"Valley of the Shadow" reminds me of the Jungian idea of the shadow. In the thread about "
Stuff falling and breaking recently", people have been posting about weird dreams, emotional processing, chaos and change in their lives. This sounds as if the unconscious things which people haven't been dealing with is "coming out" and manifesting in their lives, both inwardly and outwardly.
If your psyche is charged with conflicting currents (whether unconscious and/or half-conscious), it can scramble your focus, lead to carelessness and mistakes, and there may also be symbolic "signs" from the Universe as to what's going on. If you work through these things - deeper inner work - then the symptoms on the surface (your conscious mind not working as well) can then resolve, and life may change in various ways.
Over the past few years, I and many others here have been going in the opposite direction. If things don't work well on the surface level in your mind and in your life, then forcing things into shape through discipline and dealing with outer things have been the solution - build your will and force your being to work reliably in accordance with your current ideas and direction. Well, building your will is very important, but there comes the point when you need to examine whether you're really using what you've built properly.
When you hit a barrier beyond which you cannot go, then maybe it it best to reconsider the approach. Exclusively focusing on paying attention to "the present moment" and working reliably with precision in your current activities, means you're not paying attention to the reality of what's inside you. If problems keep getting bigger, maybe there's something else for you to notice and direct your attention towards.
For me, in the second half of last year, a huge inner process began. (Earlier that year, I went through a shorter, intense period of fearful and painful struggle, breaking apart some old and very rigid structures in my psyche. That seems to have prepared the ground for "part 2".) I've experienced various inner symbolic dramas, recapitulated my life and dealt with very intense repressed emotions. I would not have been able, beforehand, to imagine that I had so much anger, bitterness, and grief inside of me. And as it is resolved, and old beliefs I took for granted are re-examined (because the inner experience has kept pushing my old assumptions to the limit until they break down), it seems to lead to maturation. Emotional blocks to understanding go away, and suddenly I begin to understand life, myself, others, and relations with others differently.
Years ago, I had a peculiar dream in which I and others in this network visited a "city of the soul". A vast place made of intricate stone structures, it was not a place we lived in, but rather had begun to visit so as to learn. It was, in large part, a 'future potential', a place that may in the future 'come alive' along with the formation of a social memory complex. But there was also all kinds of negative stuff, not visible to the eye, 'hidden' in the city, in its structure. And in the future, it would have to be dealt with so that the city could be cleansed in order for us to have a future connected to it.