With Diwali gone and Christmas around the corner, we are approaching a festive time of celebration where we see lots of light and candles everywhere. This inspired me to think of how we experience lightness and darkness.
The world we live in is often referred to as the ‘third dimension’, where we discover life through understanding duality and the difference between things. Unfortunately, many of us are conditioned to judge darkness as ‘wrong’ or ‘bad’ instead of a natural experience of life, and this leads us to rejecting parts of our own darkness as well as the darkness around us. What if instead of pushing away feelings of anger, sadness, and fear, we recognize this as a part of our life without judgment and begin to accept this in ourselves and in others? For starters, we would be much more at peace, and the feelings would pass by much quicker as there will be no resistance. Just like happiness is a transient experience, sadness is too! In fact, all emotions are ‘energy in motion’, something that we feel in our mind and body for a short period of time until it passes. So happiness, sadness, excitement, and anger are all nothing but short-term experiences! In this sense lightness and darkness are both equally important, and our job is to allow both into our world without judgment.
I know this is a tall order and not so easy – but that’s part of the game of life! Instead of trying so darn hard to be light and positive all the time, why not accept the times we naturally feel different. In this case what you will be aiming for is to be in a constant state of ‘peace’, which is far more attainable than a constant state of ‘happiness’!