The Necessary Descent

Wisdom as the Dance of Complexity and Deconstruction

I've been silent on my Substack for the past few weeks. This isn't because I've run out of things to say, but because I've been in a deconstructive process—spending hours laying on the floor, doing emotional work, feeling lost and disoriented. The time I previously spent writing has instead been spent unraveling. At first, many parts of me didn't want to admit it, wanted to keep growing, expanding, and creating...but the invitation to descend can’t be ignored for long. So I've reduced my workload and made space for my system to fall apart so that something new can emerge.

When Complexity Calls for Depth

This particular descent was triggered by a significant life transition: embracing a future identity of fatherhood. My partner and I had been talking about having children, and we made the conscious choice to orient toward that future. As this decision dropped from my mind into my body, something began to clarify: I realized I needed to become someone new in order for that future to be realized. I needed to change.

This wasn't a realization that came through thinking but as an embodied recognition. I came to see ways I've failed to take care of myself around things like making money, managing my health, and future planning—longer-term concerns that, when I was living by myself (or in a monastery), I could afford to ignore or rationalize. But with a child in the picture, these issues needed to be addressed.

The reason I hadn't already been taking care of these areas traces back to imprints and emotional experiences I've turned away from—feelings and implicit beliefs about taking care of myself, feeling cared for, and being fully agentic in my capacity to provide for myself (and even more, a family). This opened up into deep emotional material, requiring me to descend into the subterranean layers of my psyche to see what I've been unwilling to see, before coming back up to build new patterns of behavior that are in integrity with the future I want to live into.

The Wisdom Skills Framework

My experience is illuminated by my friend Tom Murray's "Wisdom Skills" framework. In my conversation with Tom, he frames wisdom as the integration of two seemingly opposing movements: complexity capacity and spiritual clarity (or deconstruction).

Complexity capacity involves developing greater sophistication in our understanding, expanding our cognitive abilities, building more nuanced mental models, and increasing our capacity to respond to intricate situations. It's about growing upward and outward, becoming more skilled at navigating the complex web of relationships, technologies, and systems that make up our modern world.

Spiritual clarity is equally important but often overlooked in our culture. It involves going deeper, examining our foundations, letting go of rigid structures, and reconnecting with more primordial aspects of our being. This is the realm of shadow work, emotional processing, and the humbling recognition of our limitations and blind spots.

True wisdom, in Murray's framework, requires both movements working together in a integrated dance. Without the deconstructive movement of spiritual clarity, our complexity becomes brittle, disconnected from embodied wisdom, and potentially deluded and harmful. Without the complexity movement, our deconstruction can become self-indulgent, lacking the clarity and structure needed to engage effectively with the world.

From Tom Murray’s Wisdom Skills Framework

Think of it this way: if you're building a simple hut, you can afford to have a minimal foundation. But if you want to build a high-rise, you need to do significant work on the foundation for that structure to have integrity, to be solid, to be trustworthy. Our psychological foundations are no different. As we move into higher-order complexity in our lives, we often discover that lower-order foundational structures in our psyches need to be refactored for that complexity to be navigated with integrity.

In my case, reckoning with the more complex future of having a child triggered and exposed elements in the foundation of my being that weren't well-constructed. I needed to go down and in, examine these foundations, do the necessary work to refactor them, and then emerge with more robust agency, integrity, and coherence.

Here lies the wisdom path—not a straight line of ascension, but a spiral that alternates between engaging the world's complexity and descending to realign our foundations with what we're being called to become.

Different Descents, Different Purposes

This descent feels different than the one I’ve written about previously. The previous journey was a fundamental restructuring of my being, reckoning with core dimensions of my interiority. This time, it's less dramatic. There's more trust in the process, more familiarity with the territory.

It's funny—when I'm in descent, I notice that whatever I've written, whatever creative work I've engaged with, now feels flat and empty. And this time is no different. As someone who orients according to eros, this is profoundly disorienting. The signal that used to drive my life is nowhere to be found; where it once was I instead find contraction, fear, and lack of clarity.

However, over my years of practice, I've learned that this isn't because I'm bad or broken or wrong but because something is emerging in my psyche, reaching out for attuned connection. There is a lesson to be learned. Learning this lesson demands the steady application of sensitivity and conscious participation. It often involves seeing old patterns and pains, surfacing memories, adjusting relationships, expanding my ability to love, clarifying duties and priorities, and taking in feedback from the world that used to fly under the radar. Something is being adjusted, some adaptation is taking place.

With each descent, I find myself trusting the process more deeply. I know that each fall into the darkness leads to emergence with greater clarity and capacity to care.

So this time I'm struggling much less as I'm taken down. I've found friendships and colleagues who understand, support, and even celebrate my descent. I've built these relationships over years; many of my friends have seen me take multiple turns in this spiral, and I know they'll be there for me on the other side. Descending is not a problem—it's part of the rhythm of being alive, and we can create lives that respect this rhythm.

The Teacher's Trap

I've been in the spiritual industry for over 15 years, and I've come to see something troubling: teachers and authority figures within these spaces often face an impossible choice when it comes to their own necessary dissolution.

Many teachers don't allow themselves to actually descend and go through this kind of disorientation and collapse. I know of teachers and leaders where it's clear—and the people around them, their closest students, know it too—that they aren't seeing things clearly. They're being invited by their work, their world, and their relationships into a kind of reckoning.

But because they've created a complex organization that depends on their clarity, they become unwilling or unable to descend, to collapse. They've constructed a position where the survival of their creation depends on them not falling apart. The very structures they've built to share their wisdom become prisons that prevent their continued development.

This pattern shows up clearly with spiritual influencers too. I've seen people build successful brands in the spiritual ecosystem who then become trapped by the identity they've projected through social media. Their livelihood becomes dependent on a certain kind of brand stability and consistency. The very identity that brought them success becomes a cage that prevents further transformation. When their inner experience begins to shift—as it inevitably will if they're engaged in an authentic life of practice—they face a seemingly impossible choice between authentic expression and maintaining the brand that pays their bills.

Of course, this can make sense sometimes. We're all in positions of responsibility at times where we simply need to keep going. Sometimes you just have to defer the descent. But if we are setting ourselves up as spiritual guides or teachers, it's important for us to remain willing to go down.

The irony is painful: those positioned as guides for others' transformations can become the least able to transform themselves. The organizations, communities, and identities built around spiritual teaching can become calcified structures that prevent the very process they ostensibly promote.

The Rhythm of Descent and Emergence

I want to share a demonstrative story from my time at the monastery. The teacher there, Soryu, is one of the most deeply realized people I've ever met. He would work harder than almost anybody I've ever encountered—moving through life with incredible amounts of energy, power and clarity. It was inspiring to witness and being around him changed my understanding of what a human being could become.

But after a cycle of teaching and leading the community, the wear and tear would start to show. Those of us close to him him—his main students and the people working closely with him—would recognize the signs: his capacity was fraying and it was time for him to go on retreat. Most years, he would enter a one to three month retreat. Sometimes he didn't. Sometimes he would push it, and things would deteriorate further.

Through the complex demands of his teaching and leadership he accumulated what we might see as micro-abrasions—small tears and errors in his ability to show up in full integrity in the complexity of his duties. A kind of friction began to develop in his way of moving in the world, and that would cause suffering. Over time there was an accumulation of this suffering, indicating it was time for retreat.

During retreat, he would face what he wasn't willing to look at, which often involved suffering, pain, and some kind of descent, followed by emergence. He'd come out of retreat revitalized with new insights, perspectives, or directions for the organization and his teachings. He would once again be frictionless in his movements and decisions.

In retreat he created space to listen deeply enough to life so that adaptation could take place—not through the mind but through the body and whole being responding to and learning from the friction and suffering that had accumulated during the previous cycle.

This is why it's vital that teachers do this kind of deep work. When you're holding space for others' growth and transformation, you are receiving a tremendous amount of complexity. One of the most developmentally challenging experiences I've ever had was holding a three-month retreat for eight people. It wrecked me. If you're truly holding space for people's growth, you are being pushed to grow in ways that demand periodic retreat and renewal.

Reframing "Success" in Times of Transition

In this time of profound change, adaptation, and transition, a vision of persistent stability may be achievable for some people in some cases, but I would expect it to be the exception rather than the norm. Particularly for people reading articles like this one—those surfing the emergent, chaotic order of the liminal—we will likely go through many iterations of descent and emergence.

What secure attachment to reality looks like in this context may be the willingness to descend and fall apart, to trust the falling apart as the very process through which needed adaptation takes place. For many, this is how the necessary mutation of the "new human"—one able to move with integrity in this time between worlds—is created and discovered.

There's a significant reframe here around what we expect from the spiritual path or what "successfully walking the path" looks like. Does it look like permanent, unconditional stability, happiness, creativity, and forward motion? Or does it look like a willingness to fall apart and reconstitute our identity structures as we strive to show up with integrity in a rapidly changing, complex, uncertain, volatile world filled with dynamic relationships and emergent technologies?

My sense is that right now, because we're in a epoch of such profound transition and liminality, the appropriate aspiration is to become skillful at falling apart and skillful at reconstructing yourself—and to understand that's the rhythm of how the journey will unfold. If I'm truly striving to be in intimate contact with this world as it is, not living in some protected bubble, but engaging with this world's complexity and suffering, this cycle will repeat numerous times. And that repetition is part of the iterative wayfinding towards the new human. Those of us drawn towards that latent possibility will need to die and be reborn many times on the way.

Creating Conditions for Descent and Emergence

Given this reality, a significant question emerges: how do we create the conditions for it to be safe and adaptive to fall apart and come back together, to mutate in this way?

Part of the answer lies in developing skills—how to be with these movements of life that our ego structure is structured to turn away from. Skills that allow us to heed the call of descent and move through it and out the other side in a way that is adaptive. This is what I offer in my coaching practice.

It's also critical to create communities of support, cultures where we can be held in friendship by others who have, are, and will go through similar periods of descent and reemergence. This is crucial. If you're being called into descent and you're surrounded by people who pathologize you, who say "you need to be medicated" or "fixed," that's a radically different experience than being surrounded by friends who understand, who give you space, who care for you, who cut you some slack, who celebrate your willingness to face what is difficult.

I am there for my friends as they go through it, celebrating their courage and helping them glean the insights that are only accessible through passing into darkness and emerging again. This reciprocity is part of what makes our relationships meaningful, and it's part of the culture we're creating.

It’s also the case that the infrastructure of our society is primarily designed for complexity—for productivity, achievement, and forward motion. Through my work with the Basin Collective, we're developing complementary spaces explicitly designed for the deconstructive phase of wisdom development—spaces where people can safely descend. Many individuals today recognize the call to descend but defer it indefinitely because their environment demands continuous performance and stability. This deferral doesn't just compromise personal development; it undermines our collective capacity to adapt to changing conditions, as both individuals and systems become increasingly brittle under mounting complexity.

The Collective Stakes

There's a larger significance here, too. Breakdown is happening everywhere, at all scales of our civilization. If that breakdown is met with care, compassion, space, understanding, love, presence, and attunement, it will lead to adaptation. If it is met with resistance, pathologizing, fixing, and the gnashing of teeth, it will become fundamentalism, psychosis, and maladaptive responses.

Learning to meet breakdown appropriately is essential not just for us as individuals on our path, but for our culture and society as a whole. Our individual capacity to descend and emerge becomes a template for cultural renewal—a microcosm of the very process our entire civilization needs to navigate successfully.

The descents we experience personally are not separate from the larger transitions happening globally. By becoming skillful at this process ourselves, and creating containers that support others through it, we contribute to the development of cultural capacities that may determine whether humanity adapts or fragments in the face of accelerating change.

No End to the Path

I am more and more convinced that this path has no end. If it seems to have an end, you are probably (1) deluding yourself or (2) playing it safe and therefore at risk of betraying your soul. If you are engaged in soulful living and intimate relationship, you will be asked to adapt and grow, and you will be humbled and shaken over and over again, no matter how evolved you think you are. Pretending otherwise is a disservice to the culture of transformation that we are growing together.

The myth of arrival—that someday we'll reach a plateau of permanent clarity or wholeness—is a dangerous spiritual ideal. It creates the very conditions that lead to stagnation, bypassing, and to teachers and leaders who cannot afford to break down even when breaking down is exactly what they need.

What if instead we normalized these cycles? What if we created communities and structures that expected and accommodated the necessary dissolutions of being alive during this time between worlds? What if we recognized that the ability to surrender to these descents—not the appearance of having transcended them—is the true mark of maturity?

What awaits on the other side of descent isn't some final arrival, but a temporary integration that will, in time, call for its own dissolution. Wisdom isn't found in transcending the human condition but in fully embracing it, with all its beautiful, messy brokenness and ambiguity. Falling apart isn't the enemy of transformation but its most essential ally. I pray we learn not just to survive these necessary dissolutions, but to recognize in them the very signature of life itself—continuously dying to what was, continuously being born into what might be.

Philosophical foundations: This piece draws upon several wisdom traditions explored in my Lineages of Inspiration article, which outlines the key influences shaping my understanding of human transformation.

Work with me: I offer one-on-one guidance helping people develop secure attachment with reality through deep unfoldment work. If this resonates, explore working together.