Of Light and Dark

“I hope this is a transformational process,” I said. I was talking to myself about the dark feelings of disconnection and loss I’d been swimming in for weeks. In the midst of the darkness I was trying to figure out how to get something worthwhile from my suffering and what I was doing wrong to feel as badly as I did. After a conversation with a friend I realized that my real error was in trying to “fix” my feelings rather than feeling what I was feeling.

I know that the less I judge and fight my feelings the better I feel. Imposing a foreign order onto my feelings, especially when they are messy, makes for its own kind of misery. If there’s one thing I’ve learned from being a therapist it’s to not fight our feelings but there I was, wanting to run from the shadow and transform the darkness.

We privilege mastery, clarity, solutions, productivity, direction and action. We are told that we can be—and should be— in control, happy, and at our prime all the time. So it’s easy for it to feel we’re doing something wrong when we are unhappy, conflicted, uncertain, lost, or just hibernating. I am not speaking about deep depressions or long periods of incapacitation but of the natural cycle in our emotional lives when we are seeing darker realities, letting go, and shedding our skins. We are beings of the light and darkness.

Source: Used with permission.

Dark feelings are an unavoidable part of our money lives too . Sitting with our uncertainty, pain, and the ups and downs in relationship with money is to recognize that we have an emotional money life. Can we sit with whatever dark feelings we are having and not prematurely find answers or collapse into the darkness?

It’s not a problem that everything has a shadow side — it’s the nature of life to have both darkness and light. There are benefits to the fallow periods of decomposing and composting. And with patience an unanticipated renewal often comes. Leonard Cohen described, “There’s a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in.”