A short spoken-word guidance by Steven Barnes about the 'Dark Night of the Soul' (also called collapsing to the center). Barnes emphasizes inevitability of temporary defeat, the importance of preparing for setbacks, taking personal responsibility, and balancing outer toughness with inner tenderness (the 'inner child') so that when failure comes one can 'collapse to the center' and protect what matters.
Hi, this is Stephen Barnes welcoming you to Healing Emotions, part seven, the Dark Night of the Soul. Now, this might also reasonably be referred to as collapsing to the center. Now, it's important to remember that defeat, at least temporary defeat, is inevitable in life. The approach to any major goal will exhaust your current resources, putting a crack in in your ego shell. Now, if you know this in advance, then it's a lot like knowing that your car is going to get a flat tire when you drive across the desert next week. You can either put your head in the sand and pretend it isn't going to happen and then rail against the fates, blaming them for your 30 mile walk in the blazing sun, or you can check your spare tire, your jack, your emergency flares and spare water, and be certain that you know how to operate all the pieces of the repair machine in adv. Now, which of these options do you think is the more adult choice? The key is going to be balance. Maybe you remember the movie the Manhattan Project where the kid is constructing a homemade atomic bomb. The goal is to create a critical mass of fissionable material that required a plastic explosive to drive all the U238 inward into a sphere at a single critical instant, triggering the desired boom. Just a fraction off in any direction and you don't get that bigger explosion. Now, it's not very likely you're going to have a critical breakdown breakthrough in all three arenas at the same time. But the implication here is that if you did, you might be able to trigger one of those Saul on the Road to Damascus spontaneous enlightenment moments. While I have no idea how to trigger that, or even if it would be desirable, or if there is any discipline in the world that regularly succeeds in choreographing breakthrough in all three arenas simultaneously, there is wisdom in aligning yourself so that breakdowns will, over the course of a lifetime, proceed in a balanced fashion. It's popular to blame relationship issues on social factors, pointing out the high statistics of divorce. It's popular to blame the economy for our finances. And it's popular to blame factors outside our own behaviors for our weight problems. Plenty of agreement for all three. The doorway to the pity party is right over there. But if you take the short one, if you reject the notion that your life is out of your control, that's very different and extraordinarily powerful. One of the reasons we perform inner child meditation is that we often cannot take such responsibility for ourselves. We simply don't love ourselves enough. But most of us can rise to the higher level when our families or Children are at risk. That's how we're wired up. By creating an image of yourself as a young, helpless child, it becomes easier to see that we simply cannot continue to blame things outside ourselves for our life situation. If we do, our children, our dreams, our hopes, our intentions in the world will suffer horribly if you've committed to giving 100% of your effort to protecting that spiritual, emotional essence, that innocent core of your being. The child wants to look at the external factors and blame them for everything wrong. A dog ate my homework. But the adult knows that someone, somewhere, has to be the bottom line. You have to be willing to hurt, to bleed, to cry, really feel the pain of letting yourself down, but simultaneously identify with that perfect, precious child within you, always filled with love and hope. It's a tricky balance to maintain. See this as concentric circles or spheres, the outer toughness and the inner heart. Think of it as male and female, or yin and yang. These are just labels to help you grasp the ineffable. The ineffable. Choose your goals and balance. And when failure comes, collapse to the center, inward to your beloved child, where you are prepared to give your life to protect what is most precious. Bare your teeth. Put your back to the wall. You are the bottom line. You'd go into a burning building to protect your infant son or daughter, wouldn't you? You owe yourself no less. The dark night of the soul will come. You have to find something worth fighting for, worth living for, dying for. Remember, it's not just what you're fighting with. It's what you're fighting for. Your dreams, your love, your heart can and should be that something. This is Stephen Barnes asking you to take the commitment to be the hero in the adventure of your lifetime. There's no one else to do the job. For more information, you can go to www.diamondhour.com. thanks.
