May Logic 2014

By Victoria Schaefer

Eclipses taught ancient people that darkness sometimes is a necessary part of the light givers. When they gazed at the sun or moon and watched it being devoured by darkness, it must have shook them to their souls. Yet as they sat in petrified silence they also witnessed the light return. Then they knew it was alright for the darkness to occasionally come.

In fact, ancient peoples built sacred rituals around eclipses. Even though these moments were regarded as dangerous times and portenders of disaster, people understood that the light would return after working through the perilous times of eclipse.

As above, so below. As without, so within. We, as a modern people, experience our own internal eclipses. Carl Jung broke new ground in psychotherapy when he described the shadow self which lives within each of us. Debbie Ford, in her bestselling book The Dark Side of the Light Chasers, expands on Dr. Jung’s premise that everyone has a dark side and cautions us that if we do not acknowledge this shadow self, it can seriously affect our lives in horribly negative ways.

By embracing our shadow self in recognizing that we do in fact possess the capacity to be negative, nasty people we can move through that unwanted energy and back into the light. Furthermore, if we can admit that the character traits in others that we would judge as flaws are actually traits that we also possess, then we can dispel some of our dark side and return to the light.

It is heartening to know that the things we see in others that we enjoy and love, we also have within us. We are simply recognizing ourselves in others.

As the planets continue their sky dance constantly changing the energy that we feel, we can remember our own dance within ourselves – between the dark and the light. We cannot have one without the other. The elegant structure of the universe has made that quite clear. Yet we need not fear the darkness within ourselves as ancient peoples feared the swallowing of the sun and moon. We need only to recognize it as another aspect of us and armed with that knowledge create our own personal rituals to honor and heal our own eclipses.