Unlearning the Fear of Darkness

Today's episode topic comes to us from the Centers for Spiritual Living Global Themes.  The theme for the month of May is Light Within the Shadows

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Hello, hello, hello. This is Reverend Karen coming at you from Fearlessly Feral Living. And today I'm going to be talking about kind of a heavy desert topic. But I hope when we come out of this you won't be feeling heavy. You'll be feeling light. The title of my podcast today is called Unlearning the Fear of Darkness. Now before I get to it, let me do the introduction for you, because we got to do the introduction. Welcome to Fearlessly Fair A Living, broadcasting to you from the Woogie Ranch out here in the back 40 of northwestern Nevada, where I'm a half an hour away from the nearest gas station and the nearest grocery store. This podcast is devoted to using new thought principles to ensure successful creative living. Fearlessly Feral is a focused ministry of Centers for Spiritual Living and is devoted to the vision of a world in which everyone lives fearlessly feral, or if you prefer, wild and free. So I got today's topic from Centers for Spiritual Living. Now in Centers for Spiritual Living, we have a set of what we call global themes. These themes are created annually. They're created through a spiritual process called visioning. And they're created through the visioning process by a bunch of Centers for Spiritual Living ministers. They get together and they vision. And what comes out is what ultimately results in the global themes. So the theme for this month is called Light Within the Shadows, and I really like that theme. And yeah, today we're going to talk about unlearning the fear of darkness and what happens when we do that. So first we're going to get kind of dark for a minute. I'd like you to settle in and just imagine you've just experienced a loss. This loss is so profound, so deep, you despair you will ever come out of it. This is the kind of loss where if you start crying, you think you're never going to be able to stop, and so you keep yourself from crying. That's the kind of loss. You're plunged into a dark hallway so vast and so dark that all you can do is collapse in shock. Now the collapse might be literal, but more likely it may be metaphorical. But soon after the collapse, if you are like most of us, you will emerge in a fear-based consciousness of either flight or fight. Because let's face it, most of us don't want to stay in that dark place for very long. There's dragons in those dark places. So we come out fighting in anger and rage. We come out with our walls up. That's a form of flight, by the way. Telling the world I'll never do that again. And we begin we begin to put our life back together with some brand new limitations that we've put in place for ourselves because we're not going to do that again. And many times we also move into control mode, attempting to control everything and everyone about around us so that it never happens again. We fight the dark with our rage and our walls and our control issues, and in so doing we never benefit from that dark place. We never learn what it has to teach us. We fear that dark place so much that we will do and be just about anything rather than stay in it for a while. Now that's one way to live, but I'm here to propose another way. And I'd like to illustrate what I'm about to propose to you by reading you a poem by Mark Nipo. This poem is called Back and Forth, and it's in a book called The Half-Life of Angels. He wrote The Caterpillar has to bunch to move forward. The bird has to drop its wings to in order to pump higher. The dolphin has to dive in order to breach. Is it any wonder that we need to know sorrow in order to know joy? So I am here to tell you that allowing ourselves to fully and completely know our sorrow is indeed the way to know joy. I am here to tell you that no, there are not dragons in that dark place, unless you happen to be like me and you like dragons. But I don't like being in those dark places. I'm not going to affirm that. But if I'm going to go there, I'm going to take my dragons with me. I'm here to tell you that there is rest and recuperation and healing and shelter from the storm. And new awakenings and knowledge about ourselves that can set us up for successes we never previously dreamed of in those dark places that occur when we have a loss. But we can only experience that if we lose our fear of the dark. Which is a bit difficult because we have a cultural imperative to not allow ourselves to grieve properly. Pull yourself up by your bootstraps, we're told. Get it together. Don't ever let 'em see you sweat. Crying is for sissies. If you want to cry, I'll give you something to cry about. Those are the kind of messages we heard when we were kids. And we grow up believing in those messages. We can change those beliefs, guys. We really can. But until we do, we toughen up and we move through life. And pretty soon, before you know it, we've lost touch with that valuable resting spot that we all need after a loss. And because we naturally fear the unknown, we develop this fear of it. And this fear of the dark seems to be a bit like faith. We don't seem to be able to have faith without experience either. It's like that movie where the guy keeps saying, Show me the money. He doesn't believe in anything unless the money is shown. We don't believe in anything unless we experience, unless we can see it with our own eyes. So trying to replace that fear with faith, with allowing, with grieving that naturally results in a joy we never dreamed of. Well, it's a bit like pulling teeth sometimes. I consider myself really lucky. I experienced a profound loss about 25 years ago. No, it wasn't the only loss, but this is the one I'm going to talk about today. The kind of loss this loss was, it had me literally collapsed in a puddle of confusion and display and betrayal in the middle of the street. Literally. I didn't right away allow myself to experience the healing of a good grieving process. Instead I raged and got busy. Oh, and I found Mr. Rebound guy. You know, Mr. Rightnow, aren't those rebound relationships powerful? Oh my god. So I did that for a while. I raged and got busy and had this all consuming, very sick relationship. And then I got sick and I couldn't get off the couch. I fell into a deep, deep clinical depression because all that anger turns inward against us and it turned against me. That's what anger does. We get a temporary sense of false power from that anger, but then it turns on us and makes us either physically or emotionally ill. So when I couldn't get up off that couch, I was forced to give into that grief and fully process it. It was either that or lose everything because I simply couldn't function anymore. I couldn't go to work. I got willing. And I jumped in to that dark place and I examined myself and my beliefs and what I wanted to keep in my life and what I wanted to release. I reminded myself that forgiveness was about me and not about him. And I forgave everything and I set things right. And I moved along in my world much happier and more at peace because of the entire experience. And I learned that it wasn't right or good for me to pull myself up by my bootstraps and get back into the stream of life. I learned that the easier, softer way, the better way to do things was to fully immerse in this grieving process and give myself a little bit of a break. And yeah, much happier and more at peace because of it. I still experience dark times today, but the dark looks a bit different. And if you do this, if you go into the dark, I'm sure that you'll have the same experience. Because when we do this, we learn the value of the dark. We learn it's okay to retreat and rest and cry and nap and journal and repeat as necessary until those glimmers of light that come in the form of spiritual awakenings, which are really personality changes, come in. And I've experienced those fleeting feelings of peace and joy that progress from fleeting to more established. And when we start having more established peace and joy that lasts longer and sticks around for a while, when that happens, then we know we're ready to enter the mainstream of life again. So it's beneficial to do grief work. It's beneficial to process the anger and the dismay until we get to forgiveness. There is much for us to learn in the dark. We learn to feel our way through it and come out the other side, not just renewed, but new, different, wiser, with new beliefs in place, new ways of thinking in place. But able to appreciate the light that much more because we've experienced the darkness. I am so happy to tell you that when we go through that darkness and emerge out the other side, things are as beautiful as those newborn babies that everybody falls in love with. Life just seems newer and more vibrant. Yes, the darkest part of life, not something to be hidden, ignored, or shamed, but instead just as valuable as the light. There are just as many answers and spiritual awakenings and shifts in the dark as there are in the light. And that dark place, you know, I like to call it the hallway. It's a place where a loss has occurred and we haven't quite yet processed it. And the loss could be anything from a big change, like the loss of a partner through divorce or death, or a change in jobs, or a change in our living situation. We can also be thrust into a hallway of sorts with little changes, such as snow when it's springtime and it's supposed to be warm, or the restaurant you're at being out of your favorite dish. Little losses like that. There's a guy named Harry Levinson. He lived from 1922 to 2012. He was an American psychologist, and he worked in uh he was a consultant for work and organizational issues and a pioneer in the application of psychoanalytic theory to management and leadership. That's a mouthful, but here he has a quote, and here's what I want to concentrate on. He said, All change is loss, and all loss must be mourned. All change is loss, and we have to mourn it all. To not do so means all those little losses pile up on us until one day we find ourselves frozen in fear, can't leave the house. I've seen that happen a lot. So if all change is loss and loss must be mourned in order to be to successfully weather the loss, then it is in the morning that some of our most valuable work must be done. An earnest Holmes said, sitting in the shadow, we may not really believe that there is any sunshine. But the sun is there all the time. We just have to awaken to it. And in order to awaken to the sunshine, we must first process the loss. There is simply no way out of the darkness except through it. And yet once again we bump up against that culture imperative to fear the dark, to avoid it at all costs, and not admit that we are grieving and hurting and scared and shocked and dismayed. So what are we to do? I found some suggestions in my research for this topic. Center for Spiritual Living, Santa Rosa has a Facebook page, and they published this blurb there in preparation for this topic that I'm talking about today. Here's what they said. We have likened darkness to evil for eons. We have been generally taught to fear instead of embrace the darkness. The darkness is the fertile space of creation, creativity in the womb. I love that. The darkness gives birth to the light. In order to appreciate the beauty of the darkness, we have to unlearn the stigmas about it. What if we partnered with the dark instead of fearing, controlling, and labeling it? What if we held the unknown with wonderment instead of fear? These healthy shifts would help change our relationship to darkness and help us encircle the shadows and the light. So we have some clues there as to how to partner with this darkness, as to how to move through it instead of around it, as to how to use it and learn from it and benefit from it. We can partner with it. We can view the unknown with wonderment. We can change our relationship with the dark. And that right there, changing our relationship with the dark, that's what we call in this neck of the woods a treatment request. Now, treatment is affirmative prayer where we don't besiege to an outside entity, but we instead know the truth. And the truth is that I am changing my relationship with the dark right here and right now. That's the treatment. We affirm that. And then we get to look at how we get to change our relationship with the dark. Maybe allow ourselves to sit with it for a while and know that it's not killing us, that it's instead opening us up into new avenues of being, a wonderful new way of living. I think I've got a whole podcast episode about treatment somewhere. Not here. If you want to find it, I'll I'll find it for you and post the link in the show in the show notes. Our invitation here today, our intention. If you don't like treatment requests, you can say it's an invitation or an intention to partner with the dark and view the unknown with wonderment instead of fear. So what if we did that? What if we partnered with the dark? What if we held the unknown with wonderment instead of fear? What if we stood in that dark hallway and used the creative process that we learn about in our beginning foundations class to emerge from that darkness, shining a light better than anything we have ever experienced before? I have learned to love those dark hallways because it is where the creative process can happen. It's not the only place the creative process can happen, but it seems to be fertile ground there. But we have to allow it. We have to use the dark times in our lives to birth something new. I happen to take it a step further and say, those dark times, that's their job. They are specifically there to help us birth something new. Otherwise, why would we have them? If our evolution is ever an onward, upward and forward, and we experience the things in our lives that we need to experience in order to have that onward and upward evolution, that onward and upward movement in our lives, then that's what those dark times are for. That's where it happens, guys. So we partner with the dark and we use that lovely creative process that Ernest Holmes speaks of, and we create something new in our lives. We have another thing we like to teach in beginning foundations classes. It's called a seed soil plant, which stands for thought law manifestation. We think something, it gets planted in the law, and then it manifests because the law always says yes. It all begins with our thoughts and our beliefs, not the other way around. It begins with our thoughts and our beliefs. Ernest Holmes says in a book called Creative Mind, we have within us a power that is greater than anything we shall ever contact in the outer, a power that can overcome every obstacle in our life and set us safe, satisfied, and at peace, healed and prosperous in a new light and in a new life. So we're in the dark and we rest there for a while and then we connect with that power within us. And we do so through spiritual practices of meditation and contemplation and journaling and self-awareness, and we discover a bit more information about ourselves. And we change our beliefs if necessary, and we change our thinking if necessary. We plant a different seed, in other words, we think different thoughts. We nurture that seed by keeping it weed free and giving it water and maybe some food. That means we change our thinking and we keep it changed through the process of affirmative treatment. And we repeat as necessary. And then we watch the manifestation happen. And then we enjoy the fruits of our labors. In this way we can use the dark, we can partner with it, we can unlearn our fear of it, and instead know it to be what it truly is, a valuable part of life that allows us to retreat and rest and change from the inside out. And once we have done that, we can emerge from the dark, free and ready to begin to do the things that we want to do in the outer world. We release our fear of the dark and we open to new perspectives. So your invitation with this podcast episode is to partner with the dark and view the unknown with wonderment. And I thank you very much for being here with me. I do hope you got some wonderful benefit out of this episode. Fearlessly Feral Living is a focus ministry of Centers for Spiritual Living, and we do appreciate your support, which is lovingly accepted and always tax deductible. And there is a number of ways you can support us. They are all listed on our webpage at fearlesslyferal.org. I thank you once again, and I am knowing that we are all living fearlessly feral.