In the Name of Love, Seek out the Darkness

“Only the good die young”, Herodotus

The more vulnerably you lay your soul out on the table to be eaten by the wolves, the more skilled you must become at using the darkness to bring forth the light. In fact, the more intentionally skilled you become at awakening yourself, the more skilled you must become at being a light worker in the dark.

It’s a theme circulating in the collective and gaining momentum. It’s focused on those who wear their hearts on their sleeves. Those that bare naked their souls in a world perhaps not yet prepared to feel such depths in such an overt way. Let’s face it, most of us often exist buried beneath defence mechanisms of protection.

This concept is not for those who readily bare naked their darkness. More often than not, these people have already learned of its powers. In fact, they’re likely on the opposite end of the spectrum and learning how not to abuse of it.

It touches on a subject that is still not very understood and considered somewhat taboo in the love and light community. It’s actually a subject that most people functioning in sincerity and transparency don’t even think about until they’re confronted with situations and people who live from a completely different perspective.

It’s a needed tool to navigate through the waters of clashing codes of ethics within the greater community. Where things get tricky and lines get blurred in the great big psychological playing field of life. Where the perpetrators are both the victims and the saviours. Where every coin has more than just three sides. The place where if you’re not protecting yourself with some form of ‘darkness’ you’re going to be trampled on by the karma whores.

From which ever way you view it, we can attribute our actions and behaviours as either having a positive or negative effect on ourselves and those around us. Usually there’s a bit of both for everyone. Personally, this equates to making it out alive in a world that consists of more than just a few dimensions to navigate through. Chose your lenses of perception or perhaps your brain is shaped a little differently.

For those that feel the suffering of walking open heartedly in a crowd which often seeks to conceal and control, you’re going to have to learn how to navigate the waters of deception, illusion and human fallibility more equipped than you might have realized. And yes, this means learning about the darkness that a large portion of the population so readily uses to climb the ladders of personal power and prestige.

It’s the remedy to emotional sensitivity and psychic fragility. It’s learning how to source energy from the darkness to maintain sovereignty in the light. It’s using the darkness to create a strong back bone for standing tall in healthy authentic power.

What is authentic power? We should each come up with our own definition but for myself it's the ability to act from a place of heart courage with the best interests of personal and group health in mind. To be conscious enough to attempt considering all perspectives. To be sovereign enough to know your personal truth, so as to respond to the world around you in a coherent and effective way. Without loosing who you are but allowing yourself to lose what isn’t truly you. No easy task.

—“Where the comedian takes refuge in the absurdity of it all, the stoic philosopher presses on grimly.”Jules Evans

There are two ways to deal with the tragedy of the cosmic joke. The cosmic joke being that no matter who you think you are and which way you look at it, you’re going to at one point experience being oppressed and at one point someone is going to experience you as being their oppressor.

The worst cases are when your intentions weren’t meant to oppress anyone, yet your actions spoke another language to them, or when you directly experienced the ill intentions of another. Either way, it’s a mishmash that creates a cosmic soup, one that you can either laugh off and forget, moving forward into the next mishmash no better prepared, or grimly press on remembering the messiness of it all with a deeper understanding of the human condition. Holding strong to the goal of becoming more integrated and better prepared to navigate through the waves of shock, awe, illusions and disillusions that never stop coming.

—What you don’t know about your own darkness will continue to hurt others.

Own that monster. Your ancestral trauma. Your mother’s wounds, your father’s whip. Own it before it owns you and continues to hurt anyone who comes too close to you. Until we take responsibility for that which we are perceiving on the outside as hurting us, it will only continue to haunt us internally. Even if that thing is real. Trust me, I get it, sometimes the external harm is real.

People can be twisted, human nature is twisted, but the darkness that we refuse to own within ourselves provokes the external situations. When you can own your dark side and heal your own wounds your boundaries become stronger. You’re more likely to be in acceptance of the pain in others. It makes it easier to shield yourself from the agitations caused by another’s projected pain.

If you can’t learn and source from your own darkness, you’ll never understand the darkness in others, and that feeling of disconnection to other people suffering in your community is way more painful than cracking open the pain of your own darkness to find a source of mercy, compassion and understanding for all.

—“The charnel ground is that great graveyard in which the complexities of samsara and nirvana lie buried”, Chögyam Trungpa

In the Buddhist tradition there’s a practice for bodhichittas which help you cut your attachments to the things you can not change, including the deception and illusions of your own ego. It’s called the practice of Chod. It’s an odd practice in the sense that you go into meditation to metaphorically offer up your ego and body to all people, including your perceived opponents and real life perpetrators.

You imagine beheading yourself first and then cutting your body into pieces to be offered over to them in a skull cup. A supreme offering of your nectar to all beings. A part of this practice symbolically represents releasing attachment to your ego’s involvement in a negative situation, it's a purification of obstacles. Sourcing power from this type of darkness if very enlightening.

It allows all that is based in your samsara illusions to burn away faster. Often what we are perceiving are patterns of energy that are in motion due to the karma that we come into this lifetime with. As much as each person involved in a negative situation plays a personal role in creating it, there’s a thread of perception that runs through it which can only be perceived uniquely by you. Sometimes that perception itself is in fact at the heart of the pain you’re experiencing in the situation. Either way, this practice allows us to take responsibility for what we can change and reduces the risks of reacting to outside situations in ways that will generate more karma. Only you know what will generate more karma, it’s a sensed knowing based in your personal integrity.

—“Hurt people, hurt people.” Will Bowen—

Find a healthy outlet to express your darker emotions so they need not be directed at other people. That is, try to not purposely hurt others just because you yourself are experiencing pain. This is always the point of initiation. Use your pain instead to awaken within you the capacity to heal its causes of origin by expressing them in healthy ways. Human beings need to have ways of expressing emotions that are not acceptable to society. Feelings of anger, hate, disgust, jealousy, revenge, envy and so on, need the most creative attention to be transformed. Keeping them bottled up is unhealthy for the mind, body, soul and can lead to illness if you fear their darkness. If you are ignorant to them they will eventual hurt others.

Use the Darkness to Fuel Sacred Anger

Use the sacred anger from your darkness to give you the strength to stand up to people when necessary. If you’re too afraid to hurt other people’s feelings in order to draw a clear line in the sand as to what types of negative behaviour you’re not willing to accept, the more people will take advantage of your kindness.

Unfortunately people that are experiencing suffering will try to get you to suffer with them. It’s their way of feeling seen and not having to deal with their pain alone. Despite this, it doesn’t give them the right to hurt you covertly or otherwise because they’ve been hurt themselves. But let’s face it, if they’ve been taught that love equals pain, you can be sure that their understanding of love will be convoluted with some form of their suffering. There’s no need to use your darkness violently to do this, use it responsibly so they know they can’t take advantage of you just because you have a big heart. It’s a healthy “No” in the face of an unhealthy conditioned “Yes”.