Monthly Archives: August 2023

The Equanimous Mind and Becoming the Pearl

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Lately I have been working on navigating the dark and light cycles of life and within, with an equanimous mind as my foundation. Essentially, this means not seeing the light cycle as better and the dark cycle as worse or the light cycle as good and the dark cycle as bad. Both light and dark cycles are equal but different.

Ego prefers the light and has an aversion to the dark cycle because the light cycle is more pleasurable, feels more safe and is generally more fun. The dark cycle is harder to traverse for ego, it is a cycle involving fear, confusion, insecurity, loss, anger and entering the unknown. Yet the darkness is as fruitful as the light. Both are needed and both depend one each other.

Our ego’s are innocent much like a pet. Think of how your pet reacts when you have to take them to the vet. Suddenly your sweet pup is shaking, growling, deeply afraid, they may hide, run or bite. To the pet, they are being taken away from their stable secure comfortable and loving routine into a terrifying place where they are being probed and prodded, who knows what will occur!

This is a great metaphor for when we go through a dark cycle, either externally or internally. Often an external circumstance triggers the internal darkness (which I call the abyss) or the other way around but sometimes if the chemicals are off, the abyss will just come independent of an external catalyst.

No matter what causes the dark cycle, the darkness provides an opportunity to heal and grow. Rarely do we heal and grow in the light. Our egos, much like our pets, do not really care about healing or growing. We all just want comfort, love, security, ease and pleasure. It’s really very innocent. The ego is our innocent human personality and let’s face it, being human is a stinky experience. Go right past the shimmering skin and we are all guts, piss, blood and poop. Our desires take over. We go through pain and we get fragmented. Messy and sticky is our human self. It is OK!

The soul (or true self) is the part of us that desires healing and growth. Soul wants to experience being a human, to learn, evolve, experience it all, love and create! Our souls understand that healing and growing means treating ourselves and our loved ones with more love, care, compassion, skill, and integrity. Self love is imminent when we heal and grow. Not only that but when we heal and grow our soul can shine through into the world.

Childhood abuse, neglect, and life long conditioning by family and culture mixed with our ancestral epigenetic wounds cover the soul in so much mud that almost no light can shine through. Like the lotus blossoming through the mud, the darkness is the mud and the mud provides the grist needed for ego to turn within to soul to remember the true power available to each of us, within.

The power of being a soul is the power of love, creativity, and wisdom. (You do not need to be spiritual to know this as you could call the soul the authentic self and understand that the power within is the power of the human spirit backed by nature).

Ego is not bad for it is our human personality formed and forged in the fires of attachment. Ego is simply misguided. When we heal ego it allows our true self to shine through like a diamond.

The dark night of the soul is the process of the ego turning inward to reclaim this power and the only time the ego turns inward is when the external become so difficult it is forced inward through loss or tragedy. Just as much as humans tend toward craving pleasure, comfort, security, and love we also tend toward growing through the experience of loss.

It is a skill to learn how to use the darkness as a tool to heal and grow but also it just happens naturally, like how if you lose your health through a health crisis you may naturally transform from being a self focused go getter always trying to achieve the next goal to becoming a more humble and compassionate person who savors life and loves with more of an open heart. The path of difficulty brings the path of reward.

I know that the abuse I went through as a child was the catalyst for my soul shining into this world and for me becoming a healer. I am not condoning abuse nor bypassing pain or accountability here. I am only reinforcing the fact that when we use tragedy, loss, pain, darkness and the vicissitudes of life to heal and grow, the self will turn from a mud ball into a pearl. The soul can shine like a diamond into this world.

Same goes for the inner darkness. Whenever I use my abyss for healing some piece of writing or art comes out of it, as does a new layer of humor, awareness and wisdom.

Wrapping this back around the the equanimous mind…

If I know the dark cycle is as valuable as the light cycle then when I fall into the abyss of my own inner darkness or when life hands me the next loss or crisis, or both, I can reduce the unnecessary suffering by welcoming the darkness with acceptance or at the very least, non-resistance. I can allow feelings of insecurity, sorrow, anger, agony, despair, and confusion to pass through my psyche without buying what the negative narrative is selling.

With these two very distinct skills, I can create space within and space within creates choice. And when you have space to choose, you will tend toward healing, growth and back toward the light again versus getting stuck or self sabotaging. The pattern of suffering will begin to slightly change. Over time, the pattern of suffering will dissolve.

This is the process of the mud ball becoming the pearl within.

Of course if I fall into abyss and I do listen to the negative narrative, binge on crap food, watch five hours of tele, hate on myself for a night, and lose all faith in life and myself, that is ok too! (I am being a bit light and cheeky with this example as not to get too private, but you get the idea of falling deeply into your darkness where you feel disconnected from the light all together, the spectrum of this is different for everyone and I have experiences many different intensity levels on the spectrum).

On the path of healing sometimes we hit the abyss bottom and the climbing itself (back to the light) becomes the mud ball to pearl journey. Thirty five years ago, I was always in the abyss. Twenty five years ago I was in the abyss a third of the time. Progress happens. No matter how deep your darkness goes, you can turn toward healing, you can turn into your version of a pearl.

Being the pearl is a feeling of self love, an open heart and a soul shining which is natural and not forced. Becoming the pearl does not have an external marker. Maybe you never get the thing you want in the world, maybe you do or maybe it takes a really long time. The world is fickle and uncertain for as much as the New Age tells us we can always create the external reality we want. But you can always create your internal reality.

The version of happiness that stems from an open heart, self aware mind and your soul shining into the world is powerful, free, and cannot be taken. It is the dark and light cycles that keep the soul growing and evolving, turning mud into the pearl. Having an equanimous mind is a daily practice yet also roots in the wisdom of understanding the true value and necessity of dark cycles.

Negativity is Love

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Life has been rough for me the past five years among it being rough for us all collectively. By rough I mean, there has been a lot of crisis and loss. Loss and crisis come for us all in cycles. The daylight cycle is when life is going smooth and easy, fun and stable. The dark night cycle is when loss strikes, the vicissitudes of life rain, and one way through is to turn ego inward toward the inner light of the soul.

This is a metaphorical quest for the holy grail.

We each have our own version of this with a different narrator, tone, actors and plot. You cannot compare losses nor can you compare how each loss feels to each person. Just like we all have fingerprints but each is unique, we all have dark night patterns and each is unique. Some people are in long dark nights that last for years while other dark nights may last only a year or less.

In my spiritual truth the soul’s blueprint for the duration, depth and amount of dark nights that will be experienced in a person’s lifetime can be mapped by the natal chart. But if you don’t vibe with astrology or mapping your dark nights, doesn’t really matter. There are many paths up the same mountain.

Dark nights turn the mud ball into a pearl (you being the mud ball).

Through my very difficult dark night these past five years (loss on many levels) my therapy practice has blossomed like a lotus growing through the mud. This makes me think of Leonard Cohen’s line, “there is a crack in everything, that is how the light gets in.” The light has been my healing work for others and myself. I have gained tremendous resilience, self reliance, self love, self worth, spiritual connection, wisdom, acceptance, and achieved a mastery level of self care.

I do not think I could even recognize the person I was in 2017 anymore and who I am now feels more fully ripe.

But it’s not all positive. Life is always light and dark, negative and positive. On the negative side, I struggle more with my mental health issues, I harbor disappointment, regret, and I feel weary much of the time (therapists are people too moment). This aspect is why I desire to write this blog. I am not alone in how I feel and I want to normalize disappointment, regret and weariness.

The expectation our culture promotes that if you work hard and stay dedicated you can have the life you want and get what you dream of is total and utter bullshit. There, I said it. In the new age the same toxic positive expectation is promoted through the “create your own reality” rhetoric. True, some do get what they want when they work hard and stay dedicated. True, some do create their desired reality outcomes with their thoughts. But that is only one tiny slice of the big diverse complex pie of life.

Many people’s lives turn out disappointing in certain areas. Regret is natural to feel. Weariness happens. A ton of us experience tragedy for no reason such as losing a child, never finding a partner, living in poverty you can never climb out of, getting stage four cancer, just to name a few. Lately so many are victims to the storms and fires emerging from climate change ( though mamma earth has been taking out swaths of humans throughout all of time).

War, famine, abuse, sickness oh my. The vicissitudes are real and ever present. Buddha spoke of this when he said “life is suffering”.

Happiness and joy may be too tall an order through a dark night. Maybe having peace, calm, equanimity, and keeping the heart open to love is more realistic when tragedy strikes or life is putting you through too much for too long. It’s perfectly appropriate to feel disappointment for how life has turned out due to what happened to you out of your control and the choices you made.

The pressure to be happy, fulfilled and have no regrets is all too much sometimes whether that be during a dark night or not. For some it is too tall an order for a lifetime. My father lately in his dark night speaks of mudding through being the most important thing. For some, serving others and being less in self may bring a certain ease. Many paths up the same mountain again.

What if fulfillment, happiness and joy were not the only emotions being sold by the narrative that we should always follow our bliss and go for our dreams? What if that was only one narrative out of a grab bag of many narratives about the meaning or quality of life that were all considered equal? Maybe then we would not fear disappointment so much. Maybe then we would not fear negativity so much. It’s ok to have your negative side.

Peace, calm, resilience, compassion, forgiveness, acceptance, humbleness, confidence, and self reliance are some of the treasures birthed out of a dark night and these qualities can exist right beside unhappiness or a lack of joy. I do not mean to suggest a black and white framework of no happiness or joy. I am only wanting to create space for the treasures only loss cultivates. I only wish to normalize negativity and allow joy and happiness to take a backseat for a country mile.

So what if you complain a lot or you see the glass half empty. Maybe that’s because life has been rough outside of your control and you’ve been managing so much just to survive. It is ok to muddle through, it’s ok to have regrets and disappointment. This does not mean you are a bad person who has no gratitude, you don’t need to feel guilty or write in your gratitude journal. You can accept the negativity as a part of being human too.

The pearl self that the dark night creates doesn’t mean being a positive ray of sunshine. Becoming the pearl can mean not having a nervous breakdown, being able to laugh, to love, to stay balanced, have some peace, wisdom, understanding, and to know you are stronger than you ever thought you could be.

I have much more to share on this topic for future blogs. My intention is to share my vulnerability in service to your vulnerability. The negativity, disappointment, and weariness in me honors your negativity, disappointment and weariness in you. Both are love.