In fact, I often say that we must befriend our dark emotions. We must acknowledge them and allow ourselves to feel them. Feelings are essentially the bodily response to the existential experience of living and being.Īnd so we must turn to the dark emotions of grief. They also emanate more abstractly, from our thoughts. They arise in us in response to what we are seeing, hearing, touching, tasting, and smelling in any given moment. But are they really “bad”? No, they are not.įeelings are not intrinsically good or bad-they simply are. Yes, the dark emotions are painful and challenging to experience. And when we feel “dark” emotions, we mean that we feel sadness, emptiness, loss, depression, despair, shame, and fear. Have you ever noticed that we tend to equate the dark with all things evil and bad, while light represents goodness and purity? Darkness is night, ghosts, caves, bats, devils, and vampires. Yet if you allow yourself to sit still in the blackness without trying to fight it, deny it, or run away from it, you will find that it has something to teach you. If you are struggling after a significant loss of any kind, you are probably inhabiting that long, dark night. Lewis, Eckhart Tolle, and various Christian mystics have called “the dark night of the soul.”Īfter the death of someone loved, the dark night of the soul can be a long and very black night indeed. In fact, a significant loss plunges you into what C.S. They were superficial signs of a deeply profound, spiritual crisis. Such mourning “rules” or customs were a way of acknowledging loss and honoring the need for a period of darkness. When they did venture out into the community, they wore clothing that outwardly represented their internal reality. During this time-whose length and detailed customs varied by era, religion, and culture as well as by each mourner’s specific relationship to the person who died-mourners essentially withdrew from society. One way in which we used to honor the need to make friends with the darkness of grief was to observe a period of mourning. The International Dark-Sky Association is a nonprofit “fighting to preserve the night.” Recognizing that human-produced light creates “light pollution” that diminishes our view of the stars, disrupts our circadian rhythms as well as ecosystems, and wastes significant amounts of energy, the association seeks to reserve the use of artificial lighting at night to only what is truly necessary.Īs you read about Paradox 2, I would like you to remember this mantra of “fighting to preserve the night.” During our times of grief, we are also well served to fight to honor and preserve the sanctity and restorative powers of the dark night of the soul. It’s a Truth we must rediscover because it is essential to healing in the aftermath of significant loss. The paradox of mourning we will consider together in this article might, at first glance, seem self-contradictory, but as I will reveal, it is actually a forgotten Truth with a capital T. A paradox is a seemingly self-contradictory statement or situation that is in fact often true.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |