“Why right now, when I am living something so luminous, are things I thought I had overcome beginning to appear in me?”From Yoga del Descenso · Libro Puerta
The grief you had already wept. The fear you had already overcome. The childhood wound you thought you had left behind. An anger in which you do not recognize yourself. And none of it arrives in your worst season, but in your best, in the middle of the deepest stage of your inner life, as if someone had chosen the worst possible moment to open the drawers.
It is a question almost no one dares to ask out loud, because it sounds like ingratitude, or like madness. That is why the first thing I want to do is not to explain anything to you, but to take a weight off you. This coincidence appears again and again in accounts of deep spiritual life. People from very different times and traditions have described a similar bewilderment: a more luminous inner life coinciding with the return of things they believed they had left behind. If it is happening to you, you are not the only person who has lived it and told it.
The second thing is a promise of honesty. I am not going to give you a formula for knowing the meaning of what is happening to you. Not because I do not want to, but because it does not exist, and whoever sells you one is selling you something dangerous.
Three honest answers
When the old reappears in the middle of the luminous, there are at least three possibilities worth considering. None of them can be taken for granted beforehand. And this is what almost no one says: they can coexist.
It may be part of the work. When more light enters a house, more can be seen, including what had spent years in rooms without windows. A greater inner clarity can let you see what was hidden before, not because the process causes it, but because now you have something to look at it with. I invite you to consider this without treating it as certified: what cannot be known automatically is why it happens, or what it means in each case.
It may simply be life. Grief, stress, tiredness, crises and losses also arrive in the deepest spiritual seasons, because life does not stop out of respect for your process. Sometimes the old comes back because you lost your job, because you are sleeping badly, because someone left. And calling it a “spiritual process” would take away its true name.
It may be something that needs its own attention. Anxiety that grows, sadness that does not move, exhaustion that rest does not lift, can be present in a person of deep spiritual life just as in anyone else, and they deserve the same attention they would deserve in anyone, which is that of a professional. Your inner life does not make you immune to human difficulties, and treating it as if it did is one of the quietest ways of abandoning yourself.
There is no rule that lets you know which it is just from how intensely you feel it. What is very intense can be any of the three. What is very gentle can too. Meanwhile, the instruction remains the same: do not rush to name the wave while you are still inside it.
What the closed rooms are made of
Your inner world is not chaos. It is made of things that can be named. Memories that hold what you lived, with their charge intact or already transformed. Fears you learned, almost all of them for good reasons at the time. An identity, that idea of who you are built over years, with its prides and its condemnations. Desires, some of them yours and others inherited without examination. And learned ways of protecting yourself: going quiet before it hurts, pleasing before they abandon you, controlling before something surprises you, hardening before they touch you.
About these last ones, I want you to take one sentence with you, even if you forget everything else:
Your defenses were not born as enemies. None of them was put there to block your light; they were put there to protect you, and in passing they blocked it.
Many of them were, at the time, your way of responding to something difficult, painful or unsafe. If you learned to go quiet, you were responding to something real. If you learned to control, so were you. That these solutions are too small for you today, that they cost you relationships, openness or rest, does not make them enemies. It makes them old solutions waiting to be relieved of duty.
That is why you will never hear me speak of “destroying the ego,” of “killing the old you” or of “defeating your shadows.” That language of war hides a cruel idea: that there is a part of you that is the enemy. And the work does not function that way. No one repairs a house by hating it.
A house that renegotiates its locks
The underlying question remains. Why does the path toward the dwelling have to go through the drawers? Couldn’t peace simply settle on top of everything, and be done?
In the image of the house, those ways of protecting yourself resemble the doors, the locks and the curtains, because they shape how you receive what is new, what you let come close and what you guard against. The house that receives is not neutral. It receives through its history. The room with heavy curtains is not against the dawn; it simply learned, a long time ago, that it was safer to let nothing in.
This is how I invite you to understand the meeting between the Presence and your history: not as a battle between the good new and the bad old, but as a house renegotiating its locks. Some doors open by themselves. Others need time. Others need someone to accompany you. And the direction is not a house without history. It is a house where history has stopped deciding on its own what may enter.
Transformation may consist precisely in the new finding a human way to stay. Human: with your memory, with your character and with your history, not in spite of them, but through them, reorganized.
How to accompany yourself in the meantime
There are four things I want to tell you now, because they can help you pass through this stage with more care.
Do not fight with yourself. If the work does not function by hating the house, your part of the work does not function by hating yourself either. Whatever appears, whether fear, grief or anger, does not first need your condemnation. It first needs your company.
Do not interpret in the heat of the moment. Inside the wave, everything seems to mean something enormous. Wait at the shore. Waiting usually helps you tell apart what still makes sense from what was born of the intensity of the moment.
Do not do it all alone. Some rooms open better with someone beside you, whether a deep friendship, a community, a sensible spiritual guide or a therapist. Asking for company is not failing on the path. In many accounts, it is the path.
And learn to recognize when this needs more than a book. If the suffering persists or grows worse, if for weeks it is very hard for you to eat, sleep, work, relate to others or care for yourself and your own, if you are isolating yourself more and more or feel you are losing the ability to handle what is happening to you, that deserves professional attention now, not later. And if thoughts of harming yourself appear, that is not material to interpret alone or with a book: it is time to seek help urgently. Seeking help does not interrupt your spiritual path, nor is it a sign of little faith. Very often it is precisely one of the rooms of the work, the one that could not be opened without someone beside you.
Your history does not live only in memories. It also speaks in the shoulders that tense, in the breath that shortens, in the stomach that closes. The house is not made only of rooms; it is also made of flesh.
From Dr. Zuluan Orion's book Yoga del Descenso · Libro Puerta · Part IV