If I cannot speak the true name of something, consistently, it retains its power over me and I will not grant such power to anything or anyone.

Calling things by their true name has a deeply transformative effect that can be felt viscerally as well as subtly. It rips the veils of gaslighting, manipulation and mind control by disrupting their false narratives and distortions of reality. Allowing for integration and healing of the past by reclaiming our sovereignty and standing in the power of our truth.
Words have power. We need to use them wisely, not as weapons to hurt another, as we were taught, but as tools of dismantling illusions, lies, oppressions and injustices within as much as without.

Therefore I will keep calling the “religious group” I grew up in a CULT as that is what it is, I will speak about my childhood’s spiritual, mental, emotional, physical and sexual ABUSE and TRAUMA as many have and are currently experiencing the same and worse, I will speak about having been a REFUGEE fleeing WAR and being an IMMIGRANT for visibility and hope in support of those experiencing it today, I will speak about RACISM, WHITE SUPREMACY, MISOGYNY and MISANDRY and other TOXIC CONDITIONINGS we all share as much as I will speak of all the gifts and treasures I received along with and through these experiences.

I don’t do this to garner pity or attention for my “poor self” but to disrupt that pattern by a) normalizing truthful speech sans bypassing or sugar coating of the shadow aspects for myself and those who welcome it, b) by embodying that what happened in my life doesn’t define or limit me, and c) to end the silence and/or to shift the way we perceive and speak about shadow and dark aspects.
When I center the shadow aspects or what might be perceived as negative or triggering name for an experience or period of my life, it is not done in a spirit of forgetting about or dismissing the good that came with it by holding to a negative frame of my experiences. It is done in service of making the unseen visible by illuminating the dark and its potential gifts. I have not forgotten the good nor do I lack in gratitude for it.

There will be no enabling, support or celebration of avoidance or pity parties to be had with me. There will be inquiry, curiosity, openness, empathy, compassion, laughter and tears as we candidly reflect your experiences and mine.
There will be no trigger warnings here. I trust you to manage information according to your needs and resources.

The light of awareness, truth, love and consciousness are alchemical agents of transformation. When we speak truth to lies, illuminate the dark, and cut the chords of identification and attachments our words can speak magnificient new realities into being. This is the path I choose to walk and you are welcome to walk by my side.

Photography & Digital Art: Unknown

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Will you hold another who has been touched by the darkness within? Will you love them enough to allow them to fall apart in your arms? To unravel, to become unglued, and to feel unbearably lost as the wisdom of their process unfolds? Will you be the space in which they can finally meet the feelings and emotions that have been kept at bay for a lifetime?

To love another in this way you must touch everything that is unresolved within you – all of your own unmet sadness, abandoned shame, discarded grief, and deserted aloneness. You are willing to no longer stay safe on the sidelines. You are willing to get messy. Even gooey and drippy.

 
Will you set aside your need for the other to change, to be different, to be “cured,” to be transformed, and to be healed? Will you resist the temptation to talk them out of their embodied experience, to tell them everything will be okay, and to dishonor the creativity hidden inside the unwanted? Will you allow your heart to break with them, and endure the urge inside you to put it all back together again? Will you fall into the unknown with them, holding them close, and provide a home for their brokenness?

To care about others, yourself, and the world in this way you must stay radically embodied. You are no longer interested in transcending suffering, confusion, and neurosis, for you see these as thundering expressions of the path itself. Please don’t turn away. As your attention moves out into the conceptual world, return to the wild intelligence of your body, for it is there that love is working behind the scenes, giving birth to its sweet activity in this dimension.

It is in this factory of love, which is operating as the temple of your own body, where the sacred world is revealing its essential secrets of healing: there is no “other,” there has never been an “other,” and there could never be an “other.” There is only the reflection of your own being.

Love is taking the pieces of your heart and is using them to re-assemble the world in front of you, each as an invitation sent to reveal to you the preciousness of what is really happening here.

~ Matt Licata

Photography by Unknown

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“According to the tenets of Easter Occultism, DARKNESS is the one true actuality, the basis and root of light, without which the latter could never manifest itself, nor even exist. Light is matter, and DARKNESS pure Spirit. Darkness, in its radical metaphysical basis, is subjective and absolute light; while the latter in all its seeming effulgence and glory, is merely a mass of shadows, as it can never be eternal, and is simply an illusion, or Maya.”
~ Helena Blavatsky, The Secret Doctrine

There is a bias in the spiritual communities towards the light born out of a rejection and fear-laced perception of darkness while professing to believe in the oneness of all. Something I have fallen into as well for a while as nagging thoughts and sensations pointed to the logical contradiction and incompleteness of this attitude, inciting me to keep researching and meditating on it. In time it was easy to perceive the avoidance and subconscious patterns of victim mindsets and fear programming at play in this as well as the dualistic and oversimplified christian narratives.

I realized that our understanding of darkness affects our capacity and effectivity in our shadow work. Therefore it was not much of a surprise to me how lacking the shadow work of those who hold on to the above mentioned light bias mostly is. How can you own your shadow aspects when you demonize darkness while aggrandizing light? Who will bear the pain or shame of facing that they are holding aspects of what they reject and deny?

To see darkness through the eyes of the eastern masters is to dive into the mystery and truth of the inter-oneness of Yin & Yang. To know the inherent oneness of light and darkness, to learn to recognize it in all that surrounds us and is within us. 

The nature of existence opens up to the observer who can let go of his attachments to dual perceptions of right/wrong, male/female, etc. Duality, though being a fundamental principle of our Universe, eventually merges into the oneness of consciousness on a higher or existential dimension. The inquiry into and contemplation of oneness are pathways of decolonizing and deconditioning ourselves in order to experience and know reality as it is and not through inherited and distorted filters.

Seeing darkness as a mother principle that birthed our universe of light and matter takes us closer to the creative potentiality of the void and allows us to meet our shadow aspects without fear and find healing through our curiosity, compassion and love for them as we do our self work.

Darkness is another expression of the One, nothing to fear, recoil from or oppose. What sense does opposing make in a universe where resistance creates persistence by feeding our energy to that which we fight?

We can calmly face it, shine our light of awareness on it and pierce through its Maya (illusion) to perceive deeper truths and principles at play in our moment and experience. We might even glimpse the “light of darkness” — its elegance and beauty in the universal play of consciousness as we perceive from higher mind and consciousness.

Artist: Unknown

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