The Holy Darkness

Often, we praise light and run away from darkness, but both darkness and light are necessary for replenishment and transformation. In this dharma talk—recorded live during the pandemic—Carrie explores the ‘holy darkness’ and reveals the healing that’s possible when we meet our full humanity with an undefended heart.

Transcript

The holy darkness,

Usually the subjects that are the most interesting to people are love or light,

Abundance and this and that.

But today it's not love and light,

It's love and darkness.

I think we all can acknowledge and know that we're going through a very hard time in the world right now.

This is just such a difficult time,

Unprecedented really,

That the entire world is like a seed planted in the dark underground.

And we don't really know what's happening,

But something significant is going on that's sort of revolutionizing our world.

And there is an unimaginable amount of suffering going on in the world right now.

So actually the fact that we can even have this conversation about the holy darkness,

About our journeys and all of that is a blessing and a privilege that we have.

Because of course there's so many people in the world who don't have food or clean water or even a place to live,

Never mind being able to have this kind of conversation.

So it's so,

I think,

Important to just acknowledge how blessed we are that we have this opportunity to go within and learn about ourselves.

My spiritual teacher Amma years ago in a speech she gave said that there are two types of poverty in the world.

There's the poverty of a lack of food,

Clothing,

Shelter that we all know of.

And she said there's the poverty of love and compassion.

And of these two,

She said that the poverty of love and compassion needs to be addressed first.

Obviously not exclusive to all the pain in the world,

But until we actually address the root cause,

We won't ever really be able to bring healing to the world where it's needed at the source.

So for all of us who are here,

Whatever poverty of our own hearts that we have,

May our time together bring some sustenance and nourishment so that we can go forth into the world and offer who we are,

What we have to give.

So the term Dark Night of the Soul,

I'm sure many of you are familiar with it.

That was actually coined by St.

John of the Cross,

A Christian mystic in the 16th century.

And he was trying to reform his religious order and was imprisoned.

And during that time of great despair and feelings of abandonment from God,

He wrote this poem,

The Dark Night of the Soul.

He used it specifically in a spiritual context about his relationship with the divine,

Feeling separate from that.

And of course,

We use that today.

It's often used very generally,

Like,

Oh,

The Dark Night of the Soul I went through.

But there's something really powerful about this concept,

I think,

Of the Dark Night of the Soul.

In my experience,

These dark nights are not usually a night.

It would be nice if they were just a night.

But they're usually a very long night.

They can be.

And sometimes in life,

We have these times where everything sort of collapses into itself.

It may be precipitated by an external event or situation.

For instance,

A divorce,

A great loss,

An illness,

Or just depression,

A profound experience of losing all meaning where our concept of what is true for us,

What is real,

Just collapses.

That happens.

It happens sometimes just on our inner journey,

And it happens sometimes because of something on the outside that brings that out in us.

We might feel a sense of meaninglessness or purposelessness,

Like,

What's the point of anything?

I don't know if you've had that experience.

I would imagine at least some of you have,

Because I think it's quite a universal experience.

I know I myself have been through many times like that in my life,

Some of them very extended and very difficult,

Of just wondering,

What is the purpose of anything?

Who am I?

What do I have to give here in this planet,

In this life?

It can be a time of real hopelessness and despair,

Of feeling really lonely and afraid.

This is part of the human journey.

The dark night is like a liminal space.

And I feel like our world is in that space right now.

It feels like this virus came and we were all on a little boat and we left the port and we don't know where we're going.

We're between continents on the ocean.

And it's a very strange feeling because,

First of all,

There's tremendous pain happening,

But there's also a sense of what is life now?

What does anything mean?

Many of us are not able to interact with people.

Some people have lost their livelihoods.

Many people have lost loved ones or can't see their loved ones.

Many people have been ill.

It's really a very grave situation and very confusing for the mind.

The inner and outer are mirror reflections of each other.

So what we see happening on the outside,

In many cases,

Is also happening on the inside.

So many people are going through something,

Some kind of inner crisis or confusion or sense of what does all of this mean?

Who am I going to be when this is over?

There's a lot of different things happening for people throughout this time.

The world is not some thing outside of us.

We are the world,

All of us.

We perceive this world,

Each one of us individually,

There's a great quote by Mooji,

He says,

There's one earth,

But billions of worlds,

Which I love.

But it's true.

The world is not some faraway thing.

It's all of us together.

So we actually have the power to change the world by changing ourselves.

And sometimes these difficult experiences in life,

They become like a kind of pressure that is forcing our consciousness to evolve,

To move to a new place.

But it's hard when we're in the midst of that darkness.

We can't see our own eyeball.

We can't actually see what any of it means.

But all mystical traditions have some kind of framework for this type of dark night of the soul experience.

You can even just look at the Buddha's life,

For instance.

The Buddha,

He lived in a palace,

He had everything he could possibly want.

And he left the palace and he saw old age,

Sickness and death.

And it threw him into this intense existential crisis.

He came back to his life after seeing these things and he thought,

How could you just enjoy your life when all of these things are going to happen?

Old age,

Sickness and death.

He was pacing around and very upset.

When you read the stories,

The traditional stories,

It really comes alive as a person.

You see the turmoil that he went through,

This existential crisis,

What's the purpose of life?

There's just so much suffering.

And that pain was what got him out and made him go on his journey.

There are so many stories like this.

It's not only in the mystical traditions,

But in mythology.

We hear about the hero's journey or even in fairy tales and things like that.

In ancient literature,

They speak about these periods of our lives when we have to go through certain trials or passages to receive some gift or something on the other side that transforms us into a new person.

And sometimes this doesn't happen once in a life.

It often happens many times that we go through these types of experiences.

I think that in our society,

It's a very feel good type of society.

Everything is very much about feeling good,

Going towards the light.

And there's this mirage,

I call it social media spirituality,

Which is that it should always be beautiful and nice and happy memes and all this stuff.

And if you read the stories of the different saints and sages through the ages and the mystics and their journeys,

It's not quite that way.

When we are on this journey of life,

Many things do happen.

And sometimes they're really difficult.

And when we start to look within ourselves,

Often we don't just see beautiful light things.

Sometimes when we turn within,

It can be really hard.

So I think it's important that we bring a sense of sacredness back to the darkness.

Because really,

What we need is a sense of wholeness.

And if we only go towards one thing,

The light,

Then there's not a wholeness there.

You know,

The yin yang symbol,

It's the darkness and light,

They merge together.

And without darkness,

None of us would be here.

We all began in the darkness of the womb,

A seed,

If you leave it out in the sun,

Nothing's going to happen to it.

In fact,

It might be destroyed.

It has to be buried in the earth,

That has to go into the dirt in order to become something.

We wouldn't ever be able to see or appreciate the stars without the darkness of the sky.

I've been studying with Teuna spiritual leaders from the Sierra Nevada in Colombia for a few years,

And the spiritual leaders are known as Mamos.

And the Mamos are chosen through divination when they're just born.

And many of them spend the first nine years,

Sometimes actually even up to 18 years in the darkness,

In a cave in the darkness.

The reason they do that is because they're being tutored and mentored by the elder Mamos in the cave.

And being in the darkness,

They're attuning their consciousness to what's called a luna,

Which is like the cosmic consciousness.

And I find that to be so powerful.

I can't possibly imagine spending the first nine or 18 years of my life in darkness.

I don't know what that would be like to come out of that experience into the world and see the world in the light.

I have no idea what that would be like.

But it's because of the darkness,

Because of that space,

That they're able to attune their consciousness to nature.

And on the other side of that,

They have a great ability to communicate with nature,

To understand nature and to bring healing to nature.

So I think that this concept of the dark night,

Which like I said,

Could sometimes come from something external or sometimes from something internal,

Is something that is really important to talk about,

Especially because right now,

Collectively,

We're really going through that.

This pandemic is magnifying everything.

We can't really turn away from it,

Nor should we,

Because we've turned away for too long.

And it's really unfortunate that this is the way that we are being asked to look and wake up and see not only like the social injustices,

But the ecological issues that are happening on this planet,

As well as the things that are happening within our own selves.

The way that we're hurting ourselves,

Running away from ourselves,

Maybe living a life that isn't true.

But I think this type of pressure and tension,

It pushes us inside of ourselves.

There's nowhere to go.

So there's only so much we can scan,

Facebook or Instagram,

Eventually we're with ourselves.

And that is sometimes difficult.

I think there's sometimes an illusion when we start doing spiritual practice,

That immediately we're going to just feel good,

Meditate,

And we're going to feel calm,

And it's going to be so nice and have peace.

And oh my gosh,

I've been through that so many times of thinking like,

If I just do this practice or just this thing,

It's all going to be good,

That holy grail,

I'm going to finally love and accept myself completely.

But then when that inward turning happens,

There's a meeting of some things that maybe wouldn't want to look at.

But that,

That is the power,

That is what we're doing these practices for,

So that we can actually meet the things within ourselves that we may think of as darkness,

And become friends with them,

Embrace them again.

I remember,

This is just a little personal story,

When I first met my spiritual teacher Amma,

A couple months after I had met her,

I was still in college,

And she was doing a retreat in Michigan.

And I went.

And it was the first time I spent any extended time with her.

And I remember just feeling so excited that I was going to get to go and be there.

And it was such an unbelievably painful experience.

I never would have imagined it.

I was at the retreat,

And in the evenings,

There's usually a spiritual talk and chanting and meditation.

And every time I would just sit down to do any of that,

I felt like I was burning up.

I would just look into myself,

And I would see so many things that felt almost impossible to embrace,

To be with,

That by the time the program finished,

I would run.

I remember this,

I would literally run out of the hall into the parking lot of the hotel where this thing was happening.

It was freezing because it was the end of November in the winter,

I didn't have a jacket or anything.

I ran out into the parking lot.

And I would just start walking between the cars and just feeling like I can't go back in there.

I can't go back in there.

I can't be with myself.

It was so difficult to just be with myself.

And I felt all of these different things.

So much shame and sadness and anxiety and jealousy and pride and doubt and all of the stuff that I just,

I didn't know was there to that degree.

And of course,

I had the thought,

I must be doing something wrong,

Because this is not supposed to be happening.

I'm supposed to be feeling my heart open,

I feel peaceful,

And that is so not happening.

I just burned throughout that whole retreat.

And all of these shadows and things that I just hadn't really wanted to look at just came out.

And the sadness and the pain around that was so huge,

Because I just felt like,

I don't know what to do about this.

I don't know what to do.

All of these old wounds hadn't been addressed and grieved and the different traumas of life and whatever my own strange self concepts were that didn't serve me and all of that just came out.

Because usually our mind is projecting everything out into the world.

And we're not turning inward to look and see,

Partly because it can be hard.

And we're often given the message that when we mess up,

Or if we have a negative mental and emotional state that something's wrong with us,

We're a failure,

Whatever it may be.

That's why it's often a culture of like,

Hey,

How are you,

Man?

I'm fine.

I'm fine.

Cool.

All right.

We're all fine.

But we're not all fine,

Really,

Is the truth.

And that's why the Buddha said life is suffering,

Because he was acknowledging that truth that fundamentally until we really realize who we are,

There's something that's kind of off,

Not quite right,

You know.

Anyway,

That experience of that retreat that I went on almost initiated me into this experience of having to learn how to be with myself.

I didn't know how,

Because all of these things were coming up that I didn't like about myself.

And at that time,

I did not have any kind of self-compassion or ability to hold any of that with love.

I really didn't know how to do it.

And so many years went by in this place where I was just almost enraged with myself,

Thinking,

Wow,

You know what these teachings are,

You know,

And you can't do it.

Because there's a gap between who we are and who we want to be.

We have this idealized self,

And they don't always line up.

And that gap can be very painful sometimes.

Eventually,

After years of just being so incredibly hard on myself,

I literally collapsed and spent three years very ill with some strange undiagnosable illness that really leveled my life.

And I went to so many doctors and no one could figure out what it was.

And I had just moved to Colorado,

And I didn't know anybody there.

So I was like going through this without anybody around.

And because I was so exhausted and couldn't function,

Whatever ideas that I had about myself and my sense of self-worth,

That it was tied into how productive I was and all this stuff,

It just was blown apart.

There was no way for me to be productive because I had no life force at all.

And that was so challenging.

So that for me was very much a dark night of the soul experience.

But during that time,

One of my professors in graduate school gave me a tambora,

Which is a drone instrument,

Beautiful instrument.

And I wasn't a musician at the time,

I never sang or played an instrument or anything,

But I liked this thing so much.

And I would hold it in my lap because it has like a long neck with strings.

It looks almost like a sitar,

But it has no frets.

And I would hold it and I would just like lean my head against it and I would just strum the strings.

And I just would cry and cry,

Just went on for months.

It just felt like all of this unexpressed grief and this feeling of like,

I don't know how to accept myself.

I don't know how to be with all of these things about myself that I don't like or don't think are pretty.

And I had no energy to be able to do anything about it.

So anyway,

I would just play this instrument and over time,

The crying turned into singing,

Much to my surprise.

I never sang,

But I started hearing these melodies and humming and singing.

And as I did that,

It would just melt my heart.

And all of the emotions that I really tried to push away were coming back.

And somehow through the music,

Through allowing myself that freedom of just expression of my heart,

It was like I just gathered back all of these pieces of myself that I had thrown away.

And the music totally saved me and it lifted me out of this deep well that I was in.

And it wasn't pretty.

And it didn't happen because I wanted to be a singer or do music.

I never had that particular calling that I knew of.

It was just that this music and these chants that I had learned for so many years in my spiritual journey through my studies,

They became like a refuge for me and a way for me to really accept my full humanity.

There's a really great story.

It's just a,

It's a silly story,

But I love it about the Tibetan yogi Milarepa.

Maybe some of you have heard of him.

He was a great yogi in the 11th century.

Anyway,

The story goes,

It's like a teaching story,

That he had a cave.

It was his place.

And he left his cave one day to go get some firewood or something.

When he came back to the cave,

There were all these demons in there.

And they were just hanging out in his cave.

And he was like,

Dudes,

This is my place.

Could you please leave?

And they were like completely unfazed.

They had no reaction to it.

And so he was like,

I got to get these demons out of here.

So he started preaching to them,

The Dharma,

He started teaching them all this stuff about emptiness and everything is one and all this stuff.

And it had no effect on the demons.

So then finally,

He just said,

Okay,

I guess we have to coexist together here.

I guess we just have to be here together.

And as soon as he said that,

All the demons left,

Except one.

There was one demon who was a particularly scary,

Wrathful deity,

And he didn't leave.

But Malarepa just went up to him and he realized he needed to just give himself up to it and not resist it and not push it away.

And he just said,

Okay,

Demon,

If you want to eat me,

Eat me.

He went up to the demon.

And in that moment,

The demon just disappeared.

It's kind of a funny story,

But the teaching behind it is so profound,

Because the idea is that we all have these demons,

Right?

We all have these shadows within us.

We have these things that we find hard to accept and to be with.

And our tendency is to want to just say,

Go away,

I don't like you,

I'm not going to look at you.

I'm going to run away,

I'm going to turn it off.

But really,

When we do that,

We almost make it bigger.

The message of this is that what we need is to befriend all of these parts of ourselves.

We need to be with them and love them and accept them and not try to push them away.

In my experience,

There was so much aggression that I had towards myself because I just didn't know how to accept these things that I didn't like.

It completely wore me down in every way.

It also made it impossible for me to actually feel and imbibe the teachings that I was studying,

Because there was such a barrier,

Just feeling,

You know,

I'm a bad person,

When in truth,

I'm not a bad person.

None of us are bad people.

And we're not wrong,

Because there are things about us that cause us pain.

We're not wrong,

Because we have anxiety or depression,

Or because we've made mistakes in our life,

Or because we feel these challenging emotions.

That's what it means to be a human being.

It doesn't mean we've failed.

So we can't measure ourselves up to the cultural messages that we're given that tell us we have to look a certain way,

Or that we need these things to be happy,

That we need to improve ourselves.

That attitude of self-improvement can sometimes have a very aggressive feeling to it.

So it's about that love,

And about embracing and recognizing that these things are what make us human,

And beautiful,

And in truth,

They are also the doorway to our awakening.

Carl Jung said,

We don't find enlightenment by imagining figures of light,

But by making the darkness conscious.

And I think that that's really true.

And I think that in this time,

We're being given an opportunity to be with ourselves in a way that maybe we would never choose to be,

Because it's not necessarily easy.

But there are times in life when we can look at our life as a scripture,

And see that maybe something is happening.

Something is happening that I don't understand.

A process isn't work.

I don't know what it is,

But something's happening in my being.

And also something's happening in the world.

None of us knows what's going to happen on the other side of this virus.

Is the world going to go back to normal or to what it was before?

What was that?

Is that all a dream?

Do we even want it to go back to that?

We're destroying our planet.

We can't keep living in that way.

So we need to change.

So all of these things that are happening are like forcing us to have this kind of revolution of consciousness of sorts.

But it's also happening inside,

Because there is no separation between us and the world.

So the main thing that I want to share from all of this is just that our darkness isn't something that we need to be afraid of.

And that we need to judge or shame or push away.

But actually,

It's something that holds a tremendous amount of wisdom for us.

And in those times when we go within,

And we may feel that it's hard to be with ourselves,

That's when we have an opportunity to really embrace things that we've exiled or orphaned from our being and bring them back to have that wholeness.

I'm going to read these words to you from Osho that I really liked.

Whenever a meditator goes in,

First he always encounters darkness.

And that darkness is frightening.

Who wants to go into that darkness?

One becomes afraid.

One wants to escape from it.

So what is to be done?

You have to love this darkness.

You have to fall into this darkness and disappear.

Don't search for the light.

The search for the light will keep you distant,

Unloving,

Unavailable to the darkness.

And that will be a barrier to the light.

So don't search for light.

If it's dark,

Let it be dark.

Thank you so much.

Reviews

Such real words. I felt a real connection. Thank you!

The vulnerability is pure strength in your story - thank you for sharing it with us🙏 I needed to hear this today

Simply Amazing

Always grateful, thank you for being here and for being you🙏🏻

Thank you for this, Carrie. Your honesty will resonate with so many people and help them embrace what they might prefer to turn away from. For me, listening to your talk showed me how to accept physical pain which I have felt was in some way my own fault. I’m now trying to embrace what is and work with rather than against it. I’m so happy to have found you! I love your music too 🌈☀️🙏

Thank you so kindly for this offering~
It really resonates & means alot to hear truths.°•☆°•♡Namaste◆🙏🏼 °•🫶🏽