We are a Soul that is having a human body experience - here to live through our inner duality, flaws, weaknesses, and temptations to learn how to consciously choose our own spiritual reality. On the way of learning about the true power of our spiritual identity, we have to face incredible tests and tribulations to learn how to use this power without getting stuck in spiritual traps.
Spirituality is an inner impulse in us that reminds us to grow and evolve into the higher expression of our true being. We all carry the seed of our Higher Self in us, but the way it unfolds during our lifetime is often mysterious for us. We don't understand the purpose of our suffering, and so we resist it. However, with spiritual introspection and education we can discover the key to our self-growth through healing of all that appears as crisis, temptation or tribulation in our lives. Spirituality leads us to the spirit of truth, which includes the truth about our inner dialogues and outer deeds. We cannot align to light without shining a light onto darkness.
The pathway of facing our inner shadow is instrumental for connecting with our inner light.
Seen from a spiritual perspective, Darkness is not just the absence of Light, and it's not a singularity or entity either - it's a realm. We can probably best visualize it as a location/field/sphere with inverted polarity - inverted truth ... It is the realm of self-deception, unconsciousness, laziness, gratification, greed, and specialness. It works through us by inducing fear, doubt, and hatred, which is how it tempts into our hidden inner darkness. The inverted Self is the shadow being of ourselves, that tethered itself to the realm of inverted truth. And here is the problem...nobody wants to be reminded of their own darkness. We all want to experience ourselves and our lives as perfect and squeaky-clean. But how can we know what darkness is if we resist it?
The discussion about inner darkness is complex, and therefore, spirituality often comes with many traps and tests. "Does exploring our own darkness and shadow make us more dark?" is just one example how the many misunderstandings of cosmic laws hinder us to fully understand ourselves and our higher self. Denying that there is darkness, is another one. We don't realize how becoming perfect at bypassing our inner darkness can trap us in our own ego prison of illusions of truth. These and other so called Spiritual Traps can prevent us from healing and growing, and thus becoming able to recognize outer darkness.
The only way to discern darkness from light on the outside is to know it from within.
Darkness is merely a state in which we (temporarily) cannot see/feel light. We call something dark when it restricts our love, truth, or freedom. Our resistance toward darkness is communicated through our inner connection with what is love, truth, and freedom. We cannot control what is going on around us, but we can learn to control what happens inside of us. The link between our ego fear and outer darkness is therefore nothing but our fear of inner darkness. We struggle with admitting that there are aspects within ourselves that are hidden in the dark and out of control. We are afraid of accepting darkness because we are afraid that it would make us powerless. Rightly so...
Our fear of darkness represents the fundamental struggle of accepting who we truly are. Denying or avoiding darkness does not protect us from it. On the contrary! The more we know our own darkness, the better we can identify darkness in the world - and understand how it works.
Those who have faced and reconciled with their own darkness, mostly through crisis or trauma, can allow it to be part of our spiritual identity. The confrontation with our inner untruth teaches us truth in our hearts! And moreover, once you learn to overcome inner darkness, you know that 'delivering ourselves from evil' can only work if we know what 'evil' is. You begin to feel and see darkness in the world, which allows you to withstand it. Without knowing your inner darkness, you cannot recognize outer darkness!
Granted, "If you want to become enlightened you need to walk through the dark nights of our soul" is not a very good pr message. Hence the hesitation and doubts about exploring our own Higher Self. We want to hear about the bliss of this spiritual journey, and get there WITHOUT facing our inner adversities. After all, we all have enough outer adversities on our plates! How could adding our inner darkness into our awareness help with overcoming life's challenges? This duality can only be resolved if we are willing to understand our own Spirituality as just about the 'good' and 'bad' aspects of our life's experience, but more so a discipline of asking deeper questions...
Our human ego has a highly sophisticated program to bypass these deeper questions. It circumvents inner darkness by normalizing and 'coping' what is painful or untrue (aka self-deception). And while our ego often functions as a major adversarial force in our lives, it still is a vital part of our human design to help us to adept and survive. There is no question about the purpose and necessity of having an ego, but it needs to be trained in order to serve us. If we want to fully understand what 'being spiritual' means, we need to sort our inner hierarchies first:
We are a soul with a body, that is having a physical/material experience. Our soul is not of matter. It is immaterial and of spirit, and can therefor not die. When we die, our bodies with all their 3D survival and adaptation instincts die, including our ego. However, our Soul, the spirit being in us, remains. So, the dilemma with accepting darkness is that it is part of our innate duality. It is only through accepting this truth that we can freely illuminate our shadows without guilt, judgment, doubt, or fear. Pretending that there is nothing dark in us is futile and leads to more guilt and fear!
Most Common Spiritual Tests, Temptations & Traps
1 Spiritual Superiority
In the beginning of learning ways to more deeply connect with yourself, there often is an initial clarity that forms in you. You feel elevated and more conscious than others. It's easy to point fingers at other people's unconsciousness at this stage.
One of the first hurdles to take is the separation that occurs through regarding others through the filter of righteousness or spiritual superiority. We can easily forget how deceptive our ego is. True compassion, the foundation of healing any human condition (including unconsciousness) doesn't develop until you have experienced this part of your inner darkness. For as long as you don't fully understand the two-facedness of our human condition, we cannot fully transform our own darkness.
2 Fear of Darkness
What many of us don't understand is that avoiding, trying to eradicate, remove, or fighting darkness actually leads to the opposite effect. Whether it's our inner or outer darkness, the more you resist, the more of your energy you push into it.
Yes, we are all surrounded by darkness: politics, wars, corruption, lies, greedy corporations, division, censored news, movies, songs, and TV shows. They coerce us into complacency and checking out, but just because it is so, doesn't mean to have to fight it. The challenge with navigating our fear of darkness is in accepting that darkness is the duality of light and that it is there, while reminding ourselves that we have a choice. Due to the power of our consciousness, we can choose to stay awake and aware. It reconnects us with our higher perception and allows us to feel when something/someone is not true or right for us.
3 The Belief that Being Human is 'Weak'
Through our upbringing we have been conditioned to feel shame, guilt, pain, fear, anger, and pride as 'bad' emotions. The truth is, they are merely energetic states that help us to process our emotions. They are all part of our human nature, and we cannot control the fact that we have or feel them, but we can control if and how they influence our perceptions and choices in life. Judging our energetic states, or our humanness is futile. We are subject to so many inner and outer energies that it is impossible to always be in control of our energy. Therefore, resisting and not properly expressing our emotions is often at the root of inner darkness. It leads to our False Self, and forces us to pretend, bottle up, or try to contain what cannot be contained.
This resistance is tiring and increases energetic stress, and therefore actually strengthens the darkness within us. The less we are at peace with our inner reactivity, the stronger the resistance. Now, does this mean that it's okay to act out on all our lower states? No, of course not! The choice to act on darkness comes from a different place — our alignment to inner truth, values, and integrity. So, what we are actually looking at is not the presence of inner darkness but our ability to balance between these dualities within.
The more we resist, the more stressed we become, the more fear, the more guilt, the more darkness the feel.
4 Confusion - The Belief that Higher Power is Outside of Us
Our ego externalizes all bad things that happen to us. Endlessly excusing, justifying, or explaining is part of our ego mind's dilemma. We seek causation outside of ourselves not realizing how we externalize our higher power along with it. When we externalize our power, we are also externalizing our love, safety, responsibility, happiness, and most debilitating — our choice to change it.
In this way, we are not only preventing our own light from expanding, but unconsciously providing the breeding grounds for dark energies to get a foothold in us. The proverbial dragon is not some demonic evil force trying to persuade us to the 'other side' —but our own inner dragon materializing in the form of hardships, fake love, shadow, isolation, fragmentation illnesses, and repetitive victim cycles.
The challenge with externalizing our power lies in how we contextualize darkness. Yes, there is an outer Darkness, and yes, its purpose is to show us what not to do, but the ultimate choice of whether we succumb to outer darkness always points back to our choices in life. It is not the fact that there is darkness, but how we internally deal with it.
From an energetic point of view, Inner Darkness is the culmination of all our unresolved or disharmonic ego aspects within and therefore nothing but a perceptionary distortion. If we allow our inner darkness and its coping mechanisms to dominate our thoughts, emotions, views, judgments, behaviors, and actions — our energy will not be able to fully unfold or expand — and thus become more susceptible to outer darkness.
Externalizing darkness provides the perfect set-up for constant ups and downs and never-ending coping and distraction cycles. It messes with our perception. And so, if left unresolved, darkness can prevail and spread into all aspects of our reality. It fragments our inner integrity and splits us into separation and duality again.
5 Separating Ourselves
Perception based on separation does not only obscure the way we see others, the world, and ourselves in it, but also reconfirms our ego-beliefs and manifests in our hidden inner darkness. One of the most common misperceptions is that the world is dark and that all people are 'just out there to get me'. From a lower vibratory standpoint, this seems true, but from a higher perceptionary standpoint, it's an illusion. We see our reality based on what we align ourselves to — willingly or unwillingly. If we perceive our humanness as a never-ending struggle, we will inevitably develop a hostile outlook on others and life itself. It binds us to our ego, its separation from light and with it binds us to the human collective group karma.
When we are unconscious, we embody what we resist.
6 Spiritual Bypassing - Avoidance, Victimhood, Passivity, Laziness & Apathy
"Victimhood is the new dark." Naturally, this message is not really what we want to hear. We've already learned, that our ego tends to project all darknesses to outside of itself. It wants to see itself as being in control and if that doesn't match up, at least be a victim of something. But, regardless of whether it's justified or not, when our life feels like it is happening to us, and we resort to making others or the world responsible, we've been tricked into allowing darkness in.
Through perceiving life as a struggle and ourselves as passive participants, we've created a justifiable ego illusion/distraction for acting out on our inner darkness — be it through judgment, vengeance, envy, competition, specialness, or constant anxiety.
The main reason why we spend so much energy with inviting in or allowing our inner darkness to torment us is our passivity and avoidance. Avoiding means cutting ourselves off from feeling certain aspects of ourselves, and so it becomes a self-fulfilling cycle. While victimhood can be real, and the contextualization as something that happened to us may have been necessary to survive a specific traumatic event in the past, it can also lead to dissociation from ourselves.
This dissociation can express as:
Not feeling our body sensations or being overrun by them
Not feeling our emotions or being overrun by them
Not being able to differentiate
Not feeling any connection to others, God, or love itself.
Not allowing ourselves to feel anything beyond our physical 3D existence.
Not recognizing our energetic/etheric reality as a mirror of our inner self-experience.
So, in the end, our primal fear of feeling pain becomes the very thing that separates us from our ability to heal and love.
7 Trauma, Fragmentation, Dependencies, Addictions & Temptations
Fragmentation is the chronic and thus a more severe form of duality. Fragments are aspects of ourselves that we abandoned in the course of our lives. They are often parts of ourselves that we gave away or lost without being aware of it (e.g., addictions, co-dependency). They can also occur through having been taken away from us in childhood or early years (abuse, trauma) through painful experiences of true powerlessness.
Adding to this, many of us are actually born with a fragmented soul due to unresolved karmic aspects. It is, therefore, understandable that we don't want to go there, but if it numbs us to the point where we become unable to feel anything, we are 'officially' caught in our inner darkness. We feel helpless and unable to resolve or face anything. We are cut off from our inner power to self-heal!
To heal inner fragmentation, which is nothing but the chronic absence of light within, we need to train ourselves to shine light where there is none. While this often feels impossible at first, since we can't feel our inner light in those aspects of ourselves, we need to remind ourselves that we didn't come here to succumb or resist our pain. There is a power in us that can shift the way we see our lives around!
The healing pathway to get through our inner darkness is through allowing ourselves to feel again... and to rediscover and strengthen our ability to heal the perceived flaws of our humanness.
The reason why our mind and emotions get involved in facing darkness is that we store the memory of pain and with it the energies surrounding the pain. With the exception of PTSD, in which case the neurological hard-wire between our body, mind, and emotions is so strong that we need to seek professional help to heal, the only way to liberate ourselves from this deep hole is to face our fear of pain.
Fear and Pain are energetically linked, as is Anger and Control, but because the vibratory energy levels of pain and fear are so low they make it impossible to change and instead feed our Inner Darkness.
8 Spiritual Disconnect & Materialism
The biggest spiritual ego trap and therefore the biggest challenge of all is overcoming our fear of spiritual connection. There is shame and guilt that comes up when we try to build an inner relationship with higher power (as we understand it.) We live in a world that has conflicted our view of the Divine by mentalizing and reducing our humanness to seeing ourselves as flawed or sinful. Adding to this, we have been conditioned to seeing ourselves as material only. Without understanding the spiritual nature of our being, we suffer a great inner pain. And so it comes that our inner confusions, judgments, and fears around higher power, unconditional love, and true connection bring up the core of our inner darkness.
Spiritual connection comes with the knowing and accountability for who we truly are. If we don't know who we are, we cannot trust ourselves or others - we cannot trust in connecting - as it makes us feel vulnerable, and thus we experience ourselves as incapable of building healthy, lasting, and happy relationships altogether. As long as we allow our ego-mind and perception to stay conflicted in this way (cognitive dissonances), we will be very susceptible to justifications, coping, and control mechanisms to alleviate our deep spiritual pain and confusion, and we will not be able to find the light out of this tunnel.
By mentalizing love and connection, we are avoiding the one thing that can help us to get out of this dark inner place.
True healing and finally living our soul's purpose require us to actively unite our inner conflicts so that we can feel our inner integrity again. It leads us through our error perceptions and assists us in reconnecting with who we truly are. The way I introduced you to this inner unification process via higher learning modalities is one way to form a roadmap to a more conscious life. The main healing tool underneath all modalities that were introduced to you is deep reflection, meditation, contemplation, and honest human heart-connection.
The most effective medicine against darkness is the light of your consciousness!
Reconnecting with our inner light means accepting our condition as is and focusing on our heart-space and connecting with our True Self – and not our ego's projection of self - our False Self!
This isn’t always easy. For many of us allowing Inner Darkness or Shadow aspects to come forward is a scary thought. We judge ourselves, feel guilty or even more afraid of what may show; and if we are influenced by religious or societal programming we often can’t allow ourselves to go there in the first place. The toughest part about facing Inner Darkness is letting go of our programming. Inner beliefs, such as ‘I am a bad person’ or ‘I’m damned’ are what we are up against. In order to heal Inner Darkness and its attachments, we need to learn how to form healthier and higher vibrational inner and outer statements. For this, only the enlightening truth through inner heart-connection can bring the needed light, energetic momentum, and courage to face our fear.
Continuing your higher learning experience does not mean that you have to endlessly meditate or spend your days in energy sessions. Higher learning starts with the deep inner connection with yourself. Use the learning from these different energy lessons and session as guidelines for yourself (see downloads). Filter the most important insights of each lesson and write them down.
How to Overcome Spiritual Traps
Here's a summary of simple connection exercises that you can do to remember and unify yourself with your higher consciousness when you feel separated:
Deep breathing can allow for inner resistance, anxiety, and stress to calm down and thus allow us to transcend incoming darkness (IAM Breathing).
Reconnect with your body. Ask yourself where you are sensing what. You can use the Chakra model to navigate through your physical sensations, which can allow you to better feel what these sensations are linked. Feeling into your body is one of the simplest and most effective mindfulness techniques that can help to rewire our neurological connections and silence our fear.
Allow all emotions as signals of your inner well-being. Do not judge your emotions, instead ask yourself what unmet needs are being shown through your emotions. Feel and breathe through them. Do not be afraid of their intensity. It only takes 6 seconds of discipline to let your emotions run through your nervous system!
Pay attention to your thoughts. Write them down. Don't let them dominate your attitude, worldview, or perception of self without checking EVERY SINGLE belief and mindset you discover. Work with your critical inner voice and try to recognize if these thoughts are even yours!
Energy Healing Work can help you with reconnecting and activating our inner higher power. As we learn how to silence our mind and surrender our ego in spiritual healing work we can retrain our body, mind, and emotion to feel and love again. Spiritually, it helps you to build your relationship with your higher power and teaches you to trust in it again.
Remember:
THE EGO CANNOT SEE WHAT IT DOESN'T KNOW. IT REJECTS ALL IT DOESN'T KNOW. IT REFUSES DIVINE ORDER BECAUSE IT REMINDS IT OF ITS OWN MORTALITY.
Stay conscious!
Jona Bryndis
Energy Coach & Founder of transCODES
transCODES offers a variety of energy coaching and training modalities. If you are interested in learning more about my NEW!!! For my Spiritual Initiation Group Training click here , for energy healer & coach training classes click here, for the energetics of relationships click here and for personal energy sessions click here. To participate in our ongoing workshops, lectures, online meditations, and Energy Healing Sessions check out our Sacred Self-Healing Training or Energy Training Club membership. No prerequisites.
Please come to our live Energy talks on Skype, our Daily Sacred Self Skype Channel - or watch the recordings on my Youtube Channel.