So it seems that there was some confusion about the last post about darkness – that after spending Tuesday talking about how darkness wasn’t evil, that I then unintentionally associated them again for you yesterday. And this isn’t the impression I meant to send. Since this question didn’t come from a beginner, I thought that perhaps there was more to be said about the job of separating the Archetype of Darkness from your personal experience of it.
The Archetype of Darkness
Because the church has done such an excellent job of combining the concept of darkness and evil together, you tend to get energies that are associated with both when you initially engage this energy – just as you automatically end up engaging angels when you engage the light (another successful propaganda campaign by the church). In order to properly engage the darkness within you have to separate it from those energies that have been layered on top of it. Just like I don’t have to work with angels to work in the light, you don’t have to truck with devils to work in the darkness – they are not one in the same. And yet, if you don’t intentionally separate them in your own mind and consequently in your energy field, then you will unintentionally activate them in your world – just as I did Tuesday when I began talking about the darkness publicly for the first time.
Here are the things that darkness has been tied to that I choose to remove from the archetype before engaging:
- Evil (demons, devils, Satan, etc.)
- Negativity
- Stuck Energy
- Mental Illness
- Depression
If you can think of others that should be added to this list, please share them in the comments. I’m only one woman and this is all I came up with in my musings this morning.
The Darkness Within
What I don’t remove from the archetype are those things that, while they may be uncomfortable, are in fact the points where growth occurs:
- Pain
- Grief
- Sadness
- Desire
- Ecstasy
- Abandon
- Endurance
- Passion
- Anger
Remember, it’s when you are uncomfortable that you are actually growing. If you’re not uncomfortable, you’re not doing anything.
Just a reminder from the other blog post:
What Is Darkness?
Darkness is the balance of light. It is the destruction that makes way for new growth, the pain that causes one to find clarity and move forward, the willingness to cause pain to set the bone so that it will heal properly – and not feel bad about it because it was the right thing to do. Darkness is the willingness to sit in the pain, the grief, the sorrow, and also the joy, the physically ecstatic, the rapturous. Darkness is what allows us access to our animal nature, to that deep grounding in mother earth, to the well of desire within us that we can harness into action.