One of my many favorite Cloud Cult lyrics is from their song Everybody Here is a Cloud. The line goes, “Somebody turn the lights out. There’s so much more to see in our darkest places.” After practicing homeopathy for ten years and being a self-improvement junkie, I can emphatically agree that this line is true.
It is actually our darkest places that hold the most promise. These are the places that hold the most potential and also the most fear. It is easy to go through life hiding those dark places, shoving them to the background through avoidance behaviors – sleep, eating, over-exercising, drinking and withdrawal. It can be more comfortable to live in these behaviors than to face what may lie beneath.
We are in this strange season of transition. The light is coming. It’s brighter and warmer. We're seeing the sun again! But I also get caught unaware. I can go out with my sweatshirt and be shocked that it’s a mere 18 degrees. It may be cold, but the light is there and growing each day.
There’s a reason that everyone used to have a practice of “spring cleaning”. This is a concept I absolutely love. I have yet, however, to do a great job of executing it in my own home thoroughly enough for my liking. Nonetheless, it is a task that I will move into fully now for my own dark places.
Each spring, it’s easy to move quickly into the busyness of spring. We focus our time more and more outdoors first in tending to our plants, then cleaning the spaces and setting up for a summer outside.
This year, I am determined not to drag my old patterns, the sludge that’s built up in my dark places, into my summer. It seems that the same old patterns always seem to build up at some point and I start feeling them - ridiculous for my grandiose plans then feeling too small, not good enough, not worthy of success, unable to create a daily structure for myself and on and on.
So, what’s there to do? For me, it’s using the tools that I learned at the Hoffman Process to work through these core behavior patterns and clear out the dark places. It’s also talking to my homeopath about these patterns and continuing my personal transformation and uncovering through homeopathic care.
What is there to do for you? How will you bring the light into your dark places? What work do you need to do to clear out the sludge?
I wish all of us courage, bravery and curiosity as we usher in the light of spring and clean out our dark places.