Black Swan

            In Natalie Portman’s recent movie, Black Swan, she plays a young ballerina hoping to make to leading role in Swan Lake.  During her efforts to be the lead, her director tells her she must not only be the elegant, pure, naïve white swan but she must be able to portray and experience the black swan, the shadow side that is intense, seductive, spontaneous, creative.

            It seems that just the word shadow side or reference to it invokes either a gasp of disapproval or a sigh of longing.  Either way this side is fairly unfamiliar, unexperienced, unevolved and feared.  How interesting it is though that deep spiritual and emotional work refer to this part of us as the place we must go in order to heal.  Remember the “dark night of the soul”?  I can’t help but think this is a reference to the shadow, the Black Swan of our lives. 

As with most things though, trying to force someone to work on their hidden, rejected, repressed, etc. parts is most useless until the person is ready to go there.  It’s like forcing an addict into rehab in hopes that “they’ll see their misguided ways and straighten up” when you’re really just doing it because a) you want to control them & this seems to be the only way, b) you want to make yourself feel like you did something just in case they end up dead down the road, or c) you wish you had a way to relieve the pain & discomfort but don’t know any other way than they do – in other words, you haven’t gotten in enough pain to get addicted to THAT, YET.  As my yoga therapy teacher so wisely reminded me, we’re all addicted to something whether we own it or not.  Some things just have more sudden and severe consequences than others.  Heroin vs. cigarettes vs. fast food vs. relationships…you get the point.  They all suck though and they all take their toll on us physically, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually.  We each have our own paths and our own pain thresholds that accompany them.  No path is better or worse, wrong or right, only faster or slower, but then that too is relative.  Some of us our turtles, others are tortoises.  Both are cute but one just strikes your fancy more than the other.  So recognize your path and offer yourself compassion versus judgment, criticism and comparison of yourself to another.  As the Bhagavad Gita, a foundation text in yoga and Hinduism says, “ Better is one’s own dharma though imperfectly carried out than the dharma of another carried out perfectly.  Better is death in fulfillment of one’s own dharma, for to follow the law of another brings great spiritual peril.”  So live authentically and know that no effort ever goes to waste when it is done in purpose of your purpose on your path.  Knowing that can actually take some of the pressure off to do it PERFECT or like someone else who you PERCEIVE as perfect or with the easier path. 

            So what did your soul sign up for this round?  As Gurmukh, a well-known Kundalini teacher once told me about my parents without even mentioning them, “You know you chose them,” and she was right.  I knew I’d chosen them and that everything I learned and still learn from them is perfect, although pain at times.  When we look deeply into the darkness, we realize that darkness is merely the absence of light.  So bring your lantern of awareness and your cloak of comfort. 

What parts of you are screaming to be seen and heard? 

What would it be like to give them a voice and maybe even some space to breath and be seen? 

What would it be like to trust that you have everything you need to handle what will be revealed and if you don’t then the people that show up in your life in those Divine moments will?

Below is a Sufi quote to send you off with as you ponder your so-called darker, scarier, undesirable parts – the parts that I consider the juicy, fertile, although sometimes manure-smelling fertilizer for transformation that without it we’d all be vanilla or even worse, unsweetened.

“Overcome any bitterness that may have come because you were not up to the magnitude of the pain that was entrusted to you.  Like the Mother of the World, who carries the pain of the world in her heart, each one of us is part of her heart, and therefore endowed with a certain measure of cosmic pain.”

Ram Dass’ teacher Neem Karoli Baba (Maharaji) often told him to see everyone as his mother or the great Mother.  By doing that we all can soften into that womb-like space and do the work that WE entrusted ourselves to do this time around when we decided to come back into form from the formless.  We knew we were ready for this moment, this experience.  Can you remember?  If not, keep looking and listening. Until then, I’ll remember for you.