Pearls in a Goyan Abyss

Insights from Inner Desolation

Mar 23, 2025

A very warm welcome to all who have subscribed so far. It means a lot to me that you’re taking the time to read these words. Through Journeys Beyond, I share reflections, stories, and insights from the front lines of transformation, whether it’s in the silent hours of meditation, the depths of plant medicine work, or the raw, vulnerable and courageous moments of being with ourselves exactly as we are.

Today, in that spirit, I want to share a part of a personal story that contributed significantly to my interest in stress in my previous article, as well as contemplative practice and explorations of consciousness. This partially formed an approach to addressing suffering, which itself became the path to peace and contentment. If you like what you’re reading and are yet to subscribe, here’s the button to do so, if it tickles your fancy.

So without further ado, let’s jump in.

Man stands face to face with the irrational. He feels within him his longing for happiness and for reason. The absurd is born of this confrontation between the human need and the unreasonable silence of the world.
Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus

It was around midnight in the lab when some increasingly absurd circumstances inspired an equally absurd decision to take a photo of the disconcertingly absurd mundanity that appeared to surround me. It was an attempt (failed, admittedly) to be lighthearted about an existential ennui which was gaining mass at a rate the athletes I was supporting could only envy.

Old exercise physiology lab, Swansea University Park Campus (June 2016).

Those tubes with the purple lids contain saliva samples, a medium through which sports scientists measure hormones of interest like testosterone and cortisol. That career was the central focus of my life back then, and an intensifying estrangement from it was destabilising and unsettling. The awe and wonder that once imbued my subject had vanished into futile obscurity, and alongside the mounting stress of academia, I was burning out pretty fast.

Later that year, I was sexually assaulted and diagnosed with depression, anxiety, and cPTSD. Slipping further into a nihilistic, pathological, and frequently suicidal abyss, it dawned on me that the fear of continuing on my current path far exceeded the fear of the unknown. So I said goodbye to academia to prioritise my health, and this required rebuilding a shattered identity into something meaningful. What follows is the first of many counterintuitive realisations that led to a recovery I never thought was possible at the time.

The Dog, Francisco Goya (1819-1823). Held in the permanent collection at the Museo del Prado in Madrid, Spain.

Pictured above is one of Goya’s Black Paintings called The Dog, which has been interpreted and debated from several perspectives since the early 20th century. The head of a solitary dog emerges from the bottom of the canvas, looking upward towards a murky wilderness of muted ochre and grey. The way it isolates, diminishes and swallows a being whole seems to depict something essential about the nature of suffering. Helpless and barely visible against a vast, empty expanse, the dog sinks into an abyss where nothing solid remains to hold onto. Its upward gaze, fragile and searching, speaks to the quiet, lonely, and desperate craving for relief, met only by the brutal silence of an indifferent void. Like any chronic affliction, the painting offers no escape and no resolution, only the stark reality of dissolving into something so distant and unrecognisable, that even the contours of one’s own identity begin to blur and fade. And yet, within that emptiness, there is still a flicker of life, a gentle presence gazing softly upon a harrowing fragmentation.

Suffering stripped of meaning becomes unbearable, a weight that crushes the soul beneath its senselessness. This conflict between the longing for meaning and the indifference of the universe is what Albert Camus called the “absurd” in The Myth of Sisyphus. But Camus urges us to embrace life, not despite its absurdity, but because of it.

Sisyphus, Titian (1549): Held in the permanent collection at the Museo del Prado in Madrid, Spain

The struggle itself towards the heights is enough to fill a man's heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.
Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus

In Twilight of the Idols, Friedrich Nietzsche famously wrote, “He who has a why to live can bear almost any how.” Drawing on this idea in Man’s Search for Meaning, Viktor Frankl explained that suffering without purpose destroys us, but suffering infused with meaning transforms us. Despair, like the dog’s helpless entrapment, is not just pain; it is the absence of “why” and subsequent tormenting lack of any guiding thread. Yet in mythology, this very loss marks the first stage of the archetypal hero’s journey that culminates in a state of transcendence. The hero must first be shattered and cast into darkness before emerging transformed.

Carl Jung understood this descent as a psychological necessity in a therapeutic context. “One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious.” The abyss, the very thing we fear, is where lost pieces of ourselves reside. Edward Edinger echoes this in Ego and Archetype, describing suffering as a crucible, a place where falsehood burns away until only the essential remains. James Hollis, in Swamplands of the Soul, affirms that “Meaning is not given; it is earned.” Depression, in this context, is not solely an affliction; it is an initiation into a deeper self-realisation.

Depression is not necessarily pathological. It often foreshadows a renewal of the personality or a burst of creative activity. There are moments in human life when a new page is turned.
Carl Jung, Collected Works Volume 16: The Practice of Psychotherapy.

However, modern society recoils from pain and discomfort, as James Davies describes in The Importance of Suffering. The prevalent impulse is to medicate, suppress, or intellectualise, but this only tightens the shackles. The hero’s journey emphasises that struggle is not an error, but a passage. Like the mythic descent into the Underworld, despair invites us to let go of old identities and stand exposed before the deeper truths of existence. And in that exposure is the power to rebuild.

It takes great courage to value depression, to respect it, not to try and medicate it away or distract ourselves from its misery. Down there is potential meaning, split off from consciousness but alive, dynamic. Although a depression robs conscious life of energy, that energy is not gone. It is in the Underworld, like Orpheus who goes down there to confront, perhaps to charm, the lower powers, so we too are obliged to go down into the depression and find our soul’s greatest treasure.
James Hollis, Swamplands of the Soul

Orpheus and Eurydice - Peter Paul Rubens (1640): Permanent collection at the Museo del Prado in Madrid, Spain. Orpheus, the archetypal hero, descends into the Underworld to reclaim his lost love, symbolising the soul’s journey through darkness, the power of art and faith, and the tragic cost of doubt.

Frankl, having endured the catastrophic horrors of the Holocaust, realised that inner freedom is not found in ease or certainty, but in how we respond to suffering.

Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms - to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way. And there were always choices to make. Every day, every hour, offered the opportunity to make a decision, a decision which determined whether you would or would not submit to those powers which threatened to rob you of your very self, your inner freedom; which determined whether or not you become the plaything to circumstance, renouncing freedom and dignity…
Viktor Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning

The moment we turn towards suffering and engage with it purposefully, we step onto the transcendent path of the archetypal hero. Perhaps The Dog is not merely a portrait of despair, but of endurance. The dog does not fight or flee; it simply softens its gaze towards the darkness, through which transcendence is realised. And so too do we. Suffering, in depression, anxiety, or trauma (or all of the above, as was my case), is the abyss, but not the final word. Meaning is the spark we can kindle in the darkness, the glimmer that orients the next step. When suffering is met with purpose, the void itself becomes the doorway home.

If there is a meaning in life at all, then there must be a meaning in suffering. Suffering is an ineradicable part of life, even as fate and death. Without suffering and death human life cannot be complete.
Viktor Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning

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Pearls in a Goyan Abyss

Insights from Inner Desolation

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