From dark to light, from fear to courage, from being made fun of as a kid to being the one that everyone wants to hang out with as an adult…

It seems like a lot of us are on a journey between two extremes. We live on a planet of polarity, after all!

With polarity being such a thing here, usually we like to categorize our experiences as either dark/negative, or light/positive. And if we’re on the self-improvement path, we usually want to transmute all the “dark” stuff into “light” stuff. We think we’ve just got to get rid of all the dark and bring on the light so we can be more happy or healthy or enlightened or whatever. Right? Anyone? 🙋🏻‍♀️

This totally used to be me.

Don’t get me wrong, that’s not a bad place to start! I definitely wouldn’t be where I am today had I not made such massive efforts to get rid of all the dark stuff in my life.

So I’m not knocking it — but I’m also realizing that it’s not that simple.

And as kind of a side note, polarity isn’t just a black or white, one or the other kind of thing like so many of us are led to believe. From what I understand, it’s more of a spectrum; there are infinite degrees between love and hate, between fear and courage, and between darkness and light.

It’s really helpful to understand this if we’re going to be transmuting anything.

Transmutation

What is transmutation anyway?

At first glance, it’s just kind of a fancy spiritual word for change. 😜

But I’m finding that there’s also a higher expression of this word, along with layers of subtlety that aren’t so straightforward. So that’s what I’m going to go on about in this post for a while, specifically within the context of transmuting “darkness” in some form.

And by the way what I’m calling “darkness” could be just about anything, but for this post I’m thinking more along the lines of mental/mindset type stuff. Maybe it’s a toxic relationship pattern we keep finding ourselves in, or some deeply rooted insecurity, or feeling inexplicably sad or fearful all the time — or all of the above! 🙋🏻‍♀️

The Point

So here’s the thing.

Darkness isn’t meant to be rejected outright — it’s meant to be understood, integrated, and enveloped with so much love and acceptance that the charge it once had is neutralized. And then it just kind of falls away naturally!

That’s true transmutation.

(And that’s kind of the concept behind shadow work too, incidentally, which is something that a lot of people on the path are into.)

This method is way more effective ultimately because it’s in alignment with universal principles of energy and flow, as well as the ancient yogic principles of Dvesha (aversion) and Raga (attachment).

So it’s worth a shot!

If we aren’t afraid of darkness or hell-bent on transmuting it at all costs, there’s this space that opens up where we accept that it exists as part of Source just as much as the light does. And from that place, true change can happen! (Anything else is usually just a band-aid, in my experience.)

To be clear, this isn’t me losing my touch or compromising my values or my light. On the contrary, actually.

This is me deeply trusting the cosmic order of things, so much so that I no longer feel the need to reject certain manifestations of Source consciousness, i.e. what we label as “darkness.”

Because that was what I did for so long! If darkness came up in any form I used to straight up reject it, taking immediate action to transmute it ASAP and feel better. (My solutions would range from healthy options like incense, essential oils, baths, and yoga to less healthy options like binging on Netflix or sugar or weed.) Darkness just had no place in my reality, according to my perspective at that time.

Logically I did have reason to be a little paranoid about it, since I spent 12ish years in a really dark and ugly place and have since generated a lot of fear around anything remotely resembling depression or darkness or negative thoughts. I guess my subconscious thinks it’s a pretty slippery slope from feeling low to wasting over a decade of my life stuck in emotional quicksand. Which is fair.

But lately I’ve been realizing that the fear that I had (and still have to some extent) surrounding “darkness” is more negative than the darkness itself. It’s disproportionate. And holding that amount of fear and aversion to anything in life, darkness included, gives power to it.

What we resists persists!

It’s true.

So what do we do instead of resist it?

Well, I’m glad you asked. 😁

The Slightly Counterintuitive but Way More Awesome Option

I mentioned this earlier, but basically the alternative to rejecting manifestations of darkness from a place of aversion or fear is… well, acceptance. Acceptance, neutrality, and love. But it’s not like you’re selling out or joining Darth Vader or whatever — it’s more like a reframing, so your focus and energy surrounding whatever you’re wanting to avoid shifts. And as a natural, effortless outcome, whatever you formerly had an aversion to just kind of loses its potency, to the point where one day you’ll look back and realize “oh hey, this thing hasn’t been a problem for a while!”

Sometimes I like to visualize this as my heart expanding so much that it’s able to hold even darkness with total compassion, understanding, and light. So I’m not avoiding the darkness or forcing it to leave, but I’m holding it with so much sweet acceptance that it can no longer stay there with any real potency.

It's like it becomes impotent.

Darkness doesn’t have any charge or oomph when it’s bathed in light.

Maybe you can do this with blind faith or will or devotion but the best way, in my experience, is to foster an awareness of the larger cosmic and spiritual context behind everything. More specifically:

1. Every person, experience, and energy are all manifestations of the same Source energy — including darkness in its various forms
2. If darkness is just another manifestation of Source, there is nothing inherently wrong with the fact that it exists
3. Nothing is ever permanent except for change — so if we’re going through an experience that we label as negative, it’s cosmically and quantumly incapable of lasting forever (and the same goes for positive experiences too)

Now I’m thinking kind of sarcastically, and maybe you are too, “oh, so people just need to understand the grand cosmic plan! No big deal! Just go be enlightened and you’ll be fine!”

Well I would argue that we are ultimately already enlightened, we just have to realize it…

But aside from that, I get that what I’m suggesting is probably a tall order for a lot of people. I do think it’s possible, for the record, but everyone is on their journey — it’s not my place to intervene and get every single human to wake up.

So I’m not going to get too caught up in making suggestions, even though my personality type is super tempted to right now because it loves to fix things — instead I’m going to have faith that we’ll all get to where we’re supposed to go, and that we’re all on different journeys.

With that said, I will say that a great place to start is Trinfinity Academy.

(I couldn’t resist!)

But seriously. Developing a greater spiritual awareness, for lack of a better term, changes the way we see everything. It just puts everything into a different context or perspective that’s almost hard to verbalize because it's so vastly different from how most humans go about their lives.

With this total confidence in the universal order of things, it becomes a lot easier to relinquish any fear we may associate with the darkness, and hold space for it in our hearts right along with the light. We can bathe just about any form of darkness with so much light that it no longer has any power over us, and get on with our lives!

It's kind of awesome.

Once I made that shift, and especially now that I’ve been putting it into practice on a regular basis, I feel like I’ll never see darkness (or transmutation) in quite the same way again. Kind of like how we never look at the Wizard of Oz the same way once we see the man behind the curtain.

In Practice

It’s kind of funny because even right now, as I’m writing this, it’s coming up.

I finally moved into a beautiful new home recently, life is good, and I have no reason whatsoever to be feeling less than awesome. But these last few days, couple weeks even, I’ve just been feeling kind of… blah.

I think French people call it “ennui” (which sounds a lot cooler).

So of course I burned a bunch of incense, cleansed the house, played music at different Solfeggio frequencies, practiced yoga, ate healthy whole delicious food, ate not-super-healthy delicious sugary food…

But even after all that stuff, I seemed to keep coming back to this state of total ennui. Not sadness or fear or full-on darkness per se… just a little shitty, like this underlying feeling of lack or lameness that I can’t fully pinpoint.

I was getting kind of sick of it, and then the thought came through the blahness that I should see if there’s a deeper underlying reason that it doesn’t seem to be going away. I started asking myself why I even want it to go away in the first place — why do I have an aversion to this experience — and that was when I realized that it was the fear surrounding the ennui (what if I go back to that decade of feeling depressed as hell?) that was more potent than the feeling itself.

Anyway, that’s what motivated me to write about it. But quite honestly, part of me wanted to write this post as a way of getting it out of my system so I would stop feeling shitty — which is exactly the opposite of what I just got done writing all about! The whole point is to not avoid it! 🤦🏻‍♀️

But I’m still human! So we’re good.

I just got a kick out of that because here I am now, fresh off of writing an entire article about transmuting via integration instead of avoidance, and I still want to avoid the ennui and just be fucking happy! 🤪

The temptation runs deep!

And it is so damn worthwhile to reprogram it — to transmute it! But we know how to transmute anything now, right? 😏

Peaks and Valleys

At the end of the day we’ve got to embrace it all. Dark and light, fear and courage, inadequacy and confidence… everything! It’s all a part of Source.

Not only that, but the “darker” experiences can actually be really useful times to learn and grow and develop an even greater capacity for light. I get a little annoyed by the phrase “what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger” (which I should probably examine), but I do think there’s some truth to it here.

This kind of reminds me of the yin and yang symbol too. It’s almost healthy in a way, or at least in alignment with the way the universe works, for there to be some darkness within light and some light within the dark. A symbiotic relationship, almost. Because without darkness we wouldn’t necessarily recognize or appreciate light, or have as much catalyst to grow and increase our capacity for light; and without light… well, without light, we don’t exist!

I also want to mention that I really like Bentinho Massaro’s perspective on this, and how he refers to the natural ebb and flow of experience as peaks and valleys. Unlike the terms light and dark, or high and low, where it’s easy to label “darkness” with a more negative charge (thus giving it more power than it inherently has)… referring to these experiences as peaks and valleys makes it all sound more natural and flowing — which it is. Peaks and valleys, highs and lows, and darkness and light are all natural human experiences.

Embracing it All

So let’s recap, shall we?

The key to transmuting fear into courage is to understand the fear and hold it with loving acceptance. (True courage, after all, is learning to act in the presence of fear, not in the absence of it!)

The key to transmuting inadequacy to confidence is understanding where the feelings of inadequacy came from, and holding them with loving acceptance so our natural confidence can shine through. (And true confidence is, you guessed it, being confident in spite of any insecurities, not in the absence of them!)

And the key to transmuting darkness of any form into light is to understand and accept the darkness for what it is — nothing more, nothing less — and hold it with so much damn light that it loses its potency.

If we can remember this principle when we’re in the middle of experiencing any form of darkness, it becomes easier to hold it in light.

And that, my friends, is true transmutation.