If the sun didn’t shine on the Earth, the other side of the world wouldn’t have night. Think how many wonderful things there are in the darkness of night: nocturnal animals, glittering stars, city lights and the cool night air, the moon reflected in still ponds and the nightingale’s song. There is rest, sleep and dreams. Imagine freshly fallen raindrops hanging from the tip of every leaf of a tree, and in every drop, the reflection of the moon. Without the dark of night, we wouldn’t have many wonderful and beautiful things. The night is also full of shadows and lurking fears, of things that can’t be seen, howling wolves and spider webs, slimy slugs and shrieking bats.
Life is made from experiences, some that make us feel glad and others that make us feel bad. Sometimes an event brings so much heartache that it feels like your heart is going to break and your body wants to die. But if you can train your mind to view negative experiences in the right way, they become catalysts. Your mind can help you heal, and the experience will shape you into a stronger, wiser person.
We all have bad experiences, but we can use them to transform life into something brighter. Start small: in the midst of a difficult moment, find a tiny detail of beauty – a butterfly, an interesting leaf, a sunny sky with puffy clouds, the sound of rain or someone’s smile. Let it bring you into the present. A moment is easier to deal with than the overwhelming weight of what might happen or what has already passed.
If you are in a dark room and you turn on a light, the darkness vanishes as the room lights up. If it hadn’t been dark in the first place, you would not need the light because you would already be able to see. Similarly, if we didn’t have dark times in our lives that cause pain, we wouldn’t recognize or appreciate the bright ones that bring us happiness.
When you search for the positive within a negative experience, the experience itself changes. It ceases to be purely negative and becomes a teacher. If you can learn a lesson from a negative experience, it was never really negative at all, because it has taught you a valuable lesson. If you don’t learn from it, however, you risk staying on the treadmill of repetition, bound to repeat the same mistakes until the lesson is finally learned.
Don’t try to deny hurt and pain, pushing it away will only make it stronger. We naturally gravitate toward happiness and repel what hurts. But try doing the opposite: embrace it! Just as you would gently comfort a crying child rather than push them away, you must nurture your own difficult emotions.
When grief, loss, or sadness arise, resist the urge to block them out. Instead of thinking endlessly about the event that caused the pain, look directly at the feeling itself. Observe your grief objectively. By meeting the emotion with acceptance and kindness, it gradually loses its grip and fades.
It takes practice. Visualize the emotion as an object, a colour, or a bubble with the feeling inside. Remind yourself that it is okay to feel this way. Accept the emotion without trying to stifle it; allow the emotion to be. After a little while, acknowledge its presence, place it gently in your mental container (a bubble, or a box) and put it away until you are ready to look at it again. Next time the feeling rises, bring it out of its container, acknowledge it, accept it and put it away again. You do not need to hold onto pain forever, nor do you need to fight it — you simply need to accept it.
What if you are worried about the future? Ask yourself: Is there anything you can do to change the situation? If yes, then take action. If no, worrying is pointless. Obsessing won’t alter the problem or provide a solution; it will only drain your energy.
We don’t know what lies ahead. Circumstances may change, bringing a favourable outcome and leaving you to realize you wasted hours worrying over nothing. If you do everything you can to fix a situation and things still don’t work out the way you envisaged, you will at least know that you did your best. You took action instead of wasting energy on pointless anxiety. Accept that the universe works in ways we don’t always understand, and trust that you simply have to let it unfold. When you stop fighting against the tide and go with the flow, things have a way of working out for the best – perhaps differently than what you hoped, but ultimately for the good. It takes trust and faith.
Turn the light on in the shadows of your mind. Turn suffering into happiness by choosing to embrace your problems and learn from them. Without negative experiences, we lack the catalyst for true growth. Once you reframe how you view misfortune, it transforms into the very means by which you become a happy, light-filled participant in life. When you look at your experiences this way, everything you once thought of as negative becomes something good.
You cannot truly be enlightened if you haven’t first been endarkened.