Your Fear is a Treasure Map
“The cave you fear to enter contains the treasure you seek.” - Carl Jung
I was in a training last week that included an exercise in reflecting on our connection to our “spirit.” We were split into groups of three where one person asked the question: “What gets in the way of your spiritual connection?” Another person answered, and another person wrote down the answers.
I write “answers” in plural because the questioner was to repeat the question, after each answer, 10 times (saying “thank you” after each answer). This might sound tedious to you (as it did to me) but the experience was eye-opening.
We all took turns in each role and it was different for each of us in our group of three. What came through for me was how I circled around fear in most of my 10 answers. What gets in the way of my spiritual connection? Fear of uncertainty, fear of not knowing, fear of judgment, fear of rejection, and fear of being misled were a few of my responses.
Reflecting on the role of fear in getting in the way of my spiritual connection, I was brought back to Carl Jung’s famous quote:
“The cave you fear to enter holds the treasure you seek.”
Some of the fears I reported are essentially the same fear (judgment and connection; uncertainty and not knowing), but I realized that each represents a new cave for me to explore in my own emotional health journey.
I’m noticing that it’s much easier for me to approach these caves today than in times past because I’ve now seen (countless times) coaching clients work through their fears around approaching their inner caves of traumatic memories, grief, confusion, anxiety, and overwhelm, and eventually go into these caves. And 100% of the time, they find in these caves the treasures they most need in their lives: peace, clarity, acceptance, courage, confidence, compassion, forgiveness, and gratitude.
There is nothing I am more sure of today than this: our greatest internal fears are like treasure maps; when we follow them and go into the place inside that feels too big, overwhelming, messy, or dangerous to touch, then we finally get to the deepest parts of us that have been longing to connect, be witnessed, and release the heavy burdens they’ve been holding. What follows is often magical . . .
The beauty of the parts-based emotional awareness practices I lead clients in is that we take this process very slow and don’t proceed until all of your protector parts are ready. But once these parts feel safe and ready, the treasures reveal themselves, every time.