Loving the Darkness Healing the Light

by Pamela Black

As a personal coach and trainer for many years, I've learned to look for patterns - in issues, in healing modalities, in belief systems and their resulting outcomes. In the past year I have seen extraordinary patterns in my clients and colleagues. We are experiencing a time of unprecedented beauty, unparalleled joy, and exquisite misery.

What?

In working with hundreds of people in the past few years, I believe we are approaching critical mass - the "hundredth monkey" leading to an ideology of harmony and unconditional love that many have sought for centuries. In Native American culture, we've called it The Thousand Years of Peace. Ancient Greek philosophy spoke of the Golden Age. The Mayans, the Hopi, the ancient Essenes: Walk between the Worlds, the Age of Wisdom, the Aquarian Age.

In the dawning days of the U.S.-Iraqi war, unprecedented numbers of people worldwide spoke loudly and eloquently on behalf of peace. And even many peace-hearted people have felt uplifted by the capture of Saddam Hussein and a hope that U.S. priority will soon lie in rebuilding the Iraqi homeland and unifying its people in peace.

Yet, why is it that many people are feeling personally pulled into old patterns, long thought to be healed? Many are being besieged by fears of unknown origin and unexpected emotional outbursts. Why are we having such a hard time walking daily in the personal peace we've desired?

The "Unconditional" Part of the Equation

We've reached this amazing point in our healing because as a person, as a nation, and as a world we are focusing more openly on love. We can be proud of this. Now we are being called to take things to the next level. It's time to turn our commitment to the "unconditional" part of the equation. To truly understand where many of us are as individuals, and where we are now as a collective, a nation, we must go into the darkness, and it is intensely testing our desire for unconditional love.

I see many people, friends and clients, genuinely transforming their lives. But in order to do so, they walk first in the darkness, to find love in their deepest fears, to empower their love. In order to discuss how we can do this, we must first examine the darkness.

One of the founders of modern psychology, Carl Jung, spoke of our "shadow," our individual and collective repression. Jung said that as we develop from childhood, we take on belief systems that certain attributes are "good" and others are "bad." Honesty is good; lying is bad. Pretty is good; ugly is bad. Being likeable and liked is good; being ornery and disliked is bad. And so on. But as we grow, we experience situations where we come to believe that we embody those "bad" attributes. We don't pass the test. We spill our juice. Aunt Mabel says we're one brick shy of a load; the kid on the playground says we have a funny nose.

Our reaction is shame. And because shame is such a dense vibrational feeling, uncomfortable in the extreme (especially for us love-based, light-body beings), we have to do something to rid ourselves of that shame. Most of us at age 3 or 10 or even 22 don't have healthy mechanisms for healing and releasing these dense and unloving emotions and thoughts, so in defending our mental health and well-being, we use techniques of repression, suppression and denial. And in a few days, we're "happy" again, while we continue to add layers to our defensive structures, and our "denial muscles" get stronger and more well-defined.

None of us gets through childhood, puberty, adolescence, and young adulthood without experiences that ultimately create belief systems that are much less than joyous and peaceful. So is it any wonder that as adults we are filled unconsciously with - and manifest outwardly through the circumstances of our lives - these layers of defensive beliefs that we are not good enough, smart enough, pretty enough, fast enough, slender enough, popular enough, rich enough? So we keep stuffing, stuffing, stuffing.

We come to be driven not by those things we want - our goals - but rather by those things we want to avoid, or repress. It's knee-jerk, often unconscious, and we seem incapable of behaving differently. We've all felt ourselves react when someone "pushes our button." We've all been on the other end by accidentally pushing someone else's. The reason for this is what Jung called the reactive mind. It's as innate as "fight or flight." We've been programmed so deeply that certain traits are bad that we react immediately when someone does or says something that brings our repressed or denied belief system anywhere near the surface of our reality.

We cannot "have" beauty because we so hate ugly

This reaction to our shadow affects what I call "havingness" or our ability to have what we say we want. For instance, we cannot truly have prosperity because we're actually running from poverty. It's our poverty consciousness that's driving us. We cannot be beautiful because we so hate the idea of being ugly. We can do all the affirmations we want, but if our "driver" is hating poverty, guess what we are unconsciously focused upon, and therefore keep creating in our lives. It's the same with illness, relationships, career, and all of life.

Are you seeing the pattern if we take this out to the collective level: We cannot have peace, because we so hate/ fear war.

Now we can begin to see our resolution: We are coming to understand the darkness, to understand how we got here, and in that we can begin to release our shame. We can only begin to have light when we no longer resist darkness.

Let's look at the next layer: Because those beliefs that we're not enough are much too discomforting to face every day, we do what Jung called "projecting." We look at others and see those same attributes in them, and we hate them. We hate "those people" because they are showing us, right on the surface, those attributes we don't want to think about, because then we might have to face the thought that we are those things, too.

And so we project our hatred of lying onto those other people we see lie, when we're really trying to deny or repress those times when we have lied. We don't want to recognize those times when we take care of our own needs by blurring the truth or small omissions with others, and we especially don't want to be reminded that we even lie to ourselves. When we see others lie, it's much more comfortable to blame and vilify them. Remember Bill Clinton?

We do the same with cruelty, projecting our hatred onto all those cruel people we see, when in truth we are squirming, trying not to recall those moments we've been self-serving at the expense of another. We project our anger and judgment at rich people in order to keep hidden from our minds the times when we've wanted something outrageously luxurious and unnecessary and were told that we were selfish or bad to want those things, or heaven forbid, to want those things in the face of someone who had less- remember the starving kids in China?

We have come to think of ourselves as such bad people, and that is such a horrific and uncomfortable thought and not true, as our highest selves know, that we repress those experiences and beliefs and project all that anger out into the world on others who portray those traits.

In fact, the most frightful disease on the planet is now epidemic, and it's called "self-beat-up-itis" and the most prevalent symptom is that we sit in judgment of lots of other people, constantly seeing how bad they are and how terribly they've messed things up (for themselves, for me, for my country, etc.). This is the root of judgment; it's really judgment against self.

This is how we came to be a country filled with victim consciousness, rampant judgment, and unchecked anger and fear. We're not looking within; we're projecting outwardly. We are, truly, shouting at the dark.

Fortunately, the world is set up to help us heal these misconceptions. How? Simple: It keeps putting situations in our faces that will show us our own repressed or denied misperceptions.

And how do I know we as a group are healing more deeply than ever? Because many people are experiencing situations that bring them to acute misery - circumstances or other people coming into their lives in order to mirror their unconscious beliefs and allow them a chance to heal. Look at the people showing up in our lives (both individually and in the world arena), see the circumstances we find ourselves in, and realize that the resolution is not in trying to fix them but in asking, "What within me does this reflect?" It's never about the other person or situation; it's always about them being a mirror to show me something in myself that I've not wanted to see.

The next step is to let ourselves off the hook. We are all human, which means we have physical bodies, that seek not only to survive and get our needs met but also to have comfort and beauty around us. Each have an emotional body, which seeks not only joy but also to get out of pain and fear. Each have a mental body which has been watching all our lives to interpret situations and make decisions about how best to meet the goals of the other bodies. And our physical, emotional and mental bodies have done the best they could at the time.

And the same is true of others: they've lived with their own unique experiences and have created their own impressive defensive mechanisms, just like mine. We're all walking around seeing these towering structures, believing we are seeing the real person within, but in truth, we're really seeing only the inside of our own defensive walls. This is why we can never heal it "out there;" we can only begin to truly heal by looking "in here."

So when we see someone behaving in a way we want to judge, we can ask ourselves, "What within me am I seeking to heal?" And we can find it easier to let the other person - and therefore ourselves - off the hook by realizing how much pain a person had to be in to build a defensive mechanism that would cause him or her to act this way.

This is the start of what author Colin Tipping calls Radical Forgiveness. Realizing that other person, or that situation, is in my life not to add to my misery but to give me an opportunity to heal some misconception within me.

As Maya Angelou says, "I did the best I could at the time. And when I knew better, I did better." So now that we understand the darkness better, we can do better.

And here's the formula for shifting any issue: Awareness is 96 percent, and the next 3 percent is to find some amusement in it. The final 1 percent is simply making a new choice.

By going into the darkness and looking within, we find awareness of our own patterns, fears, misperceptions. By then finding a little amusement about it, we lighten up, or enlighten, that dense, dark energy of shame (or blame or resentment or anger or fear) and allow a bit of light to start dissipating the darkness and allowing higher, lighter energy to heal this space. And finally, we simply make a decision that we are new in every moment, and we can do better. We can forgive others - and ourselves. We can see in them - and ourselves - the light and the dark; in other words, our humanity.

And when we see darkness in others, or darkness in ourselves, instead of judgment, we begin to understand that the darkness is simply our alert system, letting us know there's something we can seek to heal. Love the darkness; it's our greatest teacher, our truest mirror. And through darkness alone, we can begin to respond with unconditional love.

Based in Atlanta, Pamela Black is a principal trainer for the Institute for Radical Forgiveness, and teaches energy tools and life skills in Raleigh. Call 919-544-1476 or 404-314-9331, or email bpamela@mindspring.com for info.

2/1/04