What is the Hug Your Cactus Journey?

An entire Hug Your Cactus book that unpacks the journey of embracing the ugly parts of your soul is currently being written. Here is brief summary of that journey.

Invitation

To hug your cactus or to engage the cactus hugging journey begins with an invitation.  Spiritually this is the invitation from Jesus to deny or as it is also referred “die to” self. One example of this is the life of the zealous Saul/Paul who even coined the phrase “a thorn in the flesh.” From a psychoanalysis perspective this same journey can be understood as to deny or “die to” ego, the ego being simply one’s own personal sense of self-importance. Three concepts or traditions are engaged to help unpack the parts of the cactus hugging journey: The 12 Steps, Enneagram of Personality, and Contemplative Prayer. The power of storytelling is also key here. As one learns to hug their cactus, embracing the ugliness of their own soul, they need to hear the stories of others on the same journey and learn to tell their own story with honesty. This is particularly a major contribution of the 12 Steps to spirituality and understanding brokenness. For, “the ‘language of recovery’ works not because those telling their stories describe experiences of Release, Gratitude, and so on, but because in the very telling of their stories, they actually experience those realities.”[1]

Crisis

For many a personal crisis is the impetus for change. My crisis was when I was confronted with my own false sense of self or “glittering image,”[2] along with an over dependence on chaos, adrenaline, and attention. These realities sent me on a journey of self-discovery that, though painful, has changed my life for the better. This is when a friend told me to hug my cactus, introducing me to this metaphor that changed everything. This metaphor originates from a speech that the actor Robert Downey Jr. gave as he was introducing Mel Gibson during an award presentation. Downey told the story of how in his own time of crisis Gibson helped learn to hug the cactus.^[3]  This is a journey from shame, brokenness and false or shadow self towards humility, healing, a more holistic sense of self, and ultimately a life of new meaning. 

Don’t Give Up Hope

In hugging your cactus, one must accept that their crisis is self-imposed. The 12 Step tradition refers to this as admitting that life is no longer manageable. This generally comes from a pattern of behavior over time. When one realizes that their life is no longer manageable, it is important not to give up their hope that things can get better and that healing, and personal transformation is possible.  This type of healing cannot happen without community, so avoiding isolation that leads to despair is essential; find others who can be a source of hope, support, and encouragement. Shocking to some, the sense of despair and hopelessness is there for a reason. So, it’s important to not move on from hopelessness too soon; instead, lean into and learn from it, for the cactus hugging journey does involve dealing with pain, specifically self-inflicted pain.   It is also important to not lose one’s sense of purpose for, “without purpose, meaning, and perspective, it is easy to lose hope, numb our emotions, or become overwhelmed by our circumstances.”[4]  

Faith Rooted in Forgiveness

Closely related to the idea of hope in the hug your cactus journey is faith, specifically a faith that is rooted in forgiveness. The alternative here is a faith rooted in performance or perfection, and yet, simply trying harder does not always work. Forgiveness is key in accepting that one is responsible for the crisis that has led to their life not working, and forgiveness takes practice; for without forgiveness there can be no real or lasting hope. Therefore, if one tries to embrace the ugly parts of their soul without a faith rooted in forgiveness and mercy, it simply won’t work. This is because, “we can only show mercy if mercy has been shown to us.  We can only live inside the flow of forgiveness if we have stood under the constant waterfall of needed forgiveness ourselves.”^[5]  It is also worth noting that the ability to both give and receive forgiveness are equally important here and the most difficult person to forgive is often oneself.  Indeed, the voice in our heads can be quite cruel and unrelenting, necessitating an external voice of forgiveness.

Personal Responsibility

It is worth noting that accepting and taking responsibility for wrongdoings is very difficult, yet this is also where real change can start to happen. Self-awareness becomes paramount as one comes to terms with the part of self that has caused harm to others. This again is painful. We become desperately dependent on forgiveness; giving and receiving forgiveness enables greater personal responsibility. Community is once again important here as one invites others to help them see their failures, blind-spots, and weaknesses so that they may better take responsibility for them. This is the part in the journey where one identifies their cactus or thorn as Paul called it, which is the ugly part of their soul. This is the part of self or ego, that shadow or “false” part of self that is the root or source of the behaviors that have led to the self-inflicted crisis.  This is where interacting with the Enneagram to discover one’s type comes in. The Enneagram, like other personality profiles, identifies both strengths and weaknesses.  It’s from these weaknesses that certain patterns of negative behavior can be observed, and that one’s cactus can generally be found. 

Embrace the Ugly

This is the part of the journey where the cactus is not just acknowledged, but also embraced. The word embrace here means for one to accept and even love those ugly parts of your soul, because they are not going away. Embrace also means to get to know them so well that you can learn to rein them in and limit the damage. Finally, embracing means integrating this cactus and thorns into one’s life, paradoxically becoming at peace, while at the same time often lamenting them. To hug your cactus means to experience something painful because it requires going into the deeper parts of self to deal with and confront the ugliness that is there.  For, “I cannot discover my ‘meaning’ if I try to evade the dread which comes from first experiencing my meaninglessness!  By meditation I penetrate the inmost ground of my life… but this penetration must be authentic.”^[6] This requires being brutally honest with oneself which again can be very painful but also facilitates personal growth, healing, and eventually a more holistic sense of self.

Humility Takes Time

The journey to hug your cactus and embrace the ugly parts of your soul takes time, for it is not an overnight fix, yet one can start to experience real change. The image of a cactus works here, because despite its prickly thorns, cacti produce flowers and fruit. This time spent hugging the cactus is not idle time, it’s deep soul work of facing and embracing the ugly. This includes investing in the personal, spiritual disciplines associated with Contemplative Prayer.  These disciplines create the space for one to work through the transformative but difficult parts of the cactus hugging journey. “In other words, spiritual work isn’t always just ‘instructive’ – it’s also transformative, and this kind of transformation can get messy.”^[7]  The messiness of soul work takes time to clean up.  The goal of this transformation is to become a person of at least some humility. This includes taking personal responsibility, as owning one’s own mess and problems breeds humility.  Yet humility by its very nature is not something one can claim for self, it must be seen and affirmed by others. 

 Life of New Meaning

This last part of the cactus hugging journey expresses the importance of finding purpose in one’s brokenness. This includes realizing that one’s story has changed, and then accepting this change and new meaning. Like becoming a person of humility, this new meaning in life is not instant, it takes time to develop. One aspect of this new meaning is to have a greater sense of gratitude and contentment in life, which also leads to less of a need for meaning at all (simple pleasures and simplicity itself bring deep joy). One important benefit to hugging your cactus is how it enables you to focus less on self and better help others. This includes the ability to see the cactus in others with a newfound sense of compassion. Storytelling remains key to this process, especially in relating the cactus hugging journey to others. This tapping into the power of storytelling is again one of the great contributions of the 12 Step tradition. This is also the benefit of using a tool like the Enneagram to know oneself better.  The result is the cactus hugging journey from a self-imposed crisis to overtime integrating the ugly parts of the soul into a fuller, more holistic sense of self.

Conclusion – It Worked

Learning to hug your cactus worked in my life as I have personally experienced new meaning by embracing and integrating the ugly parts of my soul.  As seen throughout this post, countless others have experienced personal transformation as they have learned to die to self and ego as they hug your cactus.  This journey is not just for the sake of self, but also to help others.  Downey Jr. refers to this at very end of his speech when he mentions that Gibson only asked him to “help the next guy.” This ability to “pay it forward” demonstrates a life that has truly taken on new meaning. In the end to live out this journey is certainly a challenge as embracing the ugly parts of the soul means facing, working through, and ultimately accepting one’s own contradictions.  This is a paradox, learning to simultaneously love and rein in these ugly parts as they are redeemed and integrated into a more holistic sense of self.  Bono and the members of U2 learned this reality through their music journey. 

I too, wanted to make music capable of carrying its own weight, even weight of our own contradictions.  To be ‘in the world but not of it’ was the challenge in the scriptures that would take a lifetime to figure out.  As artists we were slowly uncovering paradox and the idea that we are not compelled to resolve every contradictory impulse.^[8]   

The original speech by Robert Downey Jr.:

Full Speech Text:

“Actually I asked Mel to present me with this reward for a reason.  When I couldn’t get sober, he told me not to give up hope, and he urged me to find my faith. It didn’t have to be his faith or anyone else’s, as long as it was rooted in forgiveness. And I couldn’t get hired, so he cast me as the lead in a movie that was actually developed for him. He kept a roof over my head, and he kept food on the table. And most importantly, he said if I accepted responsibility for my wrongdoings and if I embraced that part of my soul that was ugly — “hugging the cactus” he calls it — he said that if I “hugged the cactus” long enough, I’d become a man of some humility and that my life would take on a new meaning. And I did, and it worked. All he asked in return was that someday I help the next guy in some small way. It’s reasonable to assume that at the time he didn’t imagine that the next guy would be him or that someday was tonight.”

A short video on why would someone want to hug their cactus:

[1]  Ernest Kurtz and Katherine Ketchum, The Spirituality of Imperfection: Storytelling and the Search for Meaning (New York: Bantom Books, 1992), 160.

[2] The term comes from the book Glittering Images, by Susan Howatch, which tells a redemptive story focused on Charles Ashworth, a Church of England clergyman in the late 1930s. 

[3] The Telegraph, “Robert Downey Jr asks forgiveness for Mel Gibson,” October 18, 2011, accessed August 10, 2020, video, 2:03, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_AAJuynxnTQ.

[4] Brené Brown, The Gifts of Imperfection (Center City: Hazelden Publishing, 2010, 2020), 98-99.

[5] Richard Rohr, Breathing Under Water: Spirituality and the Twelve Steps (Cincinnati: Franciscan Media, 2011), 26.

[6] Thomas Merton, Contemplative Prayer (New York: Image Books, 1969), 47.

[7]Shozan Jack Haubner, Zen Confidential: Confessions of a Wayward Monk (Boston: Shambhala Publications, Inc., 2013), 165.

[8] Bono, Surrender: 40 Songs, One Story (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2022), 143.