Darkness Descends
For the last week and a half I’ve had this feeling that I am being dragged through my darkness.
I’ve felt so mindless and devoid of all mental concepts and knowings. It is like I’ve been drowning in all of the darkness and because my thinking processes have been so hazy and jumbled, I have been without the usual life rafts of mental concepts to grab onto to pull me out.
My inner vibration has been very low and I’ve been prone to feelings of self-hatred, guilt and shame, and intense negativity without the ability to let go. It has been a process of just sitting and sitting and sitting with the darkness while going through the motions of everyday life. In every moment I am able to witness and feel the painful lesson that is taking place.
Whenever I journey this deep into my shadow I am always reminded of how ‘unawakened’ I am and how much inner work still needs to be done. It has been staggering to see so clearly how judgmental and dualistic my mind still is. I am often still a victim to thoughts of ‘right and wrong’ and ‘good and bad’.
It is immeasurably painful to simultaneously be thinking a judgmental thought while knowing that that very thought is creating the illusion that you are separated from your Source.
When we begin to know that our beliefs and thoughts are the source of all of our pain and suffering, yet we are unable to stop the momentum of the unconscious beliefs, it can become a disconcerting situation, to say the least.
And of course, all of the judgmental and dualistic thoughts are always a mirror of our own inner feelings of lack. Whenever we think or feel that someone or something is wrong or bad, what we are really saying is that ‘it’ or ‘they’ aren’t worthy, which of course is just another way of saying that we aren’t worthy because ‘it’ or ‘they’ are just a reflection of us, of the One.
If we didn’t feel unworthy within, then we would never be able to perceive the ‘bad,’ ‘wrong,’ or ‘unworthiness’ outside of us. Our outer reality is always a perfect mirror of our inner reality.
Letting all of these judgments and negative beliefs arise while not getting pulled into them or identified with them is always very challenging. It is so hard to not start making stories out of all of the negative feelings. Oh my God, the stories I’ve created about all of my negative feelings this week. They can seem never ending. And I keep willingly giving my attention and belief to them at times.
Times like these usher in desperate and silly thoughts like, “I chose to come here and do this?!” or “When will this be over so I can just go home?” When I’m in the depths of my shadow with no light in sight, the days seem to drag on endlessly. Everything ‘out there’ becomes tinted with the inner darkness that I’m experiencing.
This experience raises the question of what to do when we are drowning in our darkness and we get so lost that we don’t know what is up or down and confusion abounds. We walk towards the shadow. We surrender into it. We keep going deeper. The only way out is through. Shadows get created when we try to avoid or suppress our darkness. We created our shadow so that one day when we ‘woke up’ to our unconsciousness we would get the opportunity to consciously walk through it and reap all of the wisdom that it provides. We just keep opening and surrendering to ‘what is’ while learning to love ‘what is’ regardless of how ‘what is’ feels like or looks like.
This morning I woke up with this ‘dying’ feeling inside of me. A ‘dying’ to write, to post a blog, to take one more step towards living the life of my dreams and becoming an inspiration for others. While writing this I had a powerful vision of me living the life of a writer and then instantaneously an unconscious belief surfaced and attempted to usurp that vision with a limited statement about how unworthy I am to live that life.
