Many eschew the darkness. Most fear it. (This avoidance and fear energy just gives the darkness more power.) Here I will discuss why I feel that darkness is important.
Imagine for a moment a life without any shadows. What do you see? Light. Do you see anything else? Well, if there are no shadows, I do not know how you would see anything but light. (Yes, I do feel a bit like Neil deGrasse Tyson right about now.)
So without shadows all we would see and all we could be would be light. The shadows allow us to differentiate ourselves from one another and from The Creator. Why is this important? Without this differentiation we would only have the experience of love and oneness. If all we ever experienced was love and oneness, then how would we have the experience of ourselves? Instead, it is my belief, that we are here to experience the full spectrum of human emotions, individually.
The shadows are important as they help us to experience love in a different and more meaningful way. Again, without the shadows we would only experience one thing: Love. Yet, I believe that the shadows ARE love. For without them, our experience of love would be more … shallow. It is in our work to experience love more fully that we see through the shadows of illusion; the illusions being that not-love exists and that we are separate from one another and the Creator.
The illusion of separation is where we can create so much difficulty: my shadow is different from your shadow, so that means you are not me and I am not you. This can lead to beliefs like, “my shadow means that my need for love is different, or more worthy, than yours.” Yet, we are all cut from the same cloth of light. Our fabric is the same. Our needs are the same. We ALL need love. (so why do we so often withhold it from ourselves and others? that’s another discourse for another day.)
Another analogy would be a wave on the ocean. Does the wave differentiate itself from the ocean? Does one wave feel it is better because it breaks first? Or that another wave is less worthy because it is not “glassy” enough? I seriously doubt it. Yet we do this to ourselves and to others. Again, we ALL need LOVE.
By seeing our shadows as the illusions that they are and by fully experiencing the continuum of human emotions (by being present in each and every moment, as fully as we possibly can), we are able to bring the illusion of separation to the light. While the shadows help us to deepen our experience of love, our healing comes with the recognition that we are all One. It is then that we are once again able to experience ourselves in our fullest truth: All is Love and We are the ALL.
Namaste