allowing

Loving both the dark and the light gives you a spectrum of vision. I will, I’m sure, travel in both places as growth unfolds. But oh man, allowing the light in is sensational. Arousing your joy of living, integrating you with the world instead of isolating you, it burns off the aches. There is so much to be found within when going to those dark places. But you can get stuck in them too.

Lightless places give great power to people who can move in them. But that power can turn against you when you have difficulty shrugging out of it and regaining your buoyancy. And most of this liminal battle of crawling back out plays itself out entirely in your mind. You know the battle you’re fighting with negativity right now. You know yours better than anyone. Patterns of thought that bind you for years without you even realizing it.

Once you can see it, however, you are no longer required to maintain the way of thinking you’ve had all your life. You are relieved of it, should you choose. It is not your identity. Although I long used it as an excuse for why I couldn’t in every situation. I think we are afraid to change because we associate it so strongly with our identity that we fear if we let it go, it is like death. We are not sure if we will exist after.

Okay then. The only way out is to die.

You have to let it die. Truly. Divorce yourself from what you “know” about yourself, what you’ve been taught, raised in, surrounded by. Watch the negative, fearful version of you die and leave its corpse lying there in the dark. Give that dead entity a little kiss on the forehead, and thank it for all the comfort it’s given you over the years. It may be frighteningly quiet for a moment without that familiar old dialogue running through your mind.

So take a little step into the new dark and open the blocks. Allow light in to feed you, warm you, and heal you. The new voice will have room to come in.

Y’know, I’m from Michigan. And I know the long, cold, dark winter. It tests you. And I can certainly say it is much easier to find this warmth and light here in California. This time of the year can be trying and draining depending on where you live, when you don’t see the sun for so long.

But I’m learning you can find this warm space within you.

You have to. You have to carry it within.

In between your ribs. In your spine. Under your clavicle. In the webbing between your fingers when you spread your arms wide, and stretch like a bird. When you reach your fascia apart, body groaning outward. When you turn on your leg muscles. All of them. Toes bursting open and then crunching up.

In between your laughter and your crying. In between your sleeping and waking. Between your head and your heart. Stretch far. Put air in there.

As much air as you can fit. And then a little more. Be big. Every part of your body expanding out toward earth and sky.

There.

There is your breathing room. There is the real size of your brave heart.

Open it up. And fill it with light. Even if your sunlight has to come from your imagination because the Midwestern winter is trying to murder you with snow and sub-zero winds.

You have a little sun burning within you always. It can edge out the cold and the dark. It can fill you with golden light.

Here we are, learning how to let these depleting parts of ourselves die. Practicing allowing everything bright and beautiful to come in.