Underneath the Water: Navigating Light & Dark

"One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious." ~ Carl Jung

Our marriage therapist recently observed something profound: my husband has an aversion to the negative while I have an aversion to the positive. She is spot on. The truth is definitely in the middle—the balance, the Yin and Yang.

Picture an ocean of consciousness, vast and deep. Some of us, like my husband, skim its surface, dismissing and avoiding all the negative, letting it sink to the bottom. We think we're safe up here in the light, until suddenly one of those weights snags us. As we're swimming, all of a sudden, our foot gets stuck on one of those weights, pulling us down, making us feel like we can't swim—like we could drown any second. We fight or try to run away, not even being able to see what exactly we are fighting or running away from. Blind to the weight, it just keeps coming back and pulling us down.

The opposite would be having the negative on the surface of the ocean—clear as day—where we can see it. Clearly. Precisely. When we face our fears directly, we can look straight at them, analyze them, and figure out a path to get around them—without ignoring them. And we are safe. We don't feel the need to fight or flee because it is in our clear vision.

Now, the positive. Having an aversion to the positive, as I do, feels like you are just looking for the things in the way all the time. You're constantly swimming underneath the water, trying to find more things that are buried deep within the clear water. Never noticing that you are the clear water. Not noticing the vastness of all the choices and paths that are right in front of you because you are too fixated on finding the obstacles that may or may not be in the way.

​The truth lies in learning to swim at all depths. The ocean doesn't choose between its depths and its surface—it embraces both. Perhaps true enlightenment may not lie in avoiding either the light or the dark, but in learning to move fluidly between them with neutral acceptance, recognizing that each has its purpose in the vast ocean of our consciousness. Like Yin and Yang, they need each other to be whole.