Dark Beauty

Enjoying the delicious pleasures of frappuccinos and cupcakes with a friend on a rare sunny London weekend, we got to talking about how some of life’s experiences strike you in ways you’d never have expected. Even the good ones can be tinged with sadness or loss, that – to me – doesn’t take away from their extraordinary beauty, but gives them a depth that you only come to respect when life has turned around and bitten you once or twice.

The ex-monk and psychotherapist, Thomas Moore, devotes an entire chapter of his book, Dark Nights Of The Soul, to what he calls dark beauty. He stresses the beauty to be found in darkness, stating “Beauty is to the soul what truth and fact are to the mnd. The beauty of a thing is its depth and meaning being revealed. To perceive that beauty, you need any eye for both appearances and the invisible radiance of a thing. You also need the capacity to be affected. But many people walk through life defended against all positive influences. They are not open to the invitations and messages coming at them every turn. They wonder why life feels empty and meaningless, when the problem is not the absence of meaning but their blindness and deafness to it.”

As much as we can learn to appreciate the beauty in darkness, we also need to be awake to the darkness that lies within beauty. All transitions in life, however positive, are processes of change, where we let go of one condition in order to allow another in. Any movement or commitment involves loss – by choosing one option, we are letting others go. By moving to the next stage, we are releasing what came before. Transitions imply mixed emotions, so to ignore the dark in favour of the light is to cut off from a part of ourselves that needs acknowledgement.

One of the most vivid illustrations of those kinds of mixed emotions came from a friend a few days after she’d given birth. Although delighted to have a healthy baby to hold, she talked about how she needed to adjust to considering this external creature as ‘her baby’, when for nine months it had been something inside her. It wasn’t a simple transition and it took a little while for her feelings to settle. When they did, I’m sure it was in a large part due to her willingness to be totally honest with herself and acknowledge those uncomfortable feelings in a time that is generally considered to be a wholly positive one. Sometimes you just have to give yourself the space to feel what is there, rather than what you think you should be feeling.

Other times, the beauty within a good relationship seems clouded by conflict, yet the conflict itself is leading you on to a greater depth of authenticity and intimacy. As the authors, Harville Hendrix and Helen LaKelly Hunt, reveal in Receiving Love, developing intimacy is merely a theoretical goal until you have a chance to practice it in a safe environment.

They say “Your goal must move from the cognitive level of ‘this is what I want to do’ to the level of connected knowing where you can say ‘this is what it feels like to have the experience of doing what I want to do … You won’t know that it’s OK to be your full self instead of an abbreviated, cleaned-up version unless your partner helps you feel good about expressing opinions that may be different from hers, and the two of you end your symbiotic relationship.

“Your rehabilitation takes place through her reinforcement of your new openness. You have to disagree with her about what she’s wearing, or what movie you’re going to see, or whether it’s a good idea for your son to enlist in the military – and live to tell the tale. Then you’ll ‘know’ that it’s safe to be yourself … It’s a breakthrough to realise that the purpose of a committed relationship is not to be happy, but to heal. And then you will be happy.”

I love this quote for the fabulous truth that lies within it – happiness is not the same as surface perfection; it’s about learning to embrace all of our experiences as part of the journey, however acceptable or unacceptable we may believe them to be. With that level of equanimity, we can become truly happy.

This week, if things are tough, look for the beauty. What are you learning from the experience? How has it opened you up emotionally? Can you be content knowing that there’s an underlying meaning that’s not yet revealed itself? If it’s all looking good, but you have mixed feelings, simply acknowledge all your feelings, however appropriate you think they are. That will help you to let go and allow you to move on. Enjoy your week of both beauty and darkness – and learn to love them equally.

For the Coach Fabulous archives, go to www.coachfabulous.blogspot.com and for the I Am Fabulous archives, go to www.fabcentral.blogspot.com. You can email me at coachfabulous@iamfabulous.co.uk. All material ©2008 Alison Porter. No article may be reproduced in full or in part without the express permission of the author. (Originally posted 5 May 08)

Travelling Blind

Sometimes in life we just don’t have the answer. We’d like to think that everything is controllable, that we can protect ourselves from loss and suffering, but it’s just not possible. There are no pat answers to most of the big questions in life, people don’t behave the way we expect them to and, despite our best efforts, things don’t necessarily work out the way we planned. We can have our theories about the way things are, but sooner or later an exception will come along to prove the rule. So what’s a girl to do?

According to Jean Houston, author of The Search For The Beloved, “How do you take your woundings, your betrayals, your ‘holes’ and make yourself holy instead of battered? This process involves the dramatic remythologising of yourself and your life … the gaining of a very different perspective.”

Essentially, what we need to do is look for meaning, even when there may be no such thing as an answer. We might not be able to solve the problem, but we can find meaning in it. Sometimes what crops up may be a clue to a pattern of behaviour that we tend to repeat or that we encounter in others. As humans there’s a childlike – and very persistent – desire in us to know the reasons why things happen in our lives and, as hard as we try to reason things out, we remain very uncomfortable with any degree of uncertainty.

I remember being told by a specialist when I was struggling to overcome chronic fatigue that one of the biggest factors affecting recovery was the amount of uncertainty in patients’ lives. It seems we can deal with anything if it’s a known quantity, but it’s uncertainty that drives the stress levels up and drives us all mad in the process. That same factor is at work when we feel relieved when we have a diagnosis of illness, however good or bad – it’s the not knowing that’s the most difficult for us.

Sadly, though, life does not tend to conspire with our ideal world where certainty rules and nothing catches us by surprise. As the author of The Re-Enchantment Of Everyday Life, Thomas Moore, puts it, “It is in the nature of things to be drawn to the very experiences that will spoil our innocence, transform our lives and give us necessary complexity and depth.”

To become deeper, more soulful people – and to learn to cope with life in a way that doesn’t leave us looking like we have our fingers plugged into a light socket – we have to befriend the great mystery. We have to learn to be flexible and to embrace change as firmly and joyfully as we hold our own plans. We need to learn to tell ourselves a new story about what change and uncertainty mean in our lives.

I take my inspiration from my friend Miranda’s cat. Not only does he have a fabulous name – Great – but he ambles through life in his own happy way and is never disturbed by a last-minute change of plans. He’ll be heading out the door, but if you disturb his outward bound trajectory by picking him up, he’ll just enjoy the cuddle. Sometimes his seemingly purposeful walk towards the food bowl is interrupted by the discovery of a particularly warm bit of floor surface that captures his attention for a quick nap. It’s a pleasure – and an education – to watch him joyfully accept anything that appears in his life, whether he planned it or not.

While your circumstances may not be as simple as the feline life, you can learn to adopt a more cat-like appreciation of the moment, rather than letting your mind hang out in a future that may never happen or a past that you cannot change. Jack Canfield, who co-wrote the ultra-successful Chicken Soup For The Soul series, tells a great story about learning to let go of the need to know how things will turn out. As he points out, when you drive at night you can only ever see a couple of hundred yards ahead of you, but you can drive right across the country that way. You don’t need to be able to see the entire route to be able to make the journey. Martin Luther King Jr spoke on that theme too, when he said “Take the first step. You don’t have to see the whole staircase to take the first step.”

This week, let’s all give up trying to figure things out and just take them as they come. If there’s a project you want to get off the ground, try taking some steps without having the whole plan. Make some space in your life to be seduced by the pleasure of the moment. If you have a problem that’s bothering you, try looking for meaning instead of trying to solve it. What might that issue be telling you about a recurring theme in your life? What if you stopped worrying about it and relaxed long enough to let a solution emerge? Go and do something completely different – and preferably slightly silly – and then come back and see if you see the situation in a new light. Take a holiday from everyone else’s problems as well. Let them sort themselves out – you’re having a week off. Relax and remember that no-one ever has all the answers … and if you think you do, you’re kidding yourself!

Click through to the Coach Fabulous advice column by using the link in the Favourite Sites section on the right or by going to http://coachfabulous.blogspot.com. For alert emails on new postings, email subscribe@iamfabulous.co.uk. To contact me, email coachfabulous@iamfabulous.co.uk. All material © 2007 Alison Porter. No article may be reproduced in full or in part without the express permission of the author. (Originally posted 12 Mar 07)