"But if you tame me, then we shall need each other. To me, you will be unique in all the world. To you, I shall be unique in all the world . . ." – The Little Prince
For what I am holding onto will not allow me to live.
The wounds of our past: slavery, separation, running from love.
Both Mother Earth and I know the depths of the darkness.
Wounds, resurfaced, by no other than a lover.
No longer buried deep, but instead, threatening to consume the light within.
The love within.
What choice will I make?
I hear my body groan in agony.
“Good”, instructs my Mother.
This is the release.
I can’t see the way,
but with signs, she assures me that she does.
My only job is to lean back,
to trust my fall into the night sky,
to trust the stars will catch me.
There is no doubt some type of death will occur.
In my sacred groan, I choose to release my pain.
I choose to let go.
My only chance to return to the Light.
Notes:
If you are in pain right now, know that you are not alone. This is part of the human journey. To transcend our pain. Not to hold it in, but to release it. To let it go. Realize it is not a burden to carry but a path to transformation. This process of moving through pain often requires more movement of energy than journaling or meditating. I suggest first moving the body and inviting any noises…screams, groans, cries, etc to come to the surface to be released. Then you may find peace in stillness.
I believe this is the difference between suicide and ego death, which is, I know, a big statement to make. But when we hold on to our pain, internalize it, keep it inside, it can absolutely kill our light, our soul. On the other hand, if we choose to step towards the pain and allow it to move, to be released, whether it be by groaning and physical release or talking to a therapist or friend, it is simply the ego that dies so the flame within can burn brighter.
The opposite of the sacred groan is, yes, the sacred moan. I hesitate to write about the sacred moan, for lack of many people understanding. There needs to be some conceptualization of sacred sexuality, even if it is only resonating with the term. The sacred moan is the mirrored twin of the sacred groan. It is the orgasm between two divine energies merging together to create something so expansive that it cannot be held within. It too, must be released. Yes, it can happen during sex, but it can happen outside of physical intercourse too. For it is in the energy, the pleasure, the love, the intersect of two divine energies coming together to co-create something bigger, more expansive, that one could have ever done in singularity.
Instead, we’ve been trained to see it as “normal”. How the sun rise each day and the stars glitter each night. That I can give a friend a hug and feel a profound gratitude for their presence. How, as I type this, I can reach out my hand and put my fingers through the fur of a being who is pure, unconditional love.
I don’t care how well someone explains to me TVs, cell phones, and computers. I will always be amazed that I can get an “I love you” text from my dad 1,500 miles way in a matter of seconds. Or how I can get a live picture on my screen of a full movie, taped years ago, past appearing in reality as present. It’s mind blowing.
Or, that one time in my life, I was a mere egg, just a possibility. Then, a 6 lb baby, paired with another 6lb baby (my twin sister), who came out of a woman (my mother) who is more petite than I am. Now, I’m a full grown 5’4″ walking and talking adult. Bananas!
And, if you really want to talk miracles, what about the fact that we live on this sphere floating around in space, orbiting around the sun from just the right distance so we can survive, and that the moon affects the ocean tide?
Love.
That a human body, made of skin and bone, can experience the sensation of love. That be it physical, mental, emotional, or spiritual, we can love, and so deeply that it hurts.
When you think of life that way, when you can stare out at the mountains in the pink glow of sunrise or at the ocean as the sun fades in the horizon, it actually seems silly to believe magic doesn’t exist.
It may take some squinting at first, some fuzzy-ing up your vision as you did as kid to see the blackboard to prove you didn’t need glasses, this time to un-train your conditioned eyes, but I promise, when you look choose to look through the lens of awe, you will see it. Not only will you see it, you will realize magic has always existed, has always been all around you.
[I was recently asked by a friend if I’ve ever tried plant medicine before, as some of my writings seem to reflect as much. At the time of this writing, I have not, nor have I ever had any medicine much stronger than Tylenol, save for the local anesthesia when I’ve gone to the dentist or had my PRP injection. Still, I am certainly not against plant medicine and the beautiful “places” I’ve heard it can take you. (I am especially interested in using psychedelic medicine in trauma work by trained therapists.) Personally, what I have found is that the deeper I dive into my mental health journey, or inner work, and the braver I’ve gotten to be a witness to my own darkness, that only spirituality is left on the other side. This writing, in particular, was written during my “at home weekend retreat” where I spent much of the day journaling, meditating, and going out onto the land to walk my dog.]
Some say that winter’s days are too short, too dark.
I say, they are perfect harmony, for what my body and soul require.
Enough time to wander, to play in the Light.
To greet the morning deer, and howl with the coyotes welcoming night.
Enough time to rest, to read, to contemplate and write.
To whisper and twinkle with the stars and praise the moonlight. Remark in the contrast, the highlight of the white snow, against the navy sky.
Winter invites me in. My soul, grateful for the reflection. I bury myself in books and imagination while the rabbits burrow in their holes.
I feel alive in the sharp chill of the air and in the comfort of the fire.
Winter both calls me under the covers and to the window, to be a witness to the beauty of stillness, as Mother Earth rests under her own blanket, a gift from Father Sky.
Pacer, the blur shown, was one very excited puppy to be running in the moonlit snow.
I ran into the moonless night, not sure what I would find. Was I even searching? After all, I had no light, nothing, to show the way. What way?
Pulled forward only by something I could not describe. One blind step in front of the other, stumbling over rocks and roots. Falling. The dead leaves cushioning my hands.
It would have made sense to turn back, to the warmth of the fire. But in the pure black night, the way back had disappeared.
Then, in the stillness, in the silence of the dark, I heard a calling. So soft, I was temped to call it fiction. Yet fiction is not false. Indecipherable- was it coming from the sky? With my only choice to trust the yearning inside of me, I began to run again.
First hesitant, still falling- and then… Swiftly as a deer, the forest my home, I moved with primal, intuitive instinct.
I was running towards the light of the horizon, the pink and orange sky. My frozen breath, the only sign of my human body.
Until it wasn’t. Until I blended into the sunrise, leaving only footprints behind.
~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*
Without question, 2022 was a challenging year for me. While the events were not as harsh as in the year 2020 when I faced the physical death of my older sister, I faced my own spiritual death in 2022.
A great unshedding. Certain events led me to facing the pain inside of me, conversing with my own shadows, shadows that had protected me for so long…and letting them go. It was not an easy process, nor one that I would have necessarily chose at the onset. But I am grateful for it. It has already led to more love and joy in my life, or rather, an unveiling of what was already inside me. Of course, the journey is not over. I am still human after all. Yet I feel something shifting, slowly, and I am quite certain it is only because I had the courage to go into the darkness of my pain. Ironically, it is in the depths of darkness that one finds light.
This is a question many people have, but few have ever truly contemplated. We ask questions like, “If there was a God, how could He let children starve?” If we go any further than that, we usually end up at “There is no God” or “There is true evil (devil) in this world.” Neither of those answers do it for me. They’re just too incomplete, too reductionary. So I chose the path I lead my counseling clients on when they are feeling lost: go right into the darkness.
This essay is my attempt to explain darkness, from a human, spiritual, and mental health perspective and to answer the question “Is darkness real?”
My list on what darkness is or what could be ended up being a pretty long list. It included: evil, depression, night, shadow self, suppression of the light, death, rest, despair, fear, and shame. Some of the things on this list may read as inherently “bad”…but what about the night sky? What about rest? I quite enjoy my 8 plus hours of sleep each night, and anyone in Alaska will tell you that it’s hard to sleep without blackout shades. Then again, during winter, you’ll hear many Americans protest against the long, dark days, although I’ve learned to enjoy the extra time to move slowly and reflect. So if it wasn’t for our resistance to it, would the dark be negative at all?
As I was getting ready to write this essay, a friend replied to one of my social media posts on darkness. She asked me “Do you think the depression that comes with Winter is just something to sink into?” My reply, as usual, was nuanced. I replied “I would say it depends on how we want to define “depression”. Personally, I think surrendering to the “darkness” is simply part of winter/solstice. If I had to start definine things, I’d say depression is more going into the darkness and getting stuck there, rather than being able to go in and pass through.”
My counseling background tells me that depression is a few things. It’s the suppression of emotions, it’s the suppression of one’s true nature, and it’s the loss of hope. I think we could also call it the suppression of light. Like most therapists, I won’t say there are any negative emotions, just uncomfortable ones. However, many people do perceive emotions like sadness, fear, and anger as negative, and for various reasons (that’s an essay in itself), they don’t feel them. Unfortunately, that doesn’t mean they go away. It means the emotions get stuck in their bodies and like clouds that continue to build up, they block out any light. In the darkness of that inner cave, it’s hard to find a way out without any help, or without hope, so people get stuck. Lost. Maybe this is what it means to be a lost soul. The true enemy is not the fact everything feels dark, it’s forgetting that there is a way out.
To break from theory for a moment, I’ll add my personal experience. When I experienced depression in my teens and twenties, depression was a mixture of numbness and intense self-loathing. Sadness was there too, but the tears also told me I “wasn’t okay”, that something must be wrong with me. Since then, I’ve had many therapy sessions and done a lot of inner work on my own that was all about going into the darkness, which was really just all my unfelt emotions and negative beliefs about myself built up. Feeling the “cloud of my emotions”, and really, experiencing the storm inside of me allowed the clouds space to move. This gave a chance for the sun to come out. Now, the emotions still come, but they pass through my body more easily.
Next, there’s the theory of the shadow self. If you are a visual person, you can literally think of your own shadow as the 3pm sun hits your body and creates a shadow of your body, like a stealth body guard. Our shadow parts are “the guardians” of the parts of us we reject and that lay outside of us, unaccepted and not to be seen, unintegrated into the whole of ourselves. Or maybe more accurately, shadow parts are the black cloaks that surround the vulnerable parts of us left deep, deep inside of us, almost forgotten…and God knows, we’ve tried to forget them. Shadow parts may also be considered our inner demons, the traumas we have not yet faced. If you’re from the midwest, your shadow part might be hiding the emotional part of you, since “being tough” and not showing emotions is considered a value in that part of the country. Or, if you identify as male, it may not have been okay to show your feminine side as a child. In fact, you probably heard it was bad or weird. So you rejected that part of you. To cover up that part of you, you may have even created an alter ego wrapped in toxic masculinity. The problem is, you’re not whole without the emotional, feminine part of you. Our job is to take our shadows, or rather, the parts that they are protecting, and reintegrate them back into our whole being.
Sometime during the writing of this, I went to see a Reiki therapist to help gain insight on why my Achilles tendon wasn’t healing. Among other insights, he shared with me the vision he had of me curled up in the fetal position. I told him “I know that vision.” In my darkest moments, or what I had then considered my “weak moments”, this is the position anyone would find me in. The image had come up many times in therapy, and I had touched on it doing inner child work, but there was always some resistance. The vision goes back to me as a young girl. Feeling alone, dejected, and unloved. My own darkness: the belief that I am not loved. Logically, I know that there are lots of people who love me. Emotionally, I’ve always felt separate. In one break up I found myself saying “Why don’t you love me?”. But it was never about the guy. It was my core wound. And all the shadows around that evolved to help protect me from feeling the pain of that wound. The only cure was to go in and do the intense, intimate work of learning how to love myself, to go back to my younger self and say “I love you. I will not abandon you.” It was and is some of the hardest work I have ever done and continue to do.
But what about evil?
I’ve always considered myself the type of person that feels the immense pain of the world. I resisted much of this sensitivity through my early 20s because accepting the cruelty was too much to bear. How could such evil exist? If there was a Higher Power, how could they let this happen? So I chose ignorance. I didn’t want to think about it…so I didn’t.
Now, I’m a devout vegan. The thought of an animal ever being hurt can bring me to tears instantaneously. In saying that, my goal isn’t to turn everyone reading this into a vegan (though admittedly, that would be lovely), but to simply help others be aware of when they choose to ignore evil in any area of their life, to ignore darkness. Additionally, I stay updated enough on the news to know what’s happening, so I can help or donate when I can afford to. Yet to go deeper into the wars, to women being executed for claiming their right to exist, to the children dying of starvation…well, I could easily get lost in the darkness all over again and simply go numb to the pain. There’s no sense in any of it…because a world not filled with love is nonsensical! Here, I’m not going to claim that I know with certainty the answer as to whether or not evil exists on its own (although I try), but I can theorize that in many spaces, evil exists where love is forgotten. I hand out no excuses, but I see many of the “evil” leaders of the world trapped in a dark space where love and hope has been so far pushed away that their memory has no recollection of it ever existing. I see them as children in the fetal position, in a cave of darkness surrounded by shadows, and wrapped in a heavy blanket of shame. The shame tells a lie: “I must not be lovable”. Because love is a foreign concept, power becomes the desired feeling and monsters help block the lonely child from the fear of being unlovable. With the inner demons too much to bear, they have created a demon out of themselves. If only they knew the truth: that they are love, not their shadows.
Suicide, on the other hand, happens when a person turns their inner demons on themself. They internalize the shame until it truly becomes too much to carry. Too much to live with. Instead of attacking others, they attack themselves in the most destructive way possible. It doesn’t seem like a choice, because all they can see is the shadows inside of themselves and the shadows have blocked out the light.
In both instances, the lie is that one is unlovable. That love is too far gone to ever get it back. If only they knew…
Knew what?
I guess that brings us back to the beginning.
Is darkness real?
Some would argue that if we created a room without windows, only darkness would exist. I would argue back that they blocked out the light.
What about the monsters under the bed? Would they still be there if we turned on the light?
What if we’re too scared to look?
A lot of great spiritual teachers say that fear is the opposite of love, which I believe is nearly the same thing as saying that darkness is the opposite of light.
If that is true, why would anyone ever be scared of love?
This is where I usually have to bring inner child work into therapy. When I work with adults, some of them are very set in the belief that they are not good enough, that they don’t matter, that they are undeserving of love. Then I ask the question…would they ever say any of those things to a child? Could a child ever not be good enough? Could a child ever deserve the bad things happening to them? “Hell no!”, they say. But what about their 7 year old self?
Without going too deep into attachment theory and developmental research, a child’s view is “selfish”, in that it’s hard to see outside of themselves for answers. If a parent hits a child, the only reason a child can come up with is that it’s because they are bad, not because the parent has issues. And so, this little, innocent child believes they are defective. Something must be wrong with them, because in a young child’s eye, their parents know everything and are the omnipresent being in their world. Truly, children depend on their parent’s for survival, so a child must learn to do whatever they can to survive, even if it means coming up with a facade, or the belief that they don’t matter. That’s the only way they can make sense of misattuned love. The only way we can make sense of darkness.
As adults, we forget about our own light, that the power is in us, not our parents and their demons, because we’ve created our own. We’ve spent our whole life living in the shadows and allowing fear to protect us from harm. It’s hard to see any other option. (Fear truly is responsible for our primal safety. For example, if a child can tell when a parent is upset, they probably know it’s a good day to stay in their room and “hide”. Remember, basic psychology tells us that fear is our bodies’ survival response, allowing us to fight, flee, or freeze when we need to.) The fact that we’re actually free beings, that love is our core, and we’re capable of truly amazing things…well that sounds crazy.
And I, as a mental health therapist, say “then we all must become crazy.” Or maybe we’re already crazy for living in a lie for so long.
Yes, it does suck to know that we’ve all been living in one big lie our whole lives (and many will choose to reject this simply because the “truth is too much to bear”, that they didn’t have to live in so much pain for 10 ,20, 50 years…), but the sooner we accept it, the sooner we can move to toward something better.
With that, my answer.
No, I don’t believe darkness is real. It exists, yes, but only because we’ve made it up. It’s been created from our own internalized darkness, not that different from how we’ve created skyscrapers that block out magnificent views and create large shadows in the afternoon sun. Darkness is simply fear and negative, false beliefs about ourselves that, and when given the power, can lead to truly evil acts.
Even as I type my answer, my shadow, my inner critic, wants to come in and say “Who do you think you are to say you have the answer to such a big question? You, Ray, are full of it.” However, after having gone through my own darkness, another thought, a ray of hope, comes in to say “But what if it is, darkness, really all just a myth? What if you’re right? What if there is something better?”
Being my own devil’s advocate, I ask myself the next logical question: Why does darkness exist? What is its purpose?
I’ve already explained, in part, how I think darkness arises around the absence of love, or rather, the belief we are unlovable. Yet, if you believe in a Higher Power,, couldn’t that Higher Power just wipe that thought out and send us a big sticky note that reads “YOU ARE LOVED UNCONDITIONALLY”?
As someone who loves discussing purpose and meaning, all I can do here is draw on the wisdom of the existential authors that have come before me. We must each make our own meaning of the darkness.
Is it to grow? Is it because that in suffering, we find joy? Is it our challenge to return to love, and therefore deepen our understanding of it?
The answer may be individual or it may be universal. I’m not entirely sure. What really matters is that we each have an answer for ourselves, for the meaning presides over our evolution.
Which leads us to…death.
Here, I turn to the sky.
Every day, the sun sets, and night takes over. The next day, the sun rises. A new day is born.
My main personal experience with death was witnessing my older sister’s slow transition to death in her cancer-ridden body. I still consider it a blessing that she was able to make that transition at home, surrounded by her family. To me, it was the hardest, most sacred, most love-filled moment I have ever been present to. Even at her funeral, amidst tears and mascara stains, there was so much love surrounding me and my family. Today, while I do feel my sister’s presence when I’m experiencing hardship, I feel her the most when I’m in a state of bliss. When I’m in the mountains on a bluebird day with my dog by my side. During those times, I don’t need to call on her for support, she is just there.
My research, both in reading and in viewing others, as well as personal experience, also tells me that we all experience several deaths within ourselves during this lifetime. In fact, biology tells us that we literally have a new physical body every 7 years. Then, there are our own internal transitions, leaving old versions of ourselves behind and becoming someone new. Various cultural traditions have honored these changes throughout history. Poetically phrased, this is the “phoenix process” of death and rebirth within our individual human experience. Until our ultimate physical death. Then, does everything go dark?
I don’t have a therapeutic or scientific way to answer this question. Yes, the physical body most certainly dies. From there, my current perspective is that life, in all its intricacies, is just too miraculous to be limited by this physical realm. My older sister tells me there is more, and so does my inner knowing. That answer is satisfactory enough for me.
The final question: If darkness, a human creation, is present inside of ourselves and in the world, how do we overcome it?
Ignoring the darkness can’t be the answer, as it just creates more shadows. What about fighting it? If we fight anything, shouldn’t it be darkness?
Yet, fighting in itself is a dark act that creates more polarization and more darkness that can only block out the light, although it can never kill it. The energy of war can never heal.
I’m tempted to use the word “surrender”, but that word, even if I define it as “stepping into the flow of Life”, will most likely be misunderstood. Instead, I will choose to offer this word, “befriend”. Maybe a seemingly odd choice still, but remember, fear is a protection mechanism. The shadows created by fear are attempts to keep us safe from feeling the pain of core wounds, with the ultimate core wound being the false belief that we are unlovable. Personally, I can look at my own darkness and thank it for protecting me as a child and as an adult, thank it for showing me what needed healing. Of course, looking at and befriending darkness on a worldy scale is a much bigger challenge. Here, I’ll simply say that what we’ve been doing obviously hasn’t been working, and we will only find creative solutions when we release our own internal fears. So the simple answer, almost too simple to be believed, is that the more we heal our individual selves, the more we heal the collective.
And that is the final piece to this essay. The darkness of separation. Another lie we’ve believed. Why loneliness is a known factor of early mortality. You and I, or “thou”, to draw on the work of Martin Buber, may not be the same, but we are connected. We are one part of the Whole.
If darkness was created out of lies we’ve believed, it’s truth that can bring us to the light.
This is a topic I’ve wanting been wanting to discuss and bring more into my counseling practice for awhile now.
And so, it begins.
Truly, I believe Inner Work is one of the highest forms of spirituality, but for the sake of explanation, I’ll separate the two in the following paragraphs.
Spirituality is hard to define, because unlike religion, it’s really up to the individual to define it. In broad terms, spirituality is the belief of something greater than oneself, such at the Divine, or the deep connection shared between all living thing. It’s the Sun and the Moon, the Earth and the Sky, it’s Me and You (or, as Marin Buber would say, the relationship of “I and Thou”).
Mental health refers to your the well-being of your mind and includes psychological, emotional, and social well-being. It considers where you are on the spectrum of despair and joy and how well you’re managing daily life (I wanted to say “human existence”, but that already connects us right back to the spiritual.)
In past years, we’ve seen a lot of spiritual teachers speak simply of being happy, connecting to the Divine, and raising our vibrations. They talk about eliminating negative thoughts and switching right to positive affirmations.
Then, we have the mental health therapists, talking about the reality of depression and other mental illnesses, cognitions, being with uncomfortable emotions, and “feeling your feelings”*.
(Actually, I wish more therapist practiced “feeling-based” therapies…too many still focus only on the mind, forgetting the mind and body are connected.)
Now these two seemingly opposing world’s are reuniting. Most spiritual teachers I follow now speak about trauma work, such as Gabrielle Bernstein in her recent book Happy Days: The Guided Path from Trauma to Profound Freedom and Inner Peace. Then we have psychologists like Lisa Miller, PhD, researching and writing books like The Awakened Brain: The New Science of Spirituality and the Quest for a Inspired Life.
I’ve had a lot of friends first on the spiritual path of meditation, Yoga, etc., and then have to back track to mental health. At Naropa University, where I went to grad school, we were taught early on in meditation class the term “spiritual bypassing”. In other words “lets just clear our mind and pretend emotions like sadness, anger, and fear don’t really matter”. That path can only last for so long, although it may be years, until a person eventually hits that “breaking” moment when their soul demands attention for the deep wounds to be healed. (With that, a few spiritual practices early on make for great coping and regulation skills during therapy.)
Now let’s circle back to the idea that Inner Work is one of the highest forms of spirituality.
If we think of Parts work (or IFS), we know that the more we work with our wounded and protector parts (ex: Inner Critic, Ego, Addict, etc) and reintegrate them into the whole, the closer we are to our Higher Self, or what Richard Schwarts simply calls the “Self.” This is the part of us most aligned with our true nature, and for those who practice spirituality-our god/universe/divine-center. Similarly, the more we work with uncomfortable emotions and allow them to be seen and felt, the easier they shift and transform, like clouds in the sky. Built up clouds and emotions lead to storms. Clouds and emotions that have room to move allow for more sun, spirit, and joy to come through.
In short, if I don’t fear not being enough, I have the freedom to just be the full expression of me.
This is why, as a mental health therapist, I still enjoy listening to Abraham Hicks, Wayne Dyer, and Louise Hay*. We do want to raise our vibrations and think better thoughts. I just want to “modernize” things a bit.
First, I think we need to switch from using the word “negative” to “uncomfortable” when speaking about our emotions. I do understand the term negative when it comes to energy, but it’s important that we don’t label any of our emotions as “bad”. All emotions are sources of information and deserve to be seen and felt. That is how we validate ourselves.
From there, we can make “feeling good” a two-step process, with the first part being feeling our uncomfortable emotions. At the beginning, this includes the deep Inner Work of working through trauma and inner child wounds. We have to dig in here so we can truly allow the light to shine in and heal us. Expect a lot of storms and a lot of rainbows. While uncomfortable emotions may never go away, they do start to move through a lot faster once we’ve worked through the deep stuff and have had practice feeling our emotions.
This is also where happiness is a choice…we have to choose to do the work.
In the second step, while their still is choice involved, choice to “choose the better thought”, and to choose your actions on the path towards a meaningful and joyful life, I believe its more about simply allowing. Again, when we let go of the darkness, when we heal our pasts and learn how to move through emotions, the sun naturally wants to shine. Really, its about stepping into your Light.
To summarize, I would say that the mental health/spiritual journey is really the brave journey of going through the darkness, the darkness of our minds, so we have the freedom to be the highest versions of ourselves.
*In The Power is Within You, Louise Hay writes about how, after her cancer diagnosis, she had to go back and feel her resentment and deal with past trauma.
“The opposite of love is fear.” -Said in different ways by many people, but I usually think of The Course in Miracles or Marianne Williamson’s A Return to Love.
Your thoughts?
After all, the Lumineers say “the opposite of love’s indifference” and plenty of others will say it’s hate.
What if we add the caveat that the only way to move towards love is to befriend your fear?
Fear certainly isn’t bad. It’s our key primal survival mechanism. But in our modern world, fear has gone a little haywire. We fear what needs to not to be feared.
Fear in today’s world, you see, protects one from the risk of love, the risk of getting hurt, of having your heart broken. If it’s not the opposite of love, we can at least say it’s the biggest block to love.
Really, it’s all based on a myth. Love never goes away. It may change forms, but it can never disappear. Love surrounds us just as much as the air surrounds us. We’ve just been trained not to see it or deny its existence. Instead of being all encompassing and always existing energy that is all around us, we’ve been told love is limited and that love can hurt us. This is a lie.
While yes, a break-up, divorce, or death can be a source of great emotions such as sadness, fear, and anger, it’s not love that is hurting us. It’s the lie that it’s gone. Love is the cushion we fall back on. It’s in the arms of friends and family waiting to comfort us, our dogs waiting to lick the tears away, the Voice within us telling us it will be okay. It’s still in the relationship that was, it’s still in that other person, even if the relationship ceases to exist how it once was.
This doesn’t mean we still don’t get to have our uncomfortable emotions. We just need to take the time to feel them, as scary as they can be, and let them pass, so we can move towards a path of freedom, a path full of the love that awaits us.
Side note: You’re living a human existence in a world filled with fear. If you don’t understand this right away, that’s okay! You just have to believe it’s true. Personally, it’s been months and months of dedicated inner work to get me to this point, and I’m still not fully there. I just trust my Higher Self that the message is pure.
********
“Love in your mind produces love in your life. This is the meaning of Heaven. Fear in your mind produces fear in your life. This is the meaning of hell” ― Marianne Williamson, Return to Love: Reflections on the Principles of “A Course in Miracles.
“A Course in Miracles says that only love is real: “The opposite of love is fear, but what is all-encompassing can have no opposite.” When we think with love, we are literally co-creating with God. And when we’re not thinking with love, since only love is real, then we’re actually not thinking at all. We’re hallucinating. And that’s what this world is: a mass hallucination, where fear seems more real than love. Fear is an illusion. Our craziness, paranoia, anxiety and trauma are literally all imagined. That is not to say they don’t exist for us as human beings. They do. But our fear is not our ultimate reality, and it does not replace the truth of who we really are. Our love, which is our real self, doesn’t die, but merely goes underground.” ― Marianne Williamson, A Return to Love: Reflections on the Principles of “A Course in Miracles”
A few years ago, on a cold and snowy night in Northeast Ohio, I picked up a pen and my journal and words spilled from my hands. As I wrote, I thought I was writing my story, the story of how I lost my wings as a young girl and found them once again in my 20s. What I realized later on was the I was writing the story, in poem format, of most women I know. A year later, my sister and her boyfriend turned my poem into a video that has now been viewed by thousands and seen at The Trail Running Film Festival. My poem has now become the story of women rising.
Artwork by Sandi Nypaver
She Wanted to Fly. . .So She Flew
Once there was a little girl. She wanted to fly… So she flew.
She flew over rooftops, And skimmed the tops of trees. She flew so high that she soared with the birds. She flew even higher than the clouds, She flew among the stars.
Her wings took her anywhere she wanted to go. Her wings were only visible to her, And that is how the problem occurred. She told others of the her magical flights, And how her wings rose with the wind, Taking her higher than the mountain tops. But those who couldn’t see her wings told her this wasn’t true. They said her imagination was playing tricks on her, She had no wings, She couldn’t fly.
At first she didn’t believe them, and she continued to fly. But they grew more persistent. They told her she needed to start growing up, That it was best to keep such silly dreams to herself. Then one day, a few years down the road, She tried to fly, But never left the ground.
She remembered those voices who told her she couldn’t And figured they were right. She couldn’t really fly. Still, she worked hard in school and got good grades. She dreamed about her future And about what she wanted to be when she grew up. However, when she told others of her dreams They told her she was foolish. Some said she was not pretty enough, Others said she was not smart or creative enough. They said she should be practical And to keep such silly dreams to herself. So, she believed those voices too. Her world became gray, Rain fell every day.
But then, on a seemingly un-extraordinary day, A soft breeze blew at her back. At first she ignored it, But then it grew stronger. It lifted her feet right off the ground!
Suddenly she remembered all the times she used to fly. “Yes!” she remembered, “I flew so very high up in the sky!” As a young girl, she had flown over rooftops, Skimmed the tops of trees, And soared with the birds. Without any doubt, She knew her memories were real. Her dreams could come true, If she just believed.
And with that thought, Her broken wings were healed. Suddenly, she was flying above the clouds, Higher than the mountaintops, And found herself among the stars.
Once there was a little girl. She wanted to fly… So she flew.
A Dog and Her Girl 