I know the dark calls to you sometimes.
That you turn your face from the light.
I know you walk down the roads you know you shouldn’t,
walk into places your heart is gently urging you not to.
–Sarah Blondin, Practicing Gentle Kindness Toward Ourself*
So, how are you doing with the darkest time of the year? As our sunlit time shrinks by minutes, day by day, have you let yourself face inward, to the darkest, most remote places inside of you? Those disowned parts that you hope never to stumble upon yourself, let alone let anyone else see?
I teach about projection, and find myself learning about it every day.
“There is no there out there,” I repeat to my students. “What we perceive is necessarily everything we’ve learned up to this point so that we can try to predict what’s going to happen.” In other words, projection is how we can take one step and then the next out into what would otherwise be completely unknown to us. Our inner imaginings allow us to walk through the world.
Unfortunately, projection is what entangles us in our human relationships, both intimate and remote.
As we interact with each other, it is the sum total of our lifetime of lessons that is actually doing the talking. So long as we’re in Creative Brain, we’ll imagine the best of each other, and our exchange will be in flow. However, if one or both of us is in Reactive Brain, suddenly that sweet connection is interrupted by the imposing shadows of threats long past. Our brains take us on a swift flight into the darkness of our past, connecting unconscious dots that immediately posit righteous theories of danger. It’s like we’ve fallen from heaven to hell in a quick moment or our reactivity, sometimes taking us right into a living nightmare.
I know there are places in side of you you try to wrestle away, that you do not love…
Our collective is full of frightening tales these days.
We look for someone to blame–politicians, billionaires, criminals, slackers, elites, other generations, other ethnicities/classes/religions. We forget that there is no there out there, that the only enemy is within. And the only way to conquer that most challenging of adversaries is to track it down…and love it.
You are human, my dear one
My dearest love, you are human
You are allowed to be in both ways
You are not wrong, you are not failing because you still get lost in dark rivers
You are human.
We have almost three weeks before we tip back around, gaining more and more light. What great news, that you have 19 more days to face directly into your biggest internal monsters, the ones that has been stalking you, waiting to jump out and frighten you as your own worst self.
When you arrive in the dark
Know you are being offered a chance to grow your own internal garden of love
That the dark offers you a chance to love all the places you never dare
All of the places that challenge you
All of the places you curse
That the dark offers you a restoration of love of you entire being,
no matter what land that you stand in.
And what a gift, that you have, once again, a season of darkness to bring you face-to-face with the the ultimate challenge, to love you. Every last bit of your most expanded, and your most contracted, being.
*Sarah Blondin’s magnificent guided meditations can be found free through her Live Awake podcast. This episode can be found on the InsightTimer app.
Did you know that my book, The Relationship Ride: A Usable, Unusual Transformative Guide is now available on audio? Find it on Audible or many other audio book platforms.