Thanks to everyone who joined our first Goddess Talk and Community Members meeting of the New Year ... it was a total delight to see you after our 2 week holiday break.
On both, we continued our Winter Inquiry theme designed to explore the light and dark side of matters.
This Saturday we looked at how we could sort the world through the lens of light and dark. In general, we saw that we have been conditioned to think of the darkside as being bad or negative and the lightside as being good or positive.
We also noticed, like our exploration of joy and foreboding, the light and dark sides seem to arise in our awareness together. When we look at sunny days for example, we see warmth and light (light column) AND the burning hot, danger to our skin (dark column).
Do this week's Goddess Living Practice below to discover for yourself how your dark & light filters impact your view.
Another very interesting tidbit that arose in our conversation was how we tend to approach inquiry philosophically vs experientially. The philosophical approach to any subject is what we think or theorize about that matter. The experiential approach is how we literally experience something while living it. While theories and beliefs may be comforting and sometimes even useful, they often don't match how we actually live life.
It was interesting to see what opened up when we looked at some of the same questions from 'our experience of' the subject or question vs 'our beliefs about' it. Listen or watch the recording to hear the full conversation.
This week's practice is the one we did in the meeting, plenty to explore there! We have also added a link to the Alan Watts video we watched and discussed ... very enlightening!!
Saturday's Inquiry Recordings
This Week's Goddess Practice
Light & Dark - Discover Your Filter
We all grow up with all kinds of conditioning around good/bad, right/wrong, positive/negative .... do the following exercise and see how this shapes your unconscious view of life and living around you.
Using a journal page (or any old piece of paper) make 2 columns. Title one column Light and the other column Dark. Begin listing things, people, qualities, emotions etc. in these columns. Don't think too much, let your subconscious do the work. Just write things into the column that strikes you as most accurate. If you encounter something that seems like it belongs in both columns, scratch under the surface for which aspects of that thing go in which column.
An example from my list, 'learning new things' went in the light column 'the time it takes to learn new things' went in the dark column.
After you have a fairly long list look back over it ask yourself ...
- What do I see about how I sort the world into dark and light?
- What can I see about what the light and dark sides mean to me?
In the upcoming Goddess Talks, we will continue the exploration about how this fits with all our New Year's Resolutions ... see you there!
Bonus
Since the darkside of things is so often associated with negative, bad and sometimes even evil, we tend to avoid this side of things. In this fabulous video of an Alan Watts talk, he explores why we are often resistant to looking at the dark side of things .. especially ourselves!
Alan Watts was a British philosopher, writer and speaker who interpreted and popularized Eastern philosophy for Western audiences. Watch below! (12m)
