When It Gets Dark Outside, Turn Up Your Heart a Little Brighter

The new year has barely started and the weight already feels crushing. How do we find our way through the dark? When outwards chaos reigns, it's time to turn inwards. Strike a match. Light up a fire.

Barely a week into this new year, and the world seems to be spiralling out of control. Just in the last few days, my heart broke for people in here, in Australia, in Victoria, who are losing their homes and livelihoods to raging fires, while Northern Queensland is bracing for a cyclone - all of it a stark reminder that our climate is changing and Mother Nature cares not about our denial, procrastination or petty squabbles.

My heart broke again at the horrific sight of the world’s most powerful democracy sliding, under our very eyes, into fascism with imperialistic aspirations. It broke again yesterday with the senseless murder of Renee Nicole Good. Her very name is a beacon of hope, a reminder. Her death, I hope, is a wake-up call for all people who have not yet known totalitarianism to believe what their own eyes are telling them. It’s an invitation to resist and persist, to use our voice and to rise with dignity in defence of the very foundations of our humanity, regardless of where in the world we might live.

For, at the end of the day, what else have we left that is worth anything but our ability to choose how we want to show up in moments like this? Or in any moment, for that matter?

I was recently reminded of a terrifying performance by Yugoslavian performance artist Marina Abramovic, called Rhythm 0, from 1974. For six hours, she lay on a table surrounded by 72 objects, inviting the audience to use them on her however they pleased, with no consequences. The items could provoke pleasure or pain. There were feathers, flowers, but also scissors, an axe or a gun. By themselves, any of these objects is harmless. In the hands of an audience relieved of all responsibility or fear of consequence, they became weapons and torture devices.

By the end of the 6 hours, Abramovic was severely wounded and abused - cut, poked, sexually assaulted, had a loaded gun placed in her hand, pointed at her head, her finger pushed on the trigger - all by members of the audience drunk on the power she gave them.

As she recounted later, while she had pushed herself very far in many performances before, this one taught her that “if you leave it up to the audience, they can kill you.” While those objects could have been used in many ways, it turned out that the main emotion people wanted to elicit out of Abramovic was fear. Because nothing makes one feel more powerful than having another in fear of them.

During those six hours, some members of the public strove to protect Abramovic from those wanting to harm her. Fights broke out between the two groups. The man forcing her finger on the trigger of that pistol was stopped by another person taking the pistol away. What makes the difference? How does one end up using their power in defence of the vulnerable, while another seeks to dominate and crush?

For a long time, I believed people run on a spectrum between ‘bad’ and ‘good’ - people who need ever more (more money, more power) to fill up the endless void inside of them and people whose hearts are already full enough so they feel they want to give rather than take from the world. I loved to think of myself as a ‘good’ person. Someone who would not have harmed Abramovic, however much power I might have been given over her in that moment.

Then, 15 years ago, I had one of the strangest and most personally transformative experiences of my life during a holotropic breathwork session (a type of therapeutic experience that induces, through a particular type of breathing, a light trance state and can facilitate profound transpersonal experiences). In that meditative state, I lived through a series of subjective experiences that I can only describe as an evolutionary sequence of various forms of consciousness, from very basic to very complex, from zero capacity for empathy to a full embrace of love and compassion.

It was as if someone were transporting my ‘self’ - this first-person observer, fully awake and conscious, able to think and judge, but stripped of the ability to feel my ‘normal’ feelings - ‘inside’ various non-identified people. For short moments, I inhabited the emotional worlds of these people, some of whom were very similar to my ‘normal’ self, but others as different from me as if they were living on another planet.

In one of these ‘snapshots’, I experienced what it is like to care not a iota for the well-being of anyone else but yourself. More than that, I felt the experience of craving power, craving to be feared. I had the impression of being surrounded by people who were terrified of me, and I experienced the thrill of their terror. There was a sense of invincibility in being able to elicit so much fear and a heady rush of pleasure at being untouchable, at being in a position of dominance over others.

There was no impulse to be magnanimous in using my power. I did not crave to be liked or loved. I only wanted to be feared. It was unlike anything I have ever felt in my day-to-day life, and it utterly terrified me to find such darkness in the depths of my unconscious. It also completely humbled me, for in that same experience, I was given a moment of subjectively discovering what love and compassion feel like.

Like a flower blooming from my heart, I felt the moment my psyche became ‘big enough’ to hold an emotion as complex as love, or to feel a feeling as profound as compassion. It was like rain falling over scorched earth after a long drought. It was an experience of moving from a rudimentary way of existing into my full humanity. From being a mere echo of a person to being a multifaceted human being.

It is impossible to articulate the impact that experience has had on my life. Suffice to say, I’ve never taken my inherent ‘goodness’ for granted ever again. While, as with all transpersonal experiences, it is hard to say where my mind went when I became that unidimensional, power-hungry being, what I’ve chosen to take from it was a renewed appreciation for my day-to-day ability to care enough to have my heart broken, to love enough to want to protect and cherish, to feel enough of the pain of others to want to do something about it. And a sense of responsibility to access and inhabit the full repertoire of my emotional landscape, to choose my actions moment to moment.

It also helped me understand (though I cannot and will not accept) the stance of people who don’t seem capable of feeling compassion, who have no ethical or moral compass and whose worldview seems locked in cruelty and dominance. While I abhor their actions, my experience of walking in those shoes for a few moments taught me that, for the oppressors of the world, life truly is a battleground where only the mighty rule and have the right to exist. And from that stance, they feel entitled (perhaps even obligated) to act the way they do.

While I spend my whole life studying how adults grow, I don’t feel I’m much nearer to figuring out why some seem forever stuck in the ‘might makes right’ as their sole mode of being. In my own incredible experience of being ‘stuck’ in that way, even for a few moments, I was amazed by how impossible it seemed for me to feel anything else. While I was rationally aware that in my normal state I can experience many more feelings and ways of being, in that moment, I noticed I was completely locked in an overwhelming need to hold ‘power over’ others, and absolutely nothing beyond that could have moved or touched me in any way. I imagine those who live like this all the time might feel something similar.

This leads me to some burning questions. How do we, simple people who live on a wider spectrum of experience, not succumb to darkness, nor fall into despair? How do we meaningfully push back against abuse or take a stand for causes much larger than ourselves? How do we acknowledge our fear and speak up anyway? How can we make a difference when our lives are impacted in myriad ways by others’ choices or by events completely outside of our control?

I’ve come to think that when the light seems sucked out of the world, the only thing left to us is to turn our inner light a bit brighter. To light up our hearts. To rejoice in our capacity to feel a complex spectrum of feelings. To celebrate the pain of sadness and grief, for to be able to feel pain means we have not grown numb and are still able to care. To look for awe wherever we can find it, for that can remind us that the world still holds many wonders worth saving. To turn towards our loved ones and hug them out of the blue, for they are precious and they are ours and to be truly loved by another is a privilege never to be taken for granted. To do what we can to bring some goodness in the world when the balance is tipped the other way: smile at the cashier at the supermarket, thank a public servant for their work, donate to a cause we care about, volunteer in our communities, spend time with a friend in need, get off our phones and play with our kids, peacefully protest, use our platforms and our voices to remind people they too have a light in them worth turning up. To tap into gratitude, for that can help us fill up our depleted heart tanks. And finally, importantly, to take time to slow down, limit our news intake, get outside in the sun (or snow, or rain), put our bare feet on the ground and be in the real world around us, away from the noise. Give our minds and our hearts time to rest.

I hope you light up a little light inside you and stay kind with yourself and others as we sail through these rocky waters. Together, we are more. And love and hope and humanity, however improbably, can still win.

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On the 17th of January, I’ll be hosting a workshop to consciously ‘dream up’ the new year, a playful tradition I started a decade ago and which continues every January. We’ll use tools from active imagination and ‘timeline therapy’ to identify and set our intentions visually and creatively. Learn more and book your place here.

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