Blog by Valerie

“Darkness is the purest form of light” is a teaching I deeply honour from Tiwa Elder Joseph Rael – Beautiful Painted Arrow. He says this because out of darkness all colours and possibilities emerge, whereas white light reflects and pushes all colours away. Darkness is a metaphor of the sacred womb where we all begin our lives in our mother’s bodies. And darkness envelops us each night (if we allow it). Within the womb of darkness is the potentiality for anything to be (re)born.

I heard an interview with Gina Chick recently in which she said that she spends most of her time in uncomfortable spaces. That is also my experience of living in a way where I honour darkness, and it aligns with the explanation of the Red Road discussed in a previous post, where we focus the majority of our energy on honouring ancestors, living our core values, and grounding respectfully where we are. (Image: metaphor of a plant that spends most of its energy building strong roots and connecting with other plants underground, and less energy flowering or fruiting above the ground)

I’ve found that when we are committed to a holistic spiritual path of allowing all feelings and thoughts to flow without existential judgment, when others we are in relationship with do not do this too, seeds of destructive energy grow bigger between us, along with pain, judgment, insecurity, and crazy-making cognitive dissonances. If both are willing to confront the resulting mess, come together to listen to each other and take responsibility for choices, behaviours, and resulting impacts (whether intended or not), then the relationship and trust between them can repair and deepen. Unconditional love means no existential judgment.

If one or both do not do this, then the relationship transforms into one with less trust, safety and intimacy, and it can even fracture beyond repair. And broken trust, as most of us have experienced, tends to be harder to rebuild than it is to grow trust and intimacy in the first place.

In a recent blog I shared that I have witnessed numerous people work for years towards something, then turn their backs at a pivotal moment in abandonment and destruction. Some stories and beliefs seem so deep they trick us into crazy-making cognitive dissonances that become hard to contain. Cognitive dissonance is when we feel split by words and stories not aligning with behaviours and actions. For example, if we believe we are a good friend and that means we don’t feel jealous of friends’ successes, yet we do feel jealous when a friend gets a new job and we feel stuck in job rut, then we might push those feelings aside and pretend they’re not there. (Image: let’s feel it all so the negative feelings ground and we grow from them rather than growing into piles of sh*t in our lives!)

This becomes even more crazy-making when we layer denial on top. If the friend who got the new job is like me, she can feel this jealousy rising and wants to avoid it destroying the relationship. Maybe she practices giving compassion and grace while hoping that her friend processes the hard feelings, and hopefully she processes some of her own hard feelings such as disappointment that her friend couldn’t celebrate her new opportunity with her. If time passes and the hard feelings persist, she might ask her friend to talk so as to clear the air between them. If the jealous friend is too scared, ashamed, unaware or in denial about her hard feelings to be able to take responsibility and process them and instead tells the friend with the new job that she’s crazy, she is happy for her and doesn’t have any jealousy, that becomes crazy-making for both of them.

Crazy-making takes a lot of energy to carry. It spirals us out of our hearts and bodies, creating separation from our truth. We lose integrity and the ability to experience wholeness when we are trying to be two people at once. In the previous example, the jealous friend trying to be ‘a good friend’ isn’t allowing herself to be authentic and a messy human who can both feel happy for her friend and a bit jealous as well. That’s actually making her less of a good friend and growing the seed of jealousy even bigger, creating more destruction in the relationship. To me, the best thing that could happen is that the jealous friend lets go of her judgmental story about identifying and behaving as a ‘good friend’ so as to create an opening for the two of them to have a real and sustainable friendship capable of withstanding pain and hard emotions. (Image)

Exercise: What stories do you tell yourself that limit your openness to darkness? You may wish to close your eyes and meditate on the question: ‘What do I believe about the nature of darkness?‘

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