me, when I’ve moved through the darkest storms inside me and come out the other side. My entire system relaxes afterwards, knowing that when the next storm comes I don’t need to avoid it, resist it, rise above it, or sneak below it. I can walk straight into it because I now know “that I can see no way out but through” and “through” will not destroy me.