You are not addicted to drugs, alcohol, porn, sex, control, exercise, food, affection, being looked after, doing the looking after, work, holidays, shopping or admiration.
If anything you are addicted to the sense of lack. To the cycle of pleasure and pain, elation and despair.
But it might be more appropriate to say that sense of lack is addicted to you. Addicted to keeping you believing yourself in its grasp. To making you think you’ve managed what can’t really be managed – a symptom. To avoiding the one thing that breaks it, the being seen for what it is.
It’s easy to glimpse the utter, incomparable, unbroken completeness of awareness. And try to employ that bright light to obliterate the symptoms, the “problem”. Just like a photographer uses light on a face to hide wrinkles.
But being dazzled by the light simply blinds us, takes us further from what’s real. And the reality is this: Awareness is incomparable, infinity cannot be used to make the finite look small.
We’re not looking to the light, we’re going to the dark. Where shame and lack and guilt and blame and need felt safe to hide. Because to glimpse a dazzling light is to be separate from it, to be other than it. Dark absorbs all light, welcomes every feeling. Knows even the most shameful feelings as itself.
I’m not saying it’s going to be quick or easy. But when we own the darkness – not as the absence of light, but as the totality of it – then we’re feeling that shame, that anger, that loss. Feeling them fully, perhaps for the first time.
In the dark, we feel our way to fullness, to the wholeness we are. Nothing is denied, nothing is rejected.
Here, now, light and dark are in perfect harmony. Interweaving, intricately, immediately, intimately – more than intimately. Join the dance. Welcome the dark as yourself.
With Love,
Sara
