Walking Through the Valley: Reimagining the Shadow of Death

Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil.

I've heard some version of those words for most of my life, but lately I have been hearing them very differently. After sitting with this idea of relationship as a mirror and the continual invitation to turn within, I started wondering: What if the valley isn't only somewhere outside of us? What if walking through the shadow is also what happens when we accept the invitation to go inward?

Because eventually, if we go deeply enough into ourselves, we're going to encounter our shadow. We are going to meet pieces we've rejected, identities we've protected, fears we haven't wanted to name and conditioning we've mistaken for truth. We may discover things we have hidden because somewhere along the way we decided they made us unlovable, unsafe, unacceptable or somehow less Divine.

What if walking through the valley is also an ancient description of what we now call shadow work?

The part of this verse I keep coming back to is the word through. We aren't told to avoid the valley or pretend darkness doesn't exist. We aren't even told to conquer it. We walk through it, and that changes the image for me completely. I don't have to make the shadow my home, but I also don't have to fear its existence. I can enter, see what is there and continue moving.

Maybe the shadow itself isn't evil. Maybe sometimes it is simply what hasn't yet been brought into our awareness.

And then there is death.

There are so many deaths within one human lifetime that have nothing to do with our physical body dying. Identities die. Beliefs die. Relationships die. Roles die. Dreams die. Versions of ourselves die. Even our understanding of God can die when the container we once used to understand the Divine becomes too small for what we are experiencing now.

When something we've built our identity or our life around begins to fall away, it can absolutely feel like walking through a valley. We may grieve what was even when we know we cannot return to it. How could we? We aren't the person who originally entered the experience anymore. Each moment has changed us, and whatever emerges from the other side will be shaped by what we have lived.

This is where death and rebirth begin belonging to one another for me. Something falls away, space opens and something new eventually begins to emerge. We don't necessarily know what that new thing will be while we are walking through the valley, and perhaps that uncertainty is part of what makes the valley frightening.

But then I return to the next words: I will fear no evil, for you are with me.

What if the Divine isn't standing beside us as some completely separate being accompanying us into the darkness? What if the Divine is also within us? What if I AM—God, Source, Holy Spirit, whatever language resonates—is flowing through us while we walk?

If that is true, then there is nowhere within myself I can go where the Divine isn't already present. Not my grief, my rage, my fear or my shadow. Not even the parts of myself I've spent years believing I needed to fix before I could possibly be worthy of Divine love.

That thought changes the valley for me because suddenly I am not entering some godless place and hoping God will follow me there. The Divine was never absent from it in the first place.

And that makes me wonder whether we have spent a lot of time trying to call in something that was never outside of us.

Maybe the valley isn't where we lose God at all. Maybe walking through it is one of the places where we begin to discover just how impossible separation actually is.

Huge hugs & divine love,
Morgan