Quote roundup #7: On darkness as our mentor
Suffering, pain, and grief are meant to point us toward healing.
One of my favorite subjects to explore is the spiritual and metaphorical contrast between light and darkness. For many years, I wrote and spoke about grief, but not in a literal sense—as in, defining the structure or stages of grief. Rather, I chose to decipher what I hadn’t yet heard other speak about grief, that it can guide us.
In this way, darkness symbolizes goodness: shadows, moonlight, caves, wombs, tombs, cocoons.
Here’s the crux of what I’ve learned these past ten years unraveling the constructs of grief, based on conversations with the bereaved, personal experiences, and reading what others have to say: that pain is meant to heal us.
If we allow grief space within our lives, we can learn what it intends to teach us. Holding the tension and discomfort of what we perceive as “bad” (usually intense emotions, such as anger, jealousy, despair, loneliness) is a discipline. I think it is made possible when we acknowledge that all things pass, including the feelings we’d rather avoid admitting or investigating.
We’ve been conditioned to believe that light is synonymous with all that is good, and darkness signifies what is bad. I’d like to challenge that in the reflections I share here, today.
This month’s quote roundup is based on insights from Barbara Brown Taylor’s book, Learning to Walk in the Dark. My focus will be on dark emotions, a term coined by Boston psychoanalyst Miriam Greenspan.
To be human is to live by sunlight and moonlight, with anxiety and delight, admitting limits and transcending them, falling down and rising up. To want a life with only half these things in it is to want half a life…1
Dawn and dusk are my favorite times of day. There is a stillness to each that beckons me to quiet my own mind and heart, even if momentarily. When I catch a sunrise or sunset—sometimes when I’m drowsy in the early morning hours, sometimes when I’m visiting another state—there’s something about the transition between light to dark or dark to light that startles me a bit.
You see, if the sun and moon can exist in the same sky, yet one permits the other a certain period of time to shine, then I believe I can do the same with the conflicting feelings that seem to be more and more common to me these days: the pang of sorrow yet wings of delight when Felicity reminds me that she’ll be in high school next year; the unsettling confusion yet release of surrender when I tell myself I just don’t know what’s going to happen (with the economy, the upcoming election, wars in other countries).
Dawn and dusk demonstrate that both light and dark can share the same space, and when they do, beautiful things happen. I wonder if I allowed myself the room to be both afraid and content; frustrated yet resigned; restless but at peace? My hunch is that my very self, my spirit, would supersede both the light and dark places inside my life, so that both might find a home in me.
What if I learn to trust my feelings instead of asking to be delivered from them? What if I could follow one of my great fears all the way to the edge of the abyss, take a breath, and keep going? Isn’t there a chance of being surprised by what happens next? Better than that, what if I could learn how to stay in the present instead of letting my anxieties run on fast-forward?2
Staying in the here-and-now isn’t one of the strengths of my personality type: INFJ if we’re talking Meyers-Briggs, melancholic-choleric if we’re referring to the Four Temperaments. Add to that high sensitivity. Some of us prefer order to chaos, predictability to change, structure to disorganization. It feels, to us, as if we’re on edge to see when the next crisis will emerge—the proverbial dropping shoe. Heightened states of alarm when life isn’t stable, grounded, or certain drive us to an emotional place of grappling with what we cannot control until, at long last, we figure out what we can do and let go of the rest.
I’ve found in my own life that going to “the edge of the abyss,” as Brown Taylor so aptly describes here, actually makes me a better human. I’ll tell you how: because the edges test me. They’re trial by fire, in which I must determine how—not if—I will survive. Survival lies in sanity, and sanity lies in what centers me (to paraphrase Julia Cameron from The Artist’s Way).
The edges are the places we’d rather ignore most of the time, the caverns within us that we push to the side and hide from others. They’re what we perceive and portray, at least to ourselves, as what’s broken, a mistake, a failure, weak, flawed. But what happens when you illuminate your surroundings? You find clarity. You stumble upon epiphanies that lead you to accepting, with greater compassion, that you aren’t as horrible as you thought.
In this way, the edges soften. We may be driven to the precipices where every doubt, discouragement, or despondent thought is dangled in front of the ledge. And we can choose to believe them by numbing out, denying them, projecting them onto others, blaming others. Or we can say yes, these are a part of me. I do struggle in this way. But here I am, foibles and all.
That is how we chisel the edges to bring gentler shapes to our lives.
It is the inability to bear dark emotions that causes many of our most significant problems…and not the emotions themselves. When we cannot tolerate the dark, we try all kinds of artificial lights…There are no dark emotions, just unskillful ways of coping with emotions we cannot bear. The emotions themselves are conduits of pure energy that want something from us: to wake us up, to tell us something we need to know, to break the ice around our hearts, to move us to act.3
Dr. Miriam Greenspan redefined what conventionally had been termed “bad feelings” by calling them “dark emotions” in her book, Healing through the Dark Emotions: The Wisdom of Grief, Fear, and Despair.4 Her point in doing so was to reframe the common misconception that some feelings are good, and some feelings are bad. Think about it: how many of you reading grew up being told to “stop crying like a sissy?” Or maybe “Turn that frown upside down!” Even “Shh, it’s okay. There’s nothing to be upset about.”
These are all tactics for adults to allay their own discomfort with anger, sorrow, frustration, and disappointment within themselves. It’s a form of projection by way of dismissal in children. Children are born with big feelings, but they learn that some feelings garner them approval, attention, and love, while other feelings are ignored, bypassed, or minimized.
Therefore, as adults, we tend to develop subtle coping mechanisms to shut out the difficult feelings bubbling to the surface from time to time. I think the reason Brown Taylor said “there are no dark emotions” is that she was pointing out that every emotion can be used for good, or for malintent. Emotions are neutral; some make us feel good, and others we struggle to define or accept. But it’s not so much that anger in itself is bad—it’s what we do with the anger that matters most.
When I realized I could channel my rage on the pages of my private journals, it lessened their intensity and their grip on my heart. I felt the shackles around my heart begin to come undone, bit by bit, as I gave voice to years, even decades, of unspoken and unresolved wounds.
Do I want the kind of light that shines on things or the kid that shines from them?5
My brief comment on this rhetorical question is this: We must first learn to accept the light from others before we can radiate it ourselves.
If you enjoyed reading this post, you might like these related essays I wrote:
You cannot rise if you never fall: Here I share a personal story that illustrates something I learned this lesson: I am rebuilding myself, my life, and I am doing so by allowing myself to fall in the eyes of others, maybe even in the eyes of the world.
Hold the paradoxes with tenderness: Listen to your fear, but tend to your hope. What I’ve learned as I practice this skill is that my work cannot ignite any sort of emotion or meaning in another person if it has not first ignited something deeply honest in myself. The most arduous work of a writer, I’ve found, is in the constant self-discovery, the neverending search for what may never be found but can be accepted, even embraced.
Traverse the dark places of your life: Darkness can develop depth in a person. I believe it can also create despair. How do I know which way I will go—depth or despair? For me, it’s in the expectation (not the belief in a faint possibility, which is really doubt) that the Light is with me, that the Light is in me, that I am becoming and unfolding in the caverns and holes. That maybe my shadows are the beautiful things about me.
p. 51
p. 75
p. 78
I’ll be fully transparent here: this is the one book that got me through the worst part of my postpartum depression and passive suicidality. Her words pierced my heart with recognition and insight, and they paved the way for my healing.
p. 178