What is Soulful Impact and How Do We Create It? (Part 2)
Step 2: Turn Toward What You Are Running From (Embrace the Darkness)
Welcome to Soulful Impact, a newsletter exploring the territory of remembering our true nature and realizing our full potential.
This is Part 2 of a 5-part series introducing the concept and practice of Soulful Impact:
Step 2: Turn Toward What You Are Running From (Embrace the Darkness)
As always, I’d love to hear what resonates and I welcome your comments and feedback. Thanks so much for being here!
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Step 2: Turn Toward What You Are Running From (Embrace the Darkness)
This step of the practice is about intentionally noticing the elements of our experience that we tend to resist or run away from, and choosing to turn toward and embrace them instead. I refer to these uncomfortable or scary experiences as our inner darkness.
Generally speaking, in our culture, we have a bias toward the light. We want things to feel good and all to be well. Understandably so! In many cases, it’s healthy and supportive to resist the dark. The wisdom of our resistance is that it shows us where our growth edges are and keeps us from overdoing it.
Adopting an empowered creator mindset creates a healthy foundation for embracing the darkness, because it’s only healthy and generative to embrace darkness by your own empowered choice. Doing so because you feel pressured, manipulated, or think you “should” is a recipe for trouble. Plowing too far or fast into the darkness can be unfriendly. You get to choose - always - what to embrace and what to resist.
The questions I’d invite you to consider are:
What am I resisting about my present moment experience?
How much is that resistance serving me?
What, if anything, would I be willing embrace and accept about what is here now?
To the best of your ability, open to the possibility that embracing your darkness — that which you tend to resist — could be a portal to healing, freedom and empowerment. Perhaps it could help you remember your true nature and realize your full potential.
Our egos like to separate themselves from the world by judging certain qualities, experiences or identities as “good” and others as “bad.” Then they try to control our inner experiences and outer appearances to align with those judgments. In other words, they resist the dark and bias toward the light.
Intentionally embracing the darkness is a way of lovingly subverting this pattern. It is a powerful pathway to live into the felt experience of the deeper truth of who you really are. Each time you poke through the ego’s facade and come out still living and breathing on the other side — let alone feeling more empowered, peaceful, loving and free — the knowing of that deeper truth sinks more deeply into your bones.
When it comes to the practice of Soulful Impact, there are two key components to turning toward what you are running from (embracing the darkness):
The archetypal and initiatory journey of spiritual descent, which dismantles the adolescent ego and creates the possibility of making direct contact with your soul; and
The everyday practice of embracing our darkness in each present and mundane moment, characterized in particular by reclaiming banished parts of ourselves and expanding our capacity to experience intense sensation and emotion.
The Spiritual Descent
When I first read Bill Plotkin’s book Soulcraft, I was struck by his observation that there are two directions we can go to access the sacred: up (toward heaven, light, spirit and oneness) and down (into the earth, darkness, nature and soul). He offers a simple distinction between soul and spirit, which I find quite useful:
“By soul I mean the vital, mysterious, and wild core of our individual selves, an essence unique to each person, qualities found in layers of the self much deeper than our personalities. By spirit I mean the single, great, and eternal mystery that permeates and animates everything in the universe and yet transcends all. Ultimately, each soul exists as an agent for spirit.”1
Plotkin observes that these two realms of spirituality “are distinct yet complimentary. Together they form a whole. Either alone is incomplete.” He also notes that although the downward direction of spirituality — the path of soul — is “equally sacred and perhaps even more ancient,” it is often neglected by contemporary religions, especially in the West.
Reading these words for the first time struck a chord in me. It immediately made sense and resonated as true — not unlike the experience of seeing an old friend after a long time apart, or returning to a familiar place after being away. I recognized these concepts. I recognized the two directions that together make a complete whole. I recognized that one of them seemed conspicuously absent from my experience of modern-day culture and religion. This more complete picture of spirituality seemed much more trustworthy and intriguing than anything I had previously encountered. It was as if a bell rang deep within my being.
I also happened to encounter these ideas during quite a dark time in my life. I was in my mid-20s, and on the surface level, everything looked great — I’d been diligently executing my mind’s plan for “success” and had made it to my dream graduate program and dream summer internship. Yet these shiny accolades weren’t making me feel the way I expected to feel once I reached them. The strategy of my adolescent ego wasn’t working, and as I began to face that, my life felt like it was falling apart. I felt like I was falling apart, and I was — at least on the level of my ego.
At first I fought desperately against this darkness, because it’s all I knew how to do. I tried to keep myself together by sheer force of will, because I didn’t yet have the ability to see the wisdom — and the sacredness — in the dark. But I was losing the battle, and worried I was losing my mind.
It hadn’t yet occurred to me that falling apart could be a gift. That death, destruction and decay could be allies, here to shepherd away that which no longer served me and my higher purpose. That if I could trust and surrender to the natural process of death and rebirth, perhaps something new would have space to emerge.
Encountering Ploktin’s work helped open me to this possibility, and launched me on my first spiritual descent. I was suddenly able to see the falling apart as happening for me.
I began to surrender to the darkness and actually invite the death of my old life, old identity, old attachments and old ways of being. I immediately found a new sense of freedom and possibility. Before long, I was diving in the deep end: alone and hungry in the Utah desert, ceremonially marking the death of my prior self while out on a vision fast. A few days later, I received a life-altering vision that connected me to my soul’s purpose.
As I look back on that experience now, nearly 10 years on, there’s a key observation that stands out: Surrendering to the darkness — allowing it to engulf my ego’s smaller life — allowed me, for the first time, to feel held by Life itself.
It was one of the most terrifying things I had ever done. Releasing all my attachments, genuinely letting go of control, opening to the full truth of myself and my experience, finally throwing my hands up and saying “I’m done” — all of that ran completely counter to my mind’s programming. My inner critics and protectors were having an absolute heyday.
But thanks to the support of some amazing guides, the expansive love and magic of Mother Earth, and my deep desire to meet my own soul, I didn’t falter. I met those scared parts of me with love, and carried on with my descent.
The more I let go of control, the more I found myself more deeply and nourishingly supported by the more-than-human-world. Even more than supported — welcomed. Beloved. Not welcomed as the smaller, constrained version of me that my ego had been trying to force into being, but welcomed as the raw, flawed, messy, confused, and so deeply human being that I actually was.
That choice to surrender allowed me to hear the call of my soul. It cleared the path for me to follow that call, and woke me up to a whole new universe of allies. It gave me the direct experience of realizing that I didn’t have to do it all myself. I could loosen my grip, and allow myself to be guided and held. Life could actually feel much easier that way.
I have never been the same since.
The Everyday Darkness
Plotkin’s frameworks and ideas (best encapsulated in his most recent book, The Journey of Soul Initiation) are some of my favorite to illuminate the mysterious territory of soul and guide the downward direction of spiritual growth. This journey — the descent — makes up a key piece of the practice of embracing the dark. Especially at the beginning of the Soulful Impact journey, the initiatory process of releasing one’s adolescent self, opening to the Mystery and encountering soul is crucial.
But there’s more to this step than just that.
Sometimes, embracing darkness does mean a dramatic falling apart and letting go that facilitates a ceremonial death of the ego. But it isn’t always so big and dramatic. Learning to create Soulful Impact also means developing the skill of embracing the darkness on the unseen level of your everyday inner experience. It means making a daily, consistent habit out of noticing the inner experiences your ego wants to resist, choosing to surrender, and welcoming what’s here.
Generally speaking, your ego doesn’t want you to go somewhere because doing so would feel too uncomfortable or threatening to it. When the ego feels threatened, it tries to deny what’s happening by fighting or running away. Facing and accepting the reality of what’s here feels like too much, so instead you try to control the outside world and your inner experience.
Ultimately, it doesn’t work.
Fighting or escaping might create some temporary relief, but it’s a losing strategy overall. The ego can’t control reality because reality emerges from somewhere far beyond it. When we attempt to control, all we’re really doing is keeping ourselves stuck in a small and contracted state of consciousness. We spend energy, time and attention fighting a battle we can’t win, and we stay locked in a worldview that disconnects us from the deeper truth of who we really are. The thing you are running from ends up running you.
Alternatively, you can turn toward the darkness and embrace it. This is a move that helps you reclaim your agency as the empowered creator of your own experience. It’s also a powerful way to remember and return to the deeper truth of who you really are.
For example, your ego might resist acknowledging (let alone displaying or embodying) a persona, quality or characteristic that lives within you. This is often because as a child, you had some experience that caused you to experience that part of yourself as “bad,” and you learned to suppress or deny it in order to feel safe and loved. (Here’s a personal story to illustrate this example.)
Embracing your disowned parts means finding the willingness to recognize that, despite your ego’s protests, you contain the full spectrum of humanity and possibility within you. Instead of pretending that certain qualities you dislike in other people don’t also exist in you, try on the possibility that if you spot it, you got it. The reason you can recognize the characteristic in someone else is because it lives in you too. If seeing it in them drives you up the wall, that very likely means you are disowning, denying or not fully appreciating that part of yourself.
When you summon the strength to accept, love and embrace the full spectrum of humanity and possibility that you truly are, you experience wholeness. You allow your love to be greater than your fear. Through the sheer bigness of your heart, you recognize that even the most repulsive parts of you still contain a sacred essence. They are redeemable, and therefore, so are you. You get to come home to the wholeness that you already are.
“Awareness with acceptance is the healing.”
- Daniel McQueen
Another common example of inner darkness that our egos tend to avoid is the experience of intense body sensations and/or emotion. These big waves of energy can feel out of control and unpredictable, and therefore threatening to fully experience.
Building the capacity to fully experience these waves is a powerful gateway to soul. In a mysterious and magical way, surrendering to and fully experiencing that which is most sensitive and tender within us has a capacity to connect us with our soul’s gifts. (For a personal story to illustrate this example, see here.)
Choosing to embrace rather than deny the intensity of our feelings and emotions is like building a new muscle or gaining confidence with a new skill. It may feel scary and awkward at first, but each time you do it, you build more comfort and capacity. Ultimately, this practice unlocks greater integrity with yourself, as you stop fighting with your authentic experience and learn to align with it instead.
As you develop skill and comfort with welcoming and allowing the experience of emotion and sensation in the body, you also benefit from the incredible intelligence and wisdom that are available to you through those senses. You come to learn the particular energetic signatures of various feelings, and they become powerful guides to connect you to your intuition and inner truth. Your body and emotions become powerful allies to help you realize your highest potential and follow the guidance of your soul.
Step 3: Wake Up to Wholeness
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Find the complete 5-part series here:
Step 2: Turn Toward What You Are Running From (Embrace the Darkness)
Plotkin, B. (2003). Soulcraft. Novato, California: New World Library.