Are you willing to look at your own darkness?

One of the most challenging things to do is to look at our own darkness, without flinching, without reacting, without blaming, without shame, without embarrassment. This is a tough one for everyone, even for people already on the path of personal development, let alone people who are new to personal growth.

Often people ask me how do I read people. Do I look at their energies first? Or do I read their minds? Or do I look at their aura first?

The first thing I see/sense is usually energy. It is a sense, it is not seeing (which means I don't use my aura reading abilities at this point). The second thing I see is their reaction/non-reaction because you can learn a lot about a person at any moment on how much they are triggered or not. 

And what they do/act/say AFTER they are triggered is really the key to see how far they are in their journey of personal development. 

As you can imagine, most people have not stepped on the path of any self-awareness. And even if they have, most are not willing to look at their own darkness so they blame, react, bitch, divide, judge etc when they are triggered. 

I remember years ago, someone close to me was going through some deep changes in his life, so I noticed some inconsistencies and as a promise*, I made to him, that I would tell him when I see him acting from his ego. I suggested that maybe it is a good idea for him to work on his inner child issues. Immediately, he was defensive and said: my parents didn't do anything bad to me, they were almost perfect parents. 

He directed his anger towards me and said: why are you saying my parents are bad people?

Woah.

See how one suggestion triggered his deep stuff? I did not once mention anything about his parents, yet, in his own mind, he presumed I did.

In his reaction, he denied his own shadow side that he had to put his parents on the pedestal. Something is definitely really going on there! Till this day, more than some 15 years later, I do not think he has looked into this part of himself yet. But I have decided long ago, that I couldn't keep the promise to him to be his "gatekeeper" to point out to him when he was acting out of ego, because he was not willing to look at his own darkness, but in turn would turn on me. It was not worth the friendship. 

It is not easy to confront ourselves. Most of us do not like to think that we are anything less than. We want to feel powerful and we want to feel like we are in charge of our own lives, our own consciousness and our own decisions. We think that owning our darkness and seeing our faults make us weak. The reality is it takes courage to look at the biggest enemy in our own lives - our darkness. It is not weakness, it is pure strength. 

Life is a battlefield as stated in the Bhagavadgita. But the battle we have is not with other people or things. It is a battle with our own darkness. How can we go into battle with something if we do not know it, or understand it? 

Unfortunately, when we do not want to see our own darkness all decisions we make from that position is ALWAYS a decision to run from the truth of who we are. ALWAYS. 

And life is such that no matter how far we think we can run, we can never ever run from our own shadow, it is always just behind us. 

This means that time and time again, we will keep banging our heads on the wall because the decisions we make in our lives are not what will help us to go further. We may move sideways, backwards, but never forward if we are not willing to look at our own darkness. 

This is a battle we can never win if we do not look at our darkness in the eye. As my own spiritual teacher always said: Life is only a journey to meet yourself. 

At a time such as NOW, the opportunities presented to us are aplenty. So are you willing? 

[*Please do not go around pointing out your friends' faults to them if you have not been given permission.]

©2020 Shamala Tan

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Shamala Tan is an author, spiritual entrepreneur and healer. Her work focuses on transforming the lives of others on the spiritual, emotional, mental and earthly level.

One of her success stories as an author is to being featured alongside New York’s bestsellers Sonia Choquette, Robert Allen, Arielle Ford, Marci Shimoff as well as Christine Kloser in the book Pebbles In The Pond.

Shamala’s clients include small business owners, holistic practitioners as well as those seeking to find more significant meaning and value in life. Shamala offers laser coaching to her clients on a one-to-one basis or in a group environment, offline as well as online.