Finding the light by illuminating our shadows.
I woke up early one Saturday morning and entered a room filled with expressions of pain – broken hearts, betrayals, abuse, neglect . . . It was hard to hear and even harder to let in and feel. And it was even more difficult to recognize my own deep wounds, pains and disappointments and share them the other participates of this all day workshop called “Love’s Awakening”.
What a wake up call to realize that our placid smiles and pleasant personas often mask a lifetime of unhealed and repressed wounds. On the street if asked, “How are you?” virtually all of us in this room would smile and reply “fine”. Yet the truth came out in sobs, anger and grief that all was not “fine”.
So what does releasing all this pain have to do with awakening love? Can’t we simply forget our past wounds and embrace love and light? Can’t we just avoid pain or at least feeling it and only embrace love and joy?
If only we could. I know I tried. But I’ve come to know that to avoid feeling our own pain and the pain of the world around us requires us to close down our emotions and wall off our hearts, which also closes us off to letting love in and out.
Like many, I created a wall around my heart to protect myself as a child. I kept that wall in place into adulthood and only recently did I allow it to crack open. It cracked open one bright beautiful sunrise morning on the desert playa at the Burning Man Festival in 2007 when the overwhelming love and beauty around me blew my heart open. I cried tears of joy and yet sorrow at how long I’d not fully let in the beauty of life. I’ve been tearing the wall around my heart down ever since.
But it takes courage to live with your heart fully exposed and open. It makes one vulnerable to feeling all the hurt in the world and to being hurt. But if we have the courage to feel fully then we will deeply feel both pain and joy.
But most of us spend our lives avoiding feeling pain – ours and of the world around us. So to some degree, we shut down. We become more insensitive and less empathetic the more we shut down.
During the “Love’s Awakening” workshop we faced our fears, hurts, and mistrusts that hide in our shadows. By bringing them into the light of awareness they lost their hidden power over us. By seeing them as the day progressed we were able to find and release them and begin the process of unwinding the behavioral patterns that no longer serve us.
I witnessed myself and other participants growing our awareness, purging our darkest shadows and sharing our deepest desires for becoming the person of our dreams. As we moved through our pain and embraced our deepest desires for living we expanded our capacity to feel more fully. Our hearts expanded and so did our lives.
By the end of our fourteen hour day we were dancing and celebrating together in the same room we cried together in earlier. We had all “shifted”.
This awakening to love is the real work of the “awakening” that myself and others have prayed for in 2012. It begins in each of our hearts and ripples out to create a sea of change. Do you feel the shift in your world? Is your heart awakening?
Makes sense for the darkest time of the year. Let’s not forget seeds planted in the darkness still bloom in future light as the Wheel of Time rolls on.