Wrestling With Yourself We spend a lot of time in spiritual circles speaking about the importance of light, love, compassion, and kindness. Which of course are wonderful, but we negate talking about the elephant in the room. The elephant is the dark, the darkness itself. Each of us must sit with the darkness within, our own darkness. I love sitting in my home with the lights off and meditate. The first time I did this I noticed the anxiousness inside, but hearing the crickets outside allowed me to relax into the meditation. So it is wonderful to start with the darkness outside of yourself and then bringing your awareness inward to explore the aspects of judgment, criticism, addiction, co-dependency on relationships, etc… but giving yourself permission to explore the depths of the darkness inside. You can’t play the part of spiritual, because then it gives you out when things go wrong to say, “Well that is because I am human.” We are beings. Knowing all of you, loving all of you, is about arriving here fully, right here.
We live in a society that runs to self-help books to explore being happy, which is great, happiness is the end result of the exploration of darkness. When people move through darkness in life, most people just want them to be positive, or happy and move on. But the darkness is teaching us about life itself, it is a death that we are scared to explore, it is a place of deep healing. As I wrote about yesterday, darkness is the aspect of inverted love.
What brought me to spiritual practice was my own unhappiness. I had to sit with that unhappiness; when I divorced it was a dark period in my life, very dark. I had to move through lots of darkness. Darkness inside and darkness outside. Very few people wanted to sit with me during this period, but the people that did, and I thanked them everyday for that. Every mystic, teacher, guru, has a story of their own darkness helping in waking them up fully. So perhaps we are not here to find our light, perhaps we are here to jump into our darkness and explore it with support, sincerity and honesty with ourselves.
David Matthew Brown: travels the planet sharing stories, experiences, humor, and wisdom on living solely from the heart. He has spoken in USA, CANADA, NEW ZEALAND, and speaks on rotation at Unity Burbank and Antelope Valley Unity when called. He is a single Dad and loves his daughter and supports her light on this planet. He has appeared on radio, and TV as guest. His radio show Inside Out had over 400 guests including Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Michael Beckwith, Don Miguel Ruiz, Byron Katie, Marianne Williamson. He works with teens and young adults on Heart breathing.
