Embrace Your Dark Side, Meet Your Monsters
Find a quiet place and sit down. Reserve this moment for yourself, to meet your dark side. Forget the noise, the pending tasks and the “just in case” … Let that complaining, and sometimes impertinent, voice coming from your mind fade little by little. Go to meet silence, that companion with such a bad press for those who do not know how to appreciate it, but so gratifying for those who are able to discover its essence. Listen to him.
You may think that it is impossible to capture something if the interlocutor is silence, but give it a try. Often this is the bridge, the path, to contact with ourselves. In this case, inward. Do not be afraid and of course, do not run away.
There is nothing wrong with looking in the mirror, touching your skin and touching those wounds that you so often insist on not looking at. Do not look away or close your eyes to pretend nothing when you feel that something hurts. Embrace your monsters, embrace your dark side. Connect with you.
The darkness of wounds
Looking suffering in the face is not a pleasant experience, it is true. The ghosts that haunt your memories can be very intimidating and sometimes overly authoritarian. They know perfectly which are your unbreakable paths, those that are most unstable and the shady routes that harbor the roots that go deep into your skin.
Those ghosts are the traces of your past, the anchors that enslave you to the pain of what you have experienced, and feed it, from time to time, to remind you once more that they are still there, that you have not overcome that. Even if you don’t prevent it, they will become those monsters that you will end up fearing so much: the fear of rejection, of feeling lonely, of being a failure … Different disguises, different masks to cover that false belief that you cling to so much: being incapable to be happy.
You know? Wounds also have their dark side, that from which only the sadness of the gray can be seen, the pain of thorns and the decay of illusion. A dangerous area in which you can fall prisoner and that results in the turning of your life around suffering. A subtle cobweb that little by little catches you.
It is not easy to free yourself from the shards of the past, especially if they grip deeply on your skin and you take advantage of self-deception. Pain has a thousand and one ways of expressing itself, and even thinking that you are free from its condemnation, it may not be so, especially if your tendency is to avoid it.
Even the body can also be a means of being present. David Alexander, Professor and Director of the Trauma Research Center in Aberdeen says that “People who have suffered emotional damage often translate that pain into something physical.”
For this reason, you better not neglect the dark side of your wounds and their influence on your world. It can be so cunning and insightful that it even changes your view of reality. And in this way, you are trapped in a spiral of infinite suffering for your eyes.
The light that comes from your dark side
Now, just as your dark side can break your existence, it also contains the necessary impulse to make you grow. What contradictory truth? But it is like this. The ocean of suffering is immense but do not forget that if you look the other way you will be able to see dry land. The key is in balance.
It is about going beyond the painful experience, once identified and understood. Even though your heart is full of pain, you can appreciate everything that happens around you. The reality is not only suffering, although sometimes you insist on seeing it that way. Now, if you only look at your thorns, if you do not see beyond your wounds, your mind will believe that that is the only thing that exists.
The suffering is there, the important thing is that you can decide to drown or mature and grow through the swaying of its waves. How? Hugging your dark side, hugging your monsters and your demons.
The Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung called this dark side of our personality the archetype of the shadow. The basement where our most repressed instincts, sharpest selfishness and most irrepressible desires hide.
We all suffer at some point, the important thing is that you are able to recognize it, accept it and feel it, with kindness and without violence. Don’t be so hard on yourself. And once this is done, observe how it is generated, what are its causes, its true nature. What thoughts feed you? What acts empower you? What feelings make it vibrate again? We often put gasoline on the fire from our words, actions and thoughts without even realizing it …
The next step on the path to liberation is to stop creating suffering by avoiding doing everything that causes it. This step requires patience, a lot of effort and of course practice. Inside you, you have a thousand and one ways of hurting yourself, almost all related to your thoughts and automatisms. The key is to detect them and understand that nothing is permanent and that you also have the ability to transform your life. You are not a puppet.
Clearly, delving into oneself is not an easy process. You have to cross walls and break many armor, but it is the way to find the light that illuminates our day to day, the path to well-being. Now, the transformation will not be sudden, but gradual.
Transcending your dark side takes time, but only then can you end your suffering and make peace with it. Often the monsters that rule us are nothing more than our fears asking us for help …
