Maybe you’ve heard the phrase that in order to honour our light, we need to honour our darkness first. Oftentimes we interpret this as “I need to sit with my pain and embrace it and if I do that for long enough, I will restore back into a positive state of mind and being.” Although this might be true in some cases, I actually have found another interpretation that has brought more value to me and the people I work with. In order to understand it, it helps to zoom out and gain perspective.
Nature loves similarity, but it also loves variety and will seek to express it in creating each and every one of us.
It’s thanks to its taste for uniqueness that we can look at two people and immediately tell the difference between their faces and know who is who. That same principle applies to the qualities of our character, as well as the unique opportunities, lessons and skills we pick up as we move through life. Although we might be drawn towards people we feel are similar to us, there is a lot of growth in learning to appreciate those who are different.
As we allow ourselves to see and wonder at others’ uniqueness, we learn to appreciate our own ways of being different and that’s when an amazing game begins.
The unique qualities, skills and opportunities we bring to the table are our strengths. Those strengths will look to be expressed and used as much as possible – by being appreciated by our peers and by drawing our attention towards what brings us joy and engages us. It’s through expressing those strengths that we co-create in the giant orchestra of humanity and life. And here’s where the light and the dark come in.
Each of our strengths will have an empowered and disempowered version, a dark side and a light side.
If one of your unique qualities is drivenness, in its light version you will be buzzing around doing stuff and feeling amazing. When you push it too far, you fall in its dark side. You get overwhelmed and stressed out. You might get to a point where you reject that beautiful quality saying “No more of this, it’s too much stress, so from now on I won’t care and I’ll take it easy.”. Depending on how far in the dark you went, it might take some days or years to reclaim its light.
Or maybe you have an amazing skill for organising. In its light version, you will be having a great time putting order into things. Once you are done, you’d go out and have some good times with friends and some other things you enjoy doing. In its dark version, you can spend so much of your time doing it that you take it out with you after you’re done. You can start pushing yourself and your close ones with ‘tasks’ in your free time, creating pressure and tension. When you lose balance like that, you might get to the point I reached – drop it altogether and start drifting through life because now ‘organising brings pain’ and thus you don’t want it.
Or maybe you have great opportunities based on the path you’ve travelled to reach somewhere. In your light side, you’d acknowledge that you’ve moved on, but be open to exploring how you could use your old network and opportunities in the new phase of your life. In its dark side, as was my case, you can be like ‘Oh, my previous career brought me pain and I don’t want to have anything to do with it anymore.”
When the dark side of our strengths takes over, it can cause us pain and lead us to reject our unique qualities, skills and oppportunities.
When that happens, we consciously or unconsciously label our uniqueness as ‘bad’ for us and go in the other extreme and try to distance our lives from it. The thing is, even if we do manage to do that for some time, eventually our highest expression demands that we integrate our strengths and learn how to handle them in their light aspect.
This is why we went in the dark in the first place – in order to learn how to balance our strengths with some other beautiful qualities that want to be expressed through us.
So how do we do that? A great way to start is going through some memories and asking some questions:
- What qualities, skills and opportunities you had before that you no longer use?
- What happened that made you drop those?
- Acknowledging that they were strengths that you let fall into their dark side, how can you bring them back and use them in their light?
Is it possible to not go through that cycle of falling in the dark in the first place?
I am not really sure that’s possible, because it is a way through which we learn what our strengths are. And this is what Nature would want for each of us – to know and use and live those! I believe it’s all in the way we handle the dark. By being aware that the dark and the light are two sides of the same coin, of a strength we carry, can go a long way into speeding up our learning and integration process and movement towards our highest expression.
Interested in seeing how you can benefit from having a partner to support you in reclaiming your light and your strengths from the dark? This month I am offering a free coaching session to 5 people on a journey of purpose. Reach out to request a spot.
About The Paradise Vlog
I believe we already are in paradise, regardless of where we are and what’s going on in our lives. I believe life is a journey towards becoming aware of this and enjoying as much of it as we can in the limited amount of time we have here. The ‘The Paradise Vlog’ youtube channel is the space where I share my process of shedding patterns and beliefs that obstruct our view in order to replace them with presence, joy and wonder. It’s also my invitation to you – an invitation to connect and journey together in creative ways, as we help each other see through to the greatest expression of ourselves. I also love creating spaces for growth-oriented people to connect to their soul power and life purpose. I do that in the form of coaching, shamanic work and workshops. Reach out if you feel curious to explore these topics with me.
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