A Light in the Darkness

We exist within an ever-changing river of physical and subtle energies we call experiences. By defining these experiences as either pleasure or pain, good or bad, positive or negative, we determine how we will react. By creating mental constructs, ideas and beliefs around different energies, we end up chasing some and avoiding others. This judgmental division we create in our perception ends up generating conflict, tension and suffering.

While pain is a mandatory part of being human, suffering is an optional extra! Yes, we all go through stormy seas at times–some people seem to have been born into absolute hell–and I am in no way minimising the depth of pain that we all know to different degrees. But there is a way to avoid the additional pain that is self-generated by our adversarial attitudes to parts of life. As we learn to embrace even the most horrendous, endarkened energies of the human journey (with courage and support as necessary), something miraculous occurs.

Everything is energy, and there is no energy that will not shift in the light of conscious awareness. Think of darkness; have you come across any ‘dark’ that does not shift as soon as you turn a light on? I remember hearing a beautiful story around a campfire from someone who had been traveling in North America. He had been on a tour in Mammoth Cave National Park in Kentucky. The ranger asked everyone to sit down at one end of a huge cavern, almost 500 meters long. They turned the lights off; the darkness was so deep, that he could not see his hand in front of his face. Then a ranger at the far end of the cavern lit a match, and held that single, small match up high. That tiny light in that huge space was enough to allow everyone to see their own hand, faintly see each other, and make out where they were.

Your consciousness is so much more powerful than that match in the cavern. The light of your awareness–the conscious awareness of you that is experiencing all you think, feel, and sense–is grounded in love, light, presence, and has the power to heal anything. When we embrace experiences with self, others and the world, with the light of our conscious awareness, there is change. Gentle, loving acceptance is the key to our transformation.

Now we take the healing principle of acceptance from a cave in Kentucky to the safe enclosure of the consulting room, physical or virtual. A therapist holds a space of compassionate, nonjudgmental acceptance for a client. Offering a calm, kind presence of clear space–a reflection of the love of true Self–the therapist invites the client to know their own essence, and bring whatever no longer serves into the light. With courage and inner sight, old wounds are revealed: the safety of a better consciousness flushes the hurts, fear, shame, rage out of the shadows. Not buried or denied, not resisted or rejected, the stuck energies from the past immediately begin to shift in the warm sharing of a trusting relationship.