Life begins in darkness and ends in darkness. In the beginning, there was only darkness. Darkness is a mystery; it evokes curiosity and fear of the unknown, and at the same time it brings us into the embrace of reality. This reality is all around us, pregnant with the existential truths of life. As the sacred story states, ‘The earth was empty and without form and darkness covered the face of the deep.’ Out of this darkness God commanded the revelation of light. This light was not the sun or the moon but light that came from within the darkness. This light is an integral and essential part of the darkness. That darkness at the heart of creation has its counterpart in the darkness living at the core of each of us.
In the dark moments and struggles of our lives, we often realize the beauty and the power that lie deep within us. This darkness sheds light on our external world and helps us not only cope with, but also live effectively and more fully in, the painful situations of our lives. This light comes from the darkness at our core. This light — the light within the dark cave of our being — draws us back to the very source of life.
Paul Coutinho, Sacred Darkness: Encountering Divine Love In Life’s Darkest Places
The sitting practice of meditation is a powerful means to get to know yourself, to introduce yourself to yourself. Meditation is a discipline, a technique to transcend technique. You sit down on a cushion or a chair and simply experience yourself: your body, your breath, and your thoughts. You just be there, very simply. There are several aspects to meditation that are part of establishing friendship with yourself. One is mindfulness. Mindfulness is keeping track, or keeping a pulse, of being there, in a nonjudgmental way. There is no good or bad. Everything is allowed to be. Among other things, mindfulness is a stabilizing or pacifying influence. The panic of everyday life and every expectation laid on life can subside. This is a huge relief. It is called the discovery of peace.
Just this one little thing, the breath, delivers all the wisdom in the world. Each inhalation powers your strength, endurance, and concentration; each exhalation releases your resistance and fears. When we bring our agitated minds into focus by following the movement of the breath in and out of the body, we experience the reality of the present moment, clear from confusion and anxiety. The breath is fearlessness personified. That can matter a great deal to you in times of pain and panic. Focusing on the breath is the safest, surest way to overcome fear and let the immediacy of any experience move forward.
The spiritual path does not just consist of things that massage the ego or make the ego feel good and comfortable. The ego has to be continuously and repeatedly challenged in order for us to grow spiritually. One of the first things that the ego has to learn is that nothing in this world is stable or absolutely true. In order to deal with [this] effectively, we must cultivate five qualities in our meditation: courage, awareness, joy, love and compassion. Cultivating courage means that we have to have the willingness to allow ourselves to be in a depressed state; If depression is the state that we find ourselves in, we should not become alarmed and regard it as a sign of something terrible. This sort of courage is based on a fundamental conviction that we are capable of dealing with whatever it is that arises, rather than thinking that somehow or other what arises is going to have an adverse effect on us. When we start to think that our experience is going to affect us adversely, then fear, anxiety and all of those things come up. But when we are able to say, “Whatever arises is O.K.,” we do not have to be so self-protective. By allowing the depressive mood to be there — if that is what comes up — we are showing courage. If we have that kind of courage we are not harmed. More damage is done by hiding behind our illusions and delusions; when we do that, the conflicting emotions become insidious.
We seldom become all of who we are until forced to it. Some say that something in us rises to the occasion, that there is, as Hemingway called it, “grace under pressure” that comes forth in most of us when challenged. Others say this talk of grace is merely a way to rationalize hard times and painful experience, a way to put a good face on tragedy. Yet beneath all the talk of tragedy and grace, I have come to believe that we are destined to be opened by the living of our days, and whether we like it or not, whether we choose to participate or not, we will in time, everyone of us, wear the deeper part of who we are as new skin. Either by erosion from without or by shedding from within – and often both – we are forced to live more authentically. And once the crisis that opened us passes, the real choice then becomes: Will we continue such authentic living?
