Darkness Makes Perception Possible

When I share that I am a psychologist, I sometimes receive looks comparable to the looks I receive when I declare that I live in Arizona and it is the middle of August. What registers is the heat.

"How are you always so upbeat?"

Always? None of us are always anything, and especially not always upbeat.

Being human means experiencing the full spectrum of experiences and emotions. It is wading in that variability and the return to center that is a sign of well-being.

I am asked how I clear the stories and angst that others share with me.

How do I protect myself from the rage, outrage, and heartbreak that others experience and share with me?

Could I possibly really feel the sun softly settling upon my shoulders as I walk to my car after a long day parsing through darkness?

 
First, it is not all darkness that is shared in my office.

My clients process love and learning.

They share miracles of reunion and of finding peace.

They capture trust for new love and sometimes overflow with excitement for change. 

I hear the pride in the voices of parents whose children have achieved goals the entire family sacrificed for.

The reappearance of common themes woven through fully original tapestry means there is always learning for myself and my client.

Secondly, even the hours spent

processing challenges, trauma and pain

show both me and my client

the beauty, strength, resilience and inner light

of the human spirit.

Darkness tries to convince us that we are alone. But it is in the darkness that our inner light can shine and we can learn that we are never truly alone.

When life brings us darkness we may stumble, but, ultimately can find our way as we look inward for light.

That turning inward to find light can be the work of therapy or the work of self-guided reflection.

The light that emanates into the darkness from within us shows us that we are always loved and lovable.

That self source of love within is divine and part of our innate nature.

During the easy days, when surrounded by circles of friends or family bestowing gifts of love, we can lose sight of this inner golden source of love and light.

In a typical afternoon at my office there may be exchanges between spouses, scraps of dialogue, shards of breaking news that I will later hear echo over and over off of the walls of my mind.

I may reignite the shudder I felt during an earlier meeting when hearing and then registering within the wind chill factor with which a lover left home, never to return.

I have cried with my client and then after by myself long after they have left my office as I imagine their loss of a child.

My heart will ache with the echo of a heart wrenching diagnoses.

I miss the same step over and over, momentarily losing my balance, as the story of a partner's personality turns so swiftly my head spins. 

Trauma is inherited like chromosomal patterns of disease. Family pains return to be grieved years and generations after first appearing.

There are tragic relapses after years of healthy sobriety.

I witness feelings of regret at the making of mistakes with lingering devastating consequences. Mistakes that I could have easily made, any human could make, but I have had the fate in this life not to have made, not yet anyway.

Truthfully both the wonderful stories and the terrible stories have a tight grip on both myself and my clients and a lasting way of trying to steal us from the present moment.

All of the darkness shared is a gift that helps me to see the light in others and thereby the light within myself. So many years in, I feel immense gratitude to be doing the work that I do.

I am also immensely grateful to myself for learning how to take care of myself.

I feel grateful for the discipline I somehow developed to balance caring with letting go. I have learned how to really be with another, to be a witness, to be a validator, through the practice of letting the day go and returning into the present moment, again and again.

It can be challenging. There are many days when I must explicitly call to myself, the way a parent calls a fully engrossed gaming teenager to come down from his attic bedroom to dinner.

Exasperated, the wise part of me may need to repeat the call until the engrossed part finally arrives at the door of the present world.

The present is laid out so vividly over the threshold before me and I am amazed at how I had managed to ignore it for so long.  I need the sun's soft arms to hold me like a bird determined to fly softly into another day. 

Standing in that doorway, I go through my personally created ritual of clearing my mind and emotions.  It is never the same twice but the bones of ritual are there. I have short versions and long versions of my practice depending upon the level of urgency surrounding my return to the present moment.  I then walk over the threshold back into the world.

We all need to develop our own unique way of being present with our own days of darkness and the days of darkness experienced by others. We learn to trust the light that invariably emanates from within those we sit with and from within ourselves.

We each need a way of loosening the grip of our past, another's past and the collective past to return to the only moment that really exists, the now. We must develop our own unique way of calling ourselves back into our own space in the present moment where there exists a possibility that yesterday knew nothing about.