Embrace The Darkness

Quite the ominous title, but it’s far less nefarious than you might think. We all experience difficult or “dark” emotions like sadness, anger, despair, jealousy, loneliness, and so on. These emotions are no less important than other “light” feelings such as happiness, excitement, joy, and hope. While it doesn’t serve you to wallow in the depths of despair at all times, it also doesn’t serve you to deny or ignore those dark feelings either. Much like anything else in life, it’s a balance. The key point here is learning how to best navigate these feelings when they arise. And I emphasize the “when,” because without fail, you will experience these emotions. But what you do with them can make all the difference in your life. You can learn to acknowledge what shows up and how to effectively be with it as it passes through. And it will pass. Feelings are fleeting, they come and go, everchanging and evermoving, and you cannot control that. What you can control is your response to them. That response is one of the most single important factors in determining your mental health, and a skill set that can be learned. If you simply try to push it away, you just create more suffering. Not wanting to deal with your dark feelings, doesn’t make it go away. Rather, it festers and grows, and will likely come out in the most inconvenient and unwanted ways, making things even harder for yourself. Ever wonder about the expression “crying over spilled milk?” Well, it isn’t really just about the milk, right? It is so much more. That is just the tipping point, when everything bottled up comes pouring out. So, the next time you feel the darkness, perhaps it is anger, see if you can acknowledge it, welcome it (“Hello, old friend”), and decide how you want to be with it. This intentional mode of being can help you move more easily through it, making space for something new. When you learn to embrace the darkness, you also make the space to welcome in the light.