Dancing in the Darkness

Dancing in the Darkness

By Stacey K. Guenther, PhD

Just as the Darkness of the pandemic was lifting, Darkness fell upon me, enveloping me in a blackness devoid of light, sensation, and hope.

It was unexpected. I believed I was emerging from my chrysalis, ready to spread my wings in the world and germinate.

That rapid, 180-degree turn into Darkness completely threw me off my center.

The Path to the Edge of Darkness

I have always been a seeker of growth, transformation, and Oneness with the Kosmos. My path intensified after establishing a daily, committed meditation practice more than a decade ago, resulting in awakening experiences that occurred in increasing succession and lasting for extended periods. From these direct experiences, I have been shown what is true, what is beyond, and what is within. Those revelations have resulted in a deep knowing of the truth.

The past ten years have also held their own challenges for me: a series of long illnesses and health challenges, depression, anxiety, and a yearning to find my place in the world. All the things I had known – friendships, work, family – have all shifted during this transition time. This time has been accompanied by periods of aloneness. Aloneness, not loneliness, because I am deeply connected with something much more significant than myself.

When the pandemic hit, I was completing my doctoral schooling and shifting into candidacy to focus on the solo work of my dissertation. It was a time of excitement and anxiety and uncertainty and dynamism for me.

Not too long into the pandemic, I had a very personal encounter with COVID-19, falling ill and then being unable to shake its icy grip on me. It took me six and a half weeks to sit up for longer than 30 minutes. Then, it took me a year and a half before I stopped cycling in and out of being bed-bound and terribly ill. And then, it took me another year and a half to build back my strength, which even now waxes and wanes.

It was at the two-year mark when I left the comfort of my home to go and celebrate my stepson's marriage. It was an elaborate event with hundreds of guests, including my family, my husband's family, my husband's ex-wife's family, and an abundance of the couple's friends.

My sole preparation for the event was getting my body ready to be out of my comfort zone, and I experienced great anxiety, knowing that my not-yet-healed body would be around many people while the pandemic was still raging. I was afraid. I didn't want to go, but I knew that I must.

What I neglected to do, as I was focused entirely on my physical well-being, was to take steps to ensure my emotional and psychological well-being amidst tricky family dynamics. I left myself unprotected and vulnerable.

As I found myself at the wedding, it became clear that I was completely unprepared for the multiple challenging dynamics I was about to face. And, predictably, I received an onslaught of negative energy, and I absorbed it all. Rudeness and meanness. Public exclusion. The silent treatment. I felt unloved and that I did not belong in any way. I felt cast out. There was a hardness that brought me to my knees. Without the pre-event armoring that I usually do at such family events, I was left exposed and bare and began to believe I deserved the energy I was receiving.

Breaking

Following the wedding, despair and intense grief for what I had lost in the years before that moment found me when I returned home. It all came crashing down. Darkness broke me.

My connection with the Divine, my feeling of never being alone, was gone. Severed. Cut off. I was left bobbing in a dark ocean of grief, terror, and hopelessness. My sadness was overwhelming. The pain, unrelenting.

Part of me believed that this was it. This is what my life would be. At first, I tried to fight the dark, to go on with plans and projects that had started before the Darkness. However I found that willpower and self-management were unavailable through my inner resourcing. I began to care little for anything and anyone. I gave up.

I surrendered.

Surrendering into Darkness

I felt that I had no choice but to surrender into the Darkness, to allow whatever was occurring to occur. I knew from previous growth periods that I was often the last to understand the great Mystery unfolding in me, through me, as me. And with this knowledge, I just let go and invited the Darkness to do what it needed.

In that surrender and acceptance, I felt relief. I was so tired of fighting and trying and efforting.

As I leaned into the relief, I found something remarkable: I could relax and allow the unfoldment to play out without trying to control it or manage it. I just was. Whatever happened happened. And to my surprise, I found that relaxing into the Darkness was a gift.

Transforming the Darkness

As I settled into the Darkness, I began to embrace it. I found that there was something much more authentic about allowing the Darkness than trying to be in the light. And through that embrace, I found light within the Darkness.

"Imagine a black sun at your core, a dark luminosity that is less innocent and more interesting than the naïve sunshine. This is one of the gifts a dark night has to offer," according to author and former monk Thomas Moore. [1]

Moore's words soothed me and allowed me to meet the gifts of the Darkness while letting striving for perfection fall away. I allowed my messy parts to just be. I no longer tried to hide them or cover them. And I found beauty in my messiness. I began to love my messiness.

Surrendering to the Darkness and meeting the gifts that came with it allowed me to embrace my most ugly, insecure, unlovable parts. This practice of allowing things to be just as they were opened me to a new path of radical authenticity, courageously and unapologetically allowing me to be me. I found that without putting all that energy into covering my faults, a new energy began to emerge.

It was as if I was mothering myself for the first time, dancing with my feminine self and with unconditional love. I began to feel a spark of the Divine, but this Divinity was soothing, soft, warm, and gentle. She was encouraging me to just be myself.

Surrendering to the Darkness felt like returning to my more primal nature. There was a wildness to it. It felt like dancing in the darkness under the moon.

True Awakening

We seekers can sometimes forget that the spiritual path is not always unicorns and rainbows. Just as we embrace the light, we must also commune with the dark. The polarity of spiritual exploration represents the yin and yang of our nature. It is natural and whole.

We can try to deny the dark through spiritual experience. This denial has a name: spiritual bypassing. It's also known as spiritual transcendence and going holy early, i.e., we get holy and transcend in order to hide from the full truth of who we are, both light and shadow. Denying the shadow is denying the shadow's Divinity, its gift.

But engaging our shadow material is critical to spiritual growth. Without the dark, we cannot fully be light. For me, fully accepting my Darkness with no intention of fixing or changing it was necessary for where I was in my spiritual development. Without that acceptance of my messy bits, I couldn't be whole.

Darkness follows illumination in the process of spiritual formation. Thomas Moore states, "St. John of the Cross, the master of dark nights, saw them primarily as a process of purification." [2] Following illumination (or awakening or enlightenment), the process of spiritual formation is completed during the dark night, when the soul, according to Rev. Dr. Deborah Rundlett, seeks to find competence. [3] Once that competence is established through communion with the Darkness, it begins a new path marked by union with the Divine.

"Perhaps the dark night comes upon you from inside or outside to wake you up, to stir you, and steer you toward a new life. I believe this is the message of most religions, and certainly it is the gist of Christianity and Buddhism. Your dark night may be a bardo, a period of apparent lifelessness that precedes a new birth of meaning. Maybe your dark night is a gestation, a coming into being of a level of existence you have never dreamed of. Maybe your dark night is one big ironical challenge, just the opposite of what it appears to be — not a dying, but a birthing" according to Moore. [4]

Whether it was competence, purification, or rebirth (or all three) that my soul sought, I know for certain that it was about integration at its core. My soul yearned to integrate and accept the totality of its human essence in order to continue to move closer toward Oneness with the Kosmos.

What the Darkness has Taught Me about the World

While I feel my dark night is, for the most part, complete, perhaps just for now, or perhaps not, I often reflect on what my dark night has taught me about the world in its current state of polycrisis. [5] My dark night mirrored back to me the dark night of our global community.

But there is hope. As I learned from my experience dancing in the dark, there is light and hope after complete Darkness. In the final chapter of his book, A Higher Loyalty, James Comey likens our current state of being to the devastation of a forest fire. "But forest fires, as painful as they can be, bring growth. They spur growth that was impossible before the fire, when old trees crowded out new plants on the forest floor," he said. [6]

Darkness seems to "double down" before it lifts. I experienced an onslaught of difficult experiences in the time leading up to my dark night: long illness, pandemic, writing a dissertation. My Darkness got darker before it lifted. May it be that we're also experiencing that as a human species?

If that is the case, we must work together to liberate the shadow of our global society.

I recently spent a weekend in an intensive healing workshop with healer Rob Wergin. There were more than 100 of us in the room, and another 200 or more joining virtually. As we did our work, healing our hurt and pain and loving ourselves, hurts, pains, histories, and all, I was struck by the beauty of the experience. We were doing the work… together. And it became clear to me in that moment of noticing: there is nothing more important right now than all of us embracing our shadows, healing ourselves, dancing in our Darkness. That is how we will heal the world.

Stacey Guenther

A committed seeker, a large part of Dr. Stacey Guenther's past 25 years has been devoted to personal and spiritual development. She is a long-time, devoted meditator and after completing training with Jack Kornfield and Tara Brach, she became a certified meditation teacher (CMT-P). Stacey is contemplative scholar-practitioner whose research is centered on groups and how they can enter a state of magic called coherence and has written a book called Coherence: Cultivating Group Magic, which she hopes will be published in 2024. Stacey is a certified leadership coach (PCC), an organization development consultant, and an educator. Stacey was born and raised in the Virginia suburbs of Washington, DC, and now lives just outside of Asheville, NC, with her spouse and two rescue dogs.

Contact Stacey:
https://www.drstaceyguenther.com/
IG @dr.stacey.guenther
linkedin.com/in/staceyguenther

References:
[1] Thomas Moore’s Dark Night of the Soul: A Guide for Finding Your Way through Life’s Ordeals. 2005. Gotham Books. p. 7.
[2] Thomas Moore’s Dark Night of the Soul: A Guide for Finding Your Way through Life’s Ordeals. 2005. Gotham Books. p. 49.
[3] https://www.clgleaders.com/the-leader-as-poet-and-prophet/
[4] Thomas Moore’s Dark Night of the Soul: A Guide for Finding Your Way through Life’s Ordeals. 2005. Gotham Books. p. 118.
[5] A term popularized by Adam Tooze, polycrisis is the interconnection of multiple intractable issues that we face on our planet in current times, among them the climate crisis, the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic, wars in the Ukraine and Israel, growing wealth gap, and others. For more information, see: https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2023/03/polycrisis-adam-tooze-historian-explains/.
[6] James Comey’s A Higher Loyalty: Truth, Lies, and Leadership. 2018. Flatiron Books. p.244