Playing in the radiant darkness — surrendering to the Void

featuring a guided meditation for the paid subscribers <3

There is no more difficult task for a cerebral creative than learning to surrender to the Void—developing the capacity to truly enjoy it. But the fact remains, if you want to unlock your creative potential, you have to become an explorer of consciousness, an artist of the aether.

You have to learn to play in the Void.

There you are—suspended animation. Suspended above an abyss. Darkness below you, darkness above. Emptiness within, emptiness without. But as you descend into that space, energy collects around you, embracing you with a womb-like pressure—embedding you in this chasm of calm. Colors, shapes, and images cascade across your vision, materializing and melting into the black like ink in water. Feelings without form, sensations without substance. Stories without narrative.

You are here. There is nowhere else to be. There is nothing else to do.

Just emptiness dancing.

Looking for a partner.

Searching for a soul brave enough to bear it.

You could choose to be wildly unimpressed with this space and its turbulent vistas. You could choose to turn your back on what you experience here because you might not understand it intellectually—it might not be expressible linearly. You could choose to neglect the contents of your own unconscious. But you would be turning your back on the final frontier, the most alight and alive part of you.

You would be turning your back on the Spirit realm and all of the inspiration and ideas that want to move through you.

Without your willingness to feel them, they can never be born.

A call from the abyss

Six years ago, when I first began writing about creativity, there is something I knew to be true with every fiber of my being—so strongly that it ached.

I knew that the secret to creative fruitfulness must be meditation.

I say “must be” because I had never, not once in my life, tried it. The very idea made me feel antsy. I wasn’t into the occult or spiritualism yet, or at least I wouldn’t have identified as such, but I was already in the first phase of my awakening (thanks to the book Annihilation by Jeff Vandermeer). I was getting the itch to explore consciousness. I was hearing the call. And I wouldn’t have the bravery or the nervous system capacity to answer it for at least four years.

I wasn’t even ready to confront the Void much less play in it. The Void didn’t seem very playful to me at all. It seemed intimidating, overwhelming, and downright deafening.

Yet, I couldn’t escape the distinct sensation that I was accessing only a fraction of my creative power. Over the next four years, I felt increasingly unfulfilled in my creative practice. I lost the desire to write about it almost entirely.

There was a great, cavernous emptiness at my center, begging to be explored. And there was an intrepid space cowboy inside me that needed to discover it.

You could say I was possessed with manifest destiny—of a less colonial sort. I didn’t want to possess the Void, I wanted to devote myself to it. I wanted to be a respectful, deferential resident of the Great Intergalactic West

But I feared if I wasn’t careful, I’d get swallowed up in there.

Playing in the Void

If you’ve been ‘round these parts for awhile, you’ve heard me talk about how I came to know the Void—the breaking point that lead to a breakthrough. I was starved of my own inner nourishment, rotting in the depths of numbness, feeling about a tenth of my sensational reality. In a fit of utter desperation, I turned to Essential Somatics, an offshoot of the Feldenkrais methodology, and interoceptive sensing to widen my sensational range.

I learned to dialogue with my body directly, in its own language.

I hacked my somatic lexicon.

As I opened up ever more space in my body, greater quantities of my own unconscious contents surged forward. Somewhat trepidatiously at first, I practiced feeling the most subtle thumps and thrummings at the very edge of my window of tolerance. Until one day, my chest cracked open and a whole other world came flooding through.

After that first unprompted active imagination meditation introduced me to my own patch of Void space, I found the emptiness a lot less intimidating and elusive. I became fascinated with it. Daily ritual bath meditations became a luscious escape that I dove into without hesitation; accepting whatever experience was on offer. If images came, I welcomed them. If the blackness persisted, I didn’t force my own projections over it. I surrendered to whatever parts of Self, gods, guides, and energies emerged to be felt and I approached this task with an utter lack of self-seriousness.

I looked at these experiments purely as play, as experimentation.

I permitted my inner children to guide these sessions—after all, they’re the ones who seemed to understand the Spirit realm best all along. They’re the ones that lead me to this space in childhood, not realizing what power we were playing with.

And the main reason this was possible for me—as a career overachieving, try-hard perfectionist—is because I had no idea what was possible in this space. I had no expectations and, still, a fair bit of skepticism. There was no point in setting any pointed goals or narrow directives. No point in following anything but my curiosity.

What helped me to exercise patience with these experiences was the supposition that whatever happened—no matter how little sense it made—might be of some value to my subconscious parts.

Perhaps whatever played out was, in a Jungian sense, some sort of symbolic processing that didn’t require my conscious engagement.

And perhaps choosing to believe this, whether it was true or not, could activate some sort of placebo effect, making this whole exploration feel worthwhile.

Learning to move energy

In being flexible with my objectives and entertaining multiple possibilities for how this practice might serve me—emotional processing, entertainment, spiritual guidance—I loosened attachment to any one specific outcome. I decided I was willing to trust the process playing out even if I couldn’t cognitively understand it and resolved to log the results of my experiments to observe how they impacted me over time.

What I found is that I enjoyed being present with my Self; I fell in love with my inner world.

I had found an entire realm of experiences crafted just for me. I allowed myself to receive this beautiful gift I was co-creating with the universe—the gift of subjectivity. Over time, as I became more and more transfixed by my inner travels, I developed an interest in other ways of exercising this presence and leveraging the empty space.

What followed was a number of somatic experiments I loosely refer to as my Energy Body Meditations. There, I practiced sensing movements within the bounds of my body and just outside it in my auric field. With the help of breathwork, I would move and manipulate these sensations; regulating the flow of energy in and around me.

This had a gradual but direct impact on my creative practice. I spent more time feeling and allowing great ideas to bloom within me instead of rushing in to surgically remove them before they had finished gestating. I developed the capacity to allow natural processes of creation to take hold. I had a lot more patience to explore and experiment in my practice instead of trying to force certain outcomes.

I stopped listening to music or podcasts on my walks and began listening to the world around me and how it reverberates within me.

I stopped filling every quiet moment with such a sensory onslaught that I couldn’t feel what was moving within my small Self and the extended Self just outside me.

I stopped focusing my creative practice on making something happen or manhandling my own inner resources.

I stopped dominating my body’s creative process and started partnering with it.

That’s when my most magickal art began to manifest itself.

If you’re ready to begin befriending the Void, I’ve recorded a guided meditation to help you get started: