My Darkness, Sees and Honors your Darkness

I found ethos + my ritual practice amid a dark, pit-of-despair style depressive episode. It wasn’t my first or my last, but it was the most debilitating experience of depression to date, and I will spare those details for brevity’s sake. 

At times, my life has the quality of a cautionary tale. An ordinary traveler embattled with a perfect storm of extraordinary, albeit unfortunate, events. Traumas, tragedies, and tribulations. It is funny how an alliteration can make the ugliest things sound beautiful or poetic. In the thick of the suffering, you miss the faint lines of ironic symmetry and the curves in the path, which become unhealthy patterns. Patterns can become labyrinthine, leaving you feeling stuck, lost, hopeless, + frustrated. There isn’t anything poetic or beautiful in that crystallization of dysfunction. 

I found a home at ethos because of the teachers. They spoke of more than “love + light” (cue: dreamy harp sound + twinkles). That was sarcastic + dismissive. I know that the Light is needed and vital, especially in dark times. Communities need spaces that dispense the good stuff. 

At that time, I was not in a place to receive the good stuff, and it felt tawdry and cheap. Those first teachers spoke about the grief, the pain, and the suffering in life without trying to silver-line it away. 

Which was preternaturally validating, and that validation was a balm to a weary soul. 

I have memories of listening to teachers cueing in class and thinking, “Oh, she understands the neuroscience of trauma.” and “Oh, she has a working knowledge of the nervous system beyond just a cursory understanding.” That gained my closely guarded trust. 

Those experiences imparted the truth; yoga wasn’t about how I looked in a crop top or if I would ever be flexible enough for King Pigeon; yoga was about healing (cue those dreamy harps again, this time sans sarcasm). 

“Depression is an illness of the inability to marvel at the sunset.” - Robert M Sapolsky.   

That statement is beautiful and succinct. As a mental health therapist, I believe this description could also perfectly illustrate experiences of anxiety, grief, and the effects of trauma. It is quickly becoming aptly descriptive of modernity as we continue to be lulled by our ever-evolving dopamine slot machine distraction devices that are graphed to our hands. 

In our culture, we do not validate the daily unpleasant emotional experiences, let alone the tectonically disruptive experiences of grief, trauma, toxic levels of stress, and mental illness. We do not acknowledge they are part of life and can serve a purpose. 

Modern nuclear families, often broken or bifurcated, are typically our only templates for learning how to cope with painful feelings and difficult experiences. Some people are lucky, and they get a good-enough template for coping. Other people, perhaps most, do not. This, coupled with ‘the brain you get’ thanks to your genes (there’s luck again), influences your world experience.

How we “cope,” or how we are allowed and expected to cope, largely depends on how we are socialized. Which is contingent on our social location: sex, gender identity, race, ethnicity, creed, economic status, etc. 

All the aspects of our identity that make us who we influence what is demanded of us. 

As a clinical therapist, I spend most of my waking hours working behind the backdrop of polite society in the darkest corners of reality. Each day bearing witness to what human beings will do to one another. I call it “working behind the curtain” because these things I hear are the things people don’t talk about at parties. 

As a clinical observer of the human carnival, I see people slip + slide into living in survival mode, using their unique constellation of default settings. 

We all have these settings. Whether it be positively reinforced default settings, like being hyper-productive. Burying yourself in the tasks + the trappings of the material-mechanical capitalist ideal before lapsing into periods of numbing. Whether it be less socially acceptable patterns like long periods of protective collapse, living on the hamster wheel of avoidance via escapism, unending exhaustion, over-planning, procrastinating, and finally frantically trying to meet deadlines. Whether it be finding yourself in reoccurring themes in relationships or circumstances, despite the distress and disruption to your spirit. We all have default settings. 

Whatever keeps happening to you is not your fault. 

No one ever tells us that. Even when it is obvious we aren’t having a good time making a proper mess of things, no one says, “I see you are struggling, and this is not your fault.” 

It's not your fault because a default setting is like a dance you have known your entire life. You have known it for so long that you do not explicitly remember learning it. It is implicit, outside of your consciousness, but not like the wisdom of intuition. The music starts (triggering the situation), and you immediately begin reacting in the ways you always have, without thinking about the steps. It never crosses your mind during the music playing that maybe, just maybe, there is a different way of moving through. 

These old narratives, behavior patterns, and reoccurring themes kept you alive and have ensured you made it to this space and time. Honor that fact. Seriously, stop right now, look around and say out loud, “Behold, after all of that, here I am living.” 

But know, the beliefs and behaviors that ensured our survival do not necessarily continue to serve us in perpetuity. On the contrary, they tend to leave us stuck in places we cannot grow. Like a snake sheds its skin to expand and continue to mature, we must cast off old layers of our previous selves. 

Burning yourself down by staying busy, avoiding discomfort, shutting down, lashing out, numbing out, drowning your senses with drugs, drink, food, sex, exercise, or buying shit you do 

not need will not solve this problem. Suppressing, repressing, projecting, denying won’t solve this problem. The problem of being human in the 21st century. 

Compulsively distracting yourself into oblivion with scrolling, binge-watching, and zoning out will not change the deeper sense of “wrongness.” 

We live in a time of infinite information, communication, and contact, yet we live in scarcity when it comes to connections. We can overindulge in every substance and resource, yet we often feel unsatisfied, which is a sickness. 

The way out is always through. Emotions are messengers, communicating something to you about your life. Sometimes, they come to indicate that you need to do something, and other times, they simply ask you to be present, remember, and do nothing. In my estimation, most emotions bubble to the surface to come out. You usually feel at least a little better after a long-held cry. 

But we are not taught how to feel, just be with ourselves, or just observe urges. 

So, we learn by default to fight, run away, fawn, thrash, shut down, distract, and be in a chronic state of frenzy. 

To slough off those layers of self that are suffocating you, you must first be able to be with yourself, in all manner of mood and emotional states. This means not turning to a screen when you realize annoyance; you have to wait in line. It means not going to buy something you do not need because something else has been worrying you. It means sometimes saying “No” when you are always saying “Yes” and vice versa. Then tolerating what happens inside of you next. 

As I see it, we are boats in a vast ocean. Waves come and go tidal and tsunami. There are seasons for all of us when we are caught in a tempest that feels unending. Yet, eventually, they end and the sun reappears. Then a season of still waters with barely a ripple. For some, both can be equally disquieting. 

Our job, this being human, is to weather the storms and train our minds to be present for the moments that we can feel the sun on our shoulders and accept the good that is often in the placidity of the present. 

Weathering the storm means facing the pelting swell with our chin raised and eyes wide open. Even when it stings our eyes and chills us to the bone. In facing it, we learn and become active participants in navigating our lives. There is power in that because that is where knowledge is gained, and it is consolidated into wisdom. Wisdom begets feelings of mastery or the sense that 

whatever happens, you will be able to handle it. In yoga, we call this equanimity of mind. Aplomb. Composure. Serenity. Imperturbability. Unfuckwithableness. 

We can never know or control the What, the When, or the Why of those impending tempests; it is, after all the ocean. It often feels that mercurial; other times, we may feel like we are merely stuck 

in an aquarium. Too small, overly contrived, and oppressively constrained, out of our natural habitat as we sit in stale offices without windows or stare at dancing lights on a screen that dispenses tiny hits of dopamine that soothe our anxieties. For the moment. 

If you made it this far, something likely resonated with you. I wrote this to plead the case for approaching your darkest parts, facing your tempest. You are not proud of the parts of yourself, the parts you edit out of relationships as long as you can, and the parts sometimes denied even to yourself. We all have dark parts; this life is a tricky business; how could we not? 

There is another version of ourselves waiting to slip out from underneath the calcified layers within ourselves. The dark parts are not the problem; the patterns and pretenses we employ to avoid feeling them is the problem. 

I said, “It’s not your fault.” That is true, but it is your responsibility once the problem is identified and labeled to course-correct. No one can do it for you, but know, there is an entire community of people ready to help you; they are equipped and intimately familiar with navigating rough waters + the work of shedding one’s skin.