T’is the season of darkness in the northern hemisphere. It is also a time in which many of the world’s religions, regardless of hemisphere, prepare to celebrate a festival of lights. Presumably this tradition has its roots in the cultural response to darkness, that which challenges our safe and secure human existence in the face of mysterious threats or the threat and challenges of mystery…
Modern secular society isn’t much for the darkness either. Writer and eco-activist Bill McKibbon characterizes the dark to be one of the three endangered species of human experience in modern times – the other two are silence and solitude. The prevailing attitude tends to privilege the light—whether the actual light of day, the artificial lighting of the night, or the light of knowledge, progress etc.—viewing it as a kind of deliverance from that which would otherwise jeopardize our sense of order, security, identity, or wellbeing. Ironically, it seems that despite all of the light penetrating dark spaces in modern times, our world is still confronted with some form of collective shadow wherever we turn.
By contrast, wisdom traditions view turning toward the darkness or shadow as central to spiritual practice. The journey toward freedom or enlightenment is less a conquest of the darkness than a metabolizing, an embrace, a realization of the non-duality of what we encounter both in darkness and light, their interpenetration in the larger whole of existence. What happens when we allow an embrace of the darkness, turn toward the shadow sides of ourselves as persons and leaders?
An answer can be discovered by actually visiting the dark, literally speaking. Consider taking time to sit or lie on the floor in a room in your home that is absent of light in any form (note that you may need to unplug something to make this possible!). Or just take a moment to pause before turning on the lights when you enter your house or a room when it is dark. What you discover in the process may not surprise you, but it may give you a new perspective in relation to some of the questions and challenges you are facing just now.
Darkness brings us closer in to ourselves, closer to our vulnerability as well as our resourcefulness. We can’t rely on the same things in darkness that we do in the light. There are ways of knowing that become important in the darkness while other ways of knowing seem irrelevant. Our experience here is a solitary one, allowing the socially driven notions and concerns about who we think we are to fall away. This provides an opportunity to see what else may be there.
Give yourself to the direct, embodied experience of the dark as an unknown territory that has something to reveal to you. Notice how you feel in your body in the darkness. What concerns and instincts arise or fall away? What experience of yourself, your being-ness comes to the fore under the cloak of darkness?
The pace of things slows in the dark. Nature cycles all living things through periods of darkness – what does that allow for? What is the wisdom in that? Certain things are lifted from us in the dark; demands, expectations fall away in the space of this quiet, solitary place. The urgency we feel in the daylight naturally loses some of its hold when darkness descends. At the same time, there may be new anxieties or fears that arise, ones that are tied to the deeper core of our being. The invitation is to examine the discomfort with curiosity, or even wonder.
As you accustom yourself to being in the darkness, bring to mind something you have been feeling “in the dark about” in your life. Some question, or situation, a cross roads or transition point. Breathe the question through you in the darkness, feel it in your body. How you are with the situation right now? What would it be like to be in the dark with this question as if that is exactly where you need to be? Let the question spread itself out in the darkness – there is nothing to hem it in here.
Darkness invites us into not knowing. There is so much we can’t know there. In fact, to survive in the darkness, one has to embrace the not knowing, respect it, use it as a platform for curiosity, discernment, guidance. There is no room for judging what we don’t know when we’re in the dark. The steps we can take can only really be considered one at a time. Questions, then, can grow roots in the conditions of stillness and quiet that darkness provides.
Let your question grow roots in this still place – how many layers beneath the ground does it need to go before it finds the nourishment it needs in the very center of your being? Breathe through the layers, trust the darkness to provide you with discernment about what is important and not important to see about your situation right now…..
These are some of the gifts to our leadership that turning toward the darkness brings: the room not to know; a stillness and solitude that gives immediacy and directness to our experience and allows us to see the emptiness in the constructions we create; the lifting of urgency so that our questions can breathe and go deeper; access to our instinctual, intuitive ways of knowing; being with our vulnerability as deep intimacy. Imagine what it would be like if, collectively, we took on such an embrace…
Jung writes: “when the soul embraces and accepts suffering, the pain reveals itself as the birth pangs of a new inner being.”
And Rilke offers “if only we could arrange our lives in accordance with the principle that tells us that we must always trust in the difficult, then what now appears to us to be alien will become our most intimate and trusted experience.”
The womb of darkness is ultimately a transformative crucible, at some moment giving way to the luminous, inner light of Awareness, of Being itself. This then is what the celebrations are about, the festivals of light. They celebrate an inner transfiguration of the darkness more than its escape.
May this be your experience during this season and in the coming of the New Year.
Step into your greater service to bring about a more beautiful, equitable and sustainable future for humanity. GTC Starts April, 2012 in the U.S. and September, 2012 in Australia and New Zealand. Learn more.
{ 6 comments… read them below or add one }
Thank you, PI… This has long been my path of awakening, and the overarching theme for me this year. I am curious about your (author’s) own experience with darkness. The article, while it points to important aspects of this side of our humanness, would be more human to me if I could find YOU somewhere, in the darkness, too.
Hi Allison, Thank you for your comment. It’s always a fine line for me as to how much to bring my personal experience into what I write for PI’s wider audience. My life has been punctuated with extended periods of darkness in the form of depression and anxiety, rooted in genetics and family of origin issues, amplified as it is for many by cultural shadow. The earliest experience extended across a decade through college, medical school and into residency. My final emergence from this period marked a threshold into the spiritual practices and conscious developmental inquiry and unfolding that has informed my life and work since then. The gift in my encounters with darkness have been passed on in the way I worked with patients in my medical practice, hearing and legitimzing the life concerns at the root of patients’ suffering, addressing their fears and inviting them to turn toward their vulnerability as part of the healing journey. It informed my decision to leave practice in order to teach embodied self-awareness which has been the path that has most enabled my journey through the dark places in my being and my life. It is slowing me down and giving me pause once again as I seek to invite still hidden parts of myself into the larger whole of my life at the advent of my 7th decade… Thank you for inviting me to ‘come out’ and meet you here. It would be wonderful if you would care to share some of your own awakening journey through the darkness…
Bless you, Julia, for sharing the beautiful gift of emergence from that dark place. It seems many of us have delved and resurfaced, and it seems to be a common experience of being gifted with brighter light after groping though the dark. Embracing the darkness and the unknown for their gifts must be learned; it is neither intuitive nor easy. I welcome the dark intentionally now, for newer and deeper appreciation of the light. Thank you for brining us there. I agree with Allison; we all would surely benefit from bumping into each other in the darkness more often. I would like to share something I wrote once, upon surfacing:
Animation
I create my darkness;
the not-giving safety of unspoken,
turning away, turning inward.
I create my darkness;
breathe my own acrid fog.
Clouding the filmy pod
of my chosen seclusion.
Containing, confining,
concealing from any self;
sulphurous.
You cannot see me;
amorphous shadow,
wispy outline, paled, vague.
I cannot see you, feel you, be you.
I invite the light;
focused breath, clearness drawn
deeply through the porous membrane.
Intentional, inward, outward, vast.
Breathing yes, I see you;
I invite we.
How beautiful Bernie. So pleased to have you respond to the invitation as well.
I appreciate your mention of the learning process it is to move into and participate with the darker, more shadowy aspects of our developmental journeys. One of the most challenging things for me about the pull into the dark. even when I ascent to go there, is not knowing where it will head, when or if I will emerge and who I will be when I do. One can’t know and its terrifying not to. The process forces a deep practice of trust in emergence – and that there some larger movement at work than that of personality alone.
At some point, when something breaks open, when that to which I have been subject becomes object and I can gain some purchase as witness to my process, it is tempting to leap ahead to glimpse a horizon free of the darkness. But that never seems to be where the light first reveals itself – not on the distant horizon, but, as you suggest, in the luminosity of a clearer seeing that comes from within – or that comes through us from a greater knowing.
Rilke so beautifully describes this territory, its pain and uncertainty, and the collaboration with a force that transcends our separateness –
It’s possible I am pushing through solid rock
in flintlike layers, as the ore lies, alone;
I am such a long way in I see no way through,
and no space: everything is close to my face,
and everything close to my face is stone.
I don’t have much knowledge yet in grief –
so this massive darkness makes me small.
You be the master: make yourself fierce, break in:
then your great transforming will happen to me,
and my great grief cry will happen to you.
Rilke from A Book for the Hours of Prayer
Thanks again Bernie for your offering,
Julia
Julia, I believe you touch the core, at least for me, that is. It is precisely the “not knowing”, the giving over to the “great transforming”; the willingness to step into the space beyond the known and trust the unseen hands. It is the closing of the eyes and falling backward into non-self; trusting spirit, energy, grace to guide us gently into the downy bosom of we-ness.
Embracing the “not knowing” in a personal, internal sense is one thing, but I think there is a parallel experience in a facilitation setting, when the group has walled out and the silence is frightening and full of tense anxiety. A younger me would immediately struggle to fill the void with blather; flail about in discomfort and throw myself mightily against the looming brick wall. I have learned to embrace the void, relax, beathe, settle back in calm and wait for someone to find the first loose brick (with apologies to the master).
David Whyte has a beautiful way of leading us there:
Sweet Darkness
When your eyes are tired the world is tired also.
When your vision is gone no part of the world can find you.
It’s time to go into the dark where the night has eyes to recognize its own.
There you can be sure you are not beyond love.
The dark will be your home tonight,
and night will give you a horizon further than you can see.
You must learn one thing.
The world was made to be free in.
Give up all the other worlds except the one to which you belong.
Sometimes it takes darkness and the sweet confinement of your aloneness to learn
Anything or anyone that does not bring you alive
is too small for you.
-David Whyte
Thank you again, Julia, for bringing us here and shining a light on this path. I would like you to say more about “gain some purchase as witness to my process”. This is something I find impossible at times, but in some instances it happens as easily as falling off the proverbial log.
Bernie
Hi Bernie,
I think what I mean by “gain some purchase as witness” is arriving at a point where Awareness/’my’ awareness begins to be able to grasp the next available perspective on whatever has been happening for me/what I’ve been in the dark about. It is the moment in which Awarness is able to transcend and include that which “I” have been at the effect of. In my experience, it is always a moment of grace, something given rather than attained.
And yet, I also think there are conditions that one can create to enable the eventual moment of seeing. The conditions may be different at different levels of development. For example, awareness may come when one finally allows one-self to really listen and take in challenging feedback. It may come in the process of being ‘listened into speech’ by a friend or a skillful therapist. There have been times for me when the dedication to personal practices – such as yoga and meditation – created a window for clarity and integration to arise. Turning attention to the sensations in the body in a moment of emotional turmoil – as you so beautifully described in your poem – can lead to a release of contraction and a presence with Being that provides a vantage point from which to witness.
Most recently the sense of ‘gaining purchase’ arose when I directly sat in the question “Where is the Witness in all of this? Is it possible to feel at once the tumultuous machinations of this bodymind and Awareness of the machinations of this bodymind?” While sitting inside that question, a felt sense arose that offered some remove from the state I’d been in and, from that place – a kind of benevolent self-compassion – a surprising new understanding, a glimmer of landscape, emerged on the dark horizon.
Ultimately it is all grace, but it seems we can invite it through our intentional and willing participation in the process in whatever form.
Thanks, Bernie, for the reflection and learning your quesiton and offerings have provided.
Blessings of the Season to you, Julia