Start Clearing Your Snake Room
What you avoid grows fangs.
– Soulve
If I look back at my history of spiritual development, I notice a stop-start relationship with my spiritual practises. For instance, I start meditating and gaining some momentum with it, and then I stop, I get triggered, and feel as though I moved backwards. I wondered why this kept happening to me, and one day I remembered a story from a project management seminar I went to many years ago.
The project manager shared the story of a particular project that he worked on in the Amazon jungle.
They needed to install a new server room in a lumber processing factory in the forest, and looked everywhere in the facility for a place to put the new server room in. But the only room that was available was a room that nobody went into. The reason that nobody went in there was because this room only had one purpose. From time to time, snakes would crawl out of the jungle into the factory, and each time they found a snake they would grab the snake and throw it into this room. This had been going on for years, close to a decade. When this project manager was shown this room, they told him to stand well back, flung the door open, and shone the light in.
What was in there were snakes.
Snakes that had been eating snakes, snakes that had been rotting, big snakes, small snakes, baby snakes, dead snakes, live snakes – in short, absolute chaos.
As this was the only room in the entire facility that could potentially be the server room, there was only one thing to do: They needed to clear the snake room.
The relevance for this in my spiritual journey is that my subconscious looks a lot like that room. Each time I encounter some kind of problem, the story I’ve been telling myself is, “I’ll deal with it later;” I throw a snake into the snake room. “I’ll do that when I have money,” and another snake goes into the snake room. “I’ll do that when I’m not so busy,” and another snake goes into the snake room. My subconscious snake room eventually became this place that I’m too scared to even look inside anymore because of the chaos that’s been going in there. Trauma, on top of triggers, on top of sedation, on top of procrastination, and all the stuff I don’t ever want to look at. As a result, I experienced that as soon as I get some kind of focus or clarity, and start up some momentum, part of my story is I need to go and open the snake room and go and deal with what’s in there. But that seems so traumatic that I don’t even want to go and look in there anymore. And of course there’s nothing for it, but to shine the light into the dark, and to me that is the work. I need courage to go in there and just pull one problem out at a time.
As scary as it is, the snake room is only as big as it is. It’s not infinite in size. It contains a finite number of “snakes.” I know that if I slowly take out more snakes than I’m putting in there, and as long as each day I’m not throwing in more snakes, there’s hope. That for me is the analogy of the snake room, and I hope this is of use to you. Grab your courage, and go clear some snakes.
Credit John Daniels – Connected Impact
