Darkness and Brilliance
Darkness scares us. Darkness around us leads us to move cautiously. Darkness inside us hides the brilliance at our core.
Internal darkness offers us an opportunity for self-discovery. We have been taught that, theoretically, we contain everything. All facets of life are ours to experience. What we don’t want to know gets pushed into the darkness. It breaks through in dreams or slips of the tongue or projection.
Integrating the brilliance at our center is our life’s work. We need to move through the internal rubble, created by our refusal to own different aspects of ourselves. Only then can we know the outside situation as it is and not as we are. Until we do our work, our perceptions distort and confuse our inner and outer worlds. We see outside what we refuse to see inside and then draw conclusions about the world. When we won’t accept our feelings, we get stuck in our intellects and trust them to do a job they were never meant to do — finding meaning in our experience.
In the second half of life we are challenged to integrate those parts of ourselves hidden by the darkness. They are not evil, although we have distrusted them. We have chosen a façade to hide behind instead of embracing the darkness. By avoiding honesty, we have quashed our brilliance. Healing requires surrender. When we finally acknowledge that our thinking doesn’t make life work, we move into another realm. We observe, we allow, we experience, and we trust the healing process. Now we choose presence and immediacy and trust. We practice availability in the moment. We will endure anything to move fully into our aliveness.
A peace we did not manufacture lives at our center. We can only get there by moving through all the feelings stirred up by our life experiences. When we live from the peace in our center we cooperate with Life in the ever-creative flow of becoming. That is when we own our power. It moves through us and emanates from us. We open receptively to Life, knowing that all is well. In this creative process we allow ourselves to be carried and we always say Yes.
Ruth Cherry, PhD, is a clinical psychologist in private practice in San Luis Obispo, CA.
Her specialty is the merging of psychological and spiritual dynamics. She is the author of Accepting Unconditional Love and Living in the Flow: Practicing Vibrational Alignment.
In 2017, Open Your Heart, her first book of spiritual fiction, will be available.
Ruth meditates and offers a guided meditation group daily. Through meditation she experiences healing, transformation, and partnership with Life in creating.
Ruth’s web site is: www.meditationintro.com
