The Light Inside

As we practice, we are getting to know ourselves more deeply. We are learning to see and feel these places in our body that we've neglected; the dark places. The places we don’t want to see or meet. The most common experience when we see parts of ourselves that may have been broken really early on in our lives is a pretty strong aversion. A pushing away.

So when we begin to seek that light within ourselves, what’s necessary first is deep healing. A healing from the grief that we carry, a healing from the inevitable betrayals of life and all the barriers to the heart that we’ve encountered or suffered.

Transcript

So this morning,

I'd like to share a little bit about something that happened this past weekend.

I went and saw a family friend,

Their child perform at a local children's theater company here in my town.

And this boy was playing George Bailey,

The main character in the story,

It's a Wonderful Life.

And I was excited to see Luke perform.

Luke is 12.

And when he was getting ready to try out for this part,

He ran his lines with me.

And he's already an amazing actor at 12.

It's kind of extraordinary.

So many of you know the story of It's a Wonderful Life.

You know the story of George Bailey.

He had big plans,

You know,

He was going to travel,

He was going to go to college and have all these adventures and build cities and had a great deal of enthusiasm.

But then his dad died.

And George had to take over the small family savings and loan.

And so his dreams and his aspirations for himself,

They slowly disappeared.

And he is left in this town that he doesn't like this town of Bedford Falls to make the best out of his life.

And he does that he he's certainly he's of service to his community,

And helping others and guiding and supporting his community and others,

Even though he has this unlived life,

That's kind of coloring his experience,

The life that he longed for,

And he dreamed of,

It didn't come to pass.

So his longing for this life turns to despair,

When his uncle misplaces $8,

000.

And at that time,

That's a lot of money.

That's still a lot of money in my book.

And so George is consumed by the experience of failure.

He thinks and he feels that his life is worthless,

And wishes that he had never been born.

So as the course of the story goes,

You know,

You know,

We,

We end up seeing that George with the help of an angel,

He gets to see what his life would look like,

If he weren't in it,

Or what life would look like without him.

And what the angel shows him is that it would be more empty of joy,

And community and love.

So it's a beautiful story,

As many of you know,

And I found myself while I was watching this,

Identifying with George,

You know,

The sadness of those plans that didn't happen.

And that experience of kind of being knocked down again and again,

By situations,

And then having to pick myself up.

You know,

This character,

George Bailey,

Is in all of us sometimes.

And the despair that he experienced of,

Of not really living the life that he envisioned,

Not really making a difference,

That we don't matter.

That experience of not mattering,

You know,

It can feel so real.

Even when you know,

In your bones,

That it's not true.

Still,

The feeling can be so real.

The storyteller and mythologist Michael Mead,

Some of you know,

Have his work,

He used this phrase in one of his writings,

The light inside the darkness.

You know,

I experienced that sometimes the mind can get so dark.

I have this struggle in my life,

Sometimes I have these episodes of depression.

And at times they come on circumstantially.

And sometimes,

You know,

Like something has happened in my life,

And then I feel that that darkness,

And then sometimes they just come on out of nothing.

Just like the cloud,

Like a dark cloud or a fog kind of descends on my whole being.

And it kind of holds me down to some extent,

I'm,

I'm held down by the experience.

So as we get to know ourselves more deeply in practice,

You know,

We begin to see and feel these places in our body,

These dark places,

The places that we,

We don't want to see,

Or even meet,

You know.

You know,

It's really the,

It's not likely that we are really interested in experiencing these parts of ourselves that have,

That were broken,

Really early on in our life and in our development.

It's not a very common part of ourselves that we actually want to go and explore these parts.

I think that mostly a pretty strong aversion to looking is what we're,

We experience.

And when something dark enters our consciousness or our being,

You know,

Our devices and our phones are kind of a way in which we kind of gravitate towards not feeling ourselves fully.

We can sort of habituate the mind to continually get distracted and check out.

And when we do this,

You know,

What this looks like is sickness in the body.

You know,

It can turn up in many different ways.

It comes out sideways,

You know,

In cancer or autoimmune or chronic fatigue or depression.

So it's our work and it serves us to bring attention to these dark places within us with understanding and really with a clear comprehension that there is,

As Michael Mead points out,

Light in the darkness.

There is.

Here's what he has to say about it.

When we awaken our souls,

We liberate the divine spark that was there at the beginning of our lives.

The true gift of life that is also light.

The precise gift in intended to be given back to the world.

Then the light of our soul shines into the world and the secret hidden within us becomes visible and encouraging to ourselves and to others.

We see that we are not simply in a time of revolution or an age of revolution,

But an extensive period of radical loss and surprising discovery as well.

Radical loss and surprising discovery.

So when we begin to explore and seek out the light within ourselves,

What's often necessary,

The necessary first step is deep healing.

A healing from the grief that we carry and a healing from the inevitable betrayals of life and all the barriers that we have constructed to the heart that we've built up so that we don't have to encounter our suffering.

And healing is a form of forgiveness.

Without forgiveness,

We are kind of doomed to repeat the past over and over again.

There's no possibility of anything new without forgiveness.

It is actually the light of life.

And there is so much to forgive.

And when I talk about forgiveness,

I'm not condoning or giving permission to what harm may have happened.

It's not kind of like sweeping it under the carpet or turning away.

This is a misperception to the meaning of forgiveness.

And it's a strong misperception.

Like forgive and forget is a common phrase to describe this misperception.

What we're doing through forgiving is we're releasing the blame and the hatred for what happened.

We're releasing the adversiveness to it towards ourselves and towards others.

You know,

There's a saying,

Many of you have heard this,

It's a pretty pithy saying,

But it gets to the point.

Hurt people hurt people.

You know,

When we forgive,

We really understand this.

I was hurt and I caused harm.

They were hurt and they caused harm.

And knowing that and seeing that is a way in which we and kind of caring about it,

Caring about the hurt,

The misunderstanding.

That's the kind of the type of forgiveness that I'm pointing to.

And that's also the inner light.

Like the soul that Michael Mead is talking about,

He says the awakened soul can become the unifying agent for a collective renewal.

That's powerful.

I believe that,

That our caring for our wounds can be unifying,

It allows for the collective to care for their wounds and then heal.

One of my late teachers is a man named Wes Nisker.

He was in the Bay Area.

And he used to say that you are not your fault.

And I,

I love this so much.

I've shared this a lot with you all.

You are not your fault.

It's an important understanding,

Things about ourselves that we dislike,

Or conditions that we have in our life situations that we're working with,

Are conditioned by innumerable forces way out of our control.

You know,

Conditioned by genetic tendencies of anxiety,

Or depression or aggression,

Conditioned by a diseased culture plagued by violence and addiction.

In a very basic way.

Our caregivers,

Our early caregivers,

Maybe our parents treated us the way that we currently treat ourselves.

We are imprinted very,

Very early on.

So discovering this light inside is kind of unpacking the conditioning.

To me,

It kind of looks like going through an old chest up in the attic,

You know.

As we pull things out of the chest,

We see the radical loss as Mead puts it.

And we're surprised by what we discover.

And just like George Bailey,

We start seeing the goodness.

So thank you for your attention.

These are my,

My thoughts,

The Dharma this morning.

Thank you.

Reviews

Wonderful teaching! Thank you so much for reminding me of the goodness within ... ❤️

Superb 🌟 Thank you very much for sharing.

Lovely. Thought (and soul) provoking. 😊🙏🏼❤️