How to Trust Your Darkness | Amber Hawken Dip. Mindfulness CBT

While light is where we can align ourselves, darkness is a part of all our incubation. 

Seeds require burying in order to germinate. 

Humans spend nine months in solitary before taking our first breath.

Winter is a season our planet uses to restore and renew, annually. 

Ladies, the days before our bleed are perfect for rest and reflection. 

*Darkness* is often perceived as separate from us, but I believe it’s a phase that is in service to us. 

Purges can be mental. They can show up as a voice, new to your inner environment, tempting you to see the world as a dark, difficult, negative, fake, and an unhappy place.

I’ve been weaving through it for a few weeks now. Years ago I would have thought I was losing my marbles and likely become looped in berating myself and the world around me. It’s now normal at the rate of our rising in our consciousness to move through these waves every few weeks. Surrender is key, sometimes it’s a few hours and other times in a few weeks. Trust the process. 

It’s been a very humbling experience and a big clearing I know is well beyond cognitive understanding. 2020 in a nutshell really! 

I’ve had to be extra supportive of my nervous system and take responsibility for my tense energy and cynical views. Of course, attempting as much compassion for myself as I can muster, to buffer my ego’s expectations, and to ‘be unaffected’ by such phases of growth. 

The hardest part, I find, is the identity hiccup. Since I feel deeply grateful for my life and quite joyful despite the cloud, I find myself forgetting to surrender and being impatient with the process. 

No fucking surprise there. My kindergarten teacher told me, “Amber slow down, you’re like a bull at a gate”. While I find that a component, apparently the universe has a sense of humour and doesn’t allow anything to be rushed before it’s ready.

I’ve had a beautiful partner stand next to me and watch me fight myself at times, getting caught in comparison and panicked about the lack of *ease* that normally feels like a fucking waterfall in my life. 

I have half a foot in surrender and half a hand in stubborn resistance. Normally, I wait out these phases before talking to them as I tend to feel incoherent when in it.

It’s generally not too long before I pop out the other side, a month-long inner dessert walk feels like a lifetime. It was only a fortnight ago I shot a video about *depression* and my perspective of it being a place of a personal and deeply spiritual rite of passage.

A process most ancient civilisations practice as a means to consciously spotlight the darkness and pain we’re carrying that’s taking us knowingly or unknowingly so far away from ourselves, from spirit, or from our unique expression of truth. 

What we get to face/embrace/struggle with during that time are parts of ourselves we have to embrace or pain we can release. The two parts becoming whole. 

I’m reflecting on this side of my world only now because I finally felt like I wasn’t pushing – which is a sign for me that I’m not scrambling for a dopamine hit from writing which is an easy fix and trap I’ve slipped into in the past. 

We’re human before we’re anything else.

Teaching from the dark is possible but feels boring to me. I get the feeling I’m learning a language I’m not fluent in yet, so words don’t really cut it. 

That, and – we’re all in this together,

Ambs