Overview

Your Dark Side, most simply put, is all of your negative patterns together. It’s that collection of negative voices that you learned throughout childhood from parents, grandparents, surrogates, aunts, uncles, cousins, teachers and others.

Your Dark Side is the internalised negative voice that says things like:

• ‘It was a great week. but what difference will it make?’
• ‘Look at how happy they are! You can’t be happy like that, so don’t even try!’
• ‘You’ll never be good enough!’
• ‘Look what you did again, what a disaster!’
• ‘Who do you think you are?’

Your Dark Side is not who you truly are. It is the negative bias of your brain, a habitual, conditioned survival system. Your Dark Side is a parasite on your Intellect, dragging you away from your authenticity and pulling you towards the Left Road.

How you met your Dark Side on the Process

You learned during your Process week that the intention of the Dark Side is to keep us cut off from our Spiritual Self and the Light, undermining whatever we do to make positive changes in our life. A key thing to remember is that our Dark Side will never go away, but we can learn to co-exist with it and diminish its hold on us.

On the Thursday morning of your Process, you explored your Dark Side by thinking about the kind of messages it gives you, drawing its face, and scrawling its negative messages all over it. You wrote down everything that listening to this old voice had cost you. Then you beat the drawing with a shoe or other object. After this ritual, you all went outside and burnt the paper in a fire bin, declaring, ‘My Dark Side told me I was … But that’s a lie!’

Some tools to diminish your Dark Side

Call out its lies

With practice, we can learn to recognise that we are not our Dark Side, and spot when it’s lying to us. Simply by separating our Dark Side’s voice from our own, we can diminish its hold.

For example, instead of saying, ‘I am a failure, what happened today proves that!’ we could choose to say, ‘My Dark Side is telling me I am a failure. My Dark Side is telling me that today proves that…’

In so doing, we can better understand that this is just one – very negative – view and that it is not the whole truth. We then have the scope to continue, ‘My Dark Side tells me that I am a failure, but that is a lie! Today was just one day, and tomorrow is another. I have tools that can help me. This is my life, and I can make positive changes…’

Dark Side Stomp

The Dark Side stomp is a quick way to send your Dark Side packing.

Close your eyes and imagine the face of your Dark Side on your left shoulder. Hear it whisper all its old negative messages in your ear. What’s it saying about you? Can you hear its lies?

Turn your head to the left and (still with your eyes closed) see its bulging eyes, its gaping mouth, its rotting teeth, its flaring nostrils…

Get your hands around its neck and apply pressure. Watch its eyes bug out. Rip it out of your shoulder and hurl it to the floor. Expend some energy by stomping up and down on it – scream, shout, rant, roar and use your body to disempower it.

When you have disempowered your Dark Side, bring in the Light. Name some positive qualities that you love about yourself and breathe them in deeply. Focusing on the light will always disempower the Dark Side.

Dark Side Ritual

This is exercise will take 45-60min. It will help you acknowledge your Dark Side and hear what it wants to say, and then to diminish its power.

You’ll need:

• A large piece of paper or a notepad
• A few coloured pens
• A shoe (with a sturdy heel, not a slipper or flip flop)
• A timer, chime or alarm clock
• A candle (plus a lighter or matches) – optional

You may wish to use the Dark Side music that was played during your Process (above) as you’re visualising or drawing.

• Close your eyes and imagine the face of your Dark Side on your left shoulder. What is it saying?
• Start to visualise your Dark Side, perhaps it is snarling. What colour and texture is it? Can you see its teeth, its eyes?
• Now, pull it from your left shoulder and put it, spat!, on the paper in front of you.
• Now, draw your Dark Side on the page, and write out all the ugly messages it gives you.
• Get everything out on to the page. All the lies your Dark Side tells you. All the times your Dark Side has been in your way, undermined you, dimmed your Light or led you down the Left Road. Take as long as you need for this, then once it is all out on the page, pause.

Set your timer for 45min. For this exercise you will use your voice, so keep your mouth open and allow yourself to make sounds throughout this exercise. You may want to sing, to chant, to growl, to yell. Make whatever noise wants to come out and be expressed. If you use words to express, use the language you spoke as a child (if that’s different to the language you use the most now) – it will have greater impact.

• Sit looking at your Dark Side, with your shoe in your hand. Now close your eyes and tune in to all the messages.
• Now, lift the shoe up and hit the Dark Side. Keep hitting it, and letting out sounds as you go.
• Keep going, diminishing the power of the Dark Side.
• Keeping going, keeping your full focus on the page.
• When the timer ends, pause. Feel how different you feel.

To complete this powerful exercise, tear up the page. You can put the pieces in the bin, or if you have somewhere to safely set the pieces on fire you can.

You have diminished your Dark Side. Now it’s time to reconnect to the Light. Light your candle, and saying out loud, ‘Today I claim back…’,  list what it is that you wish to claim back.

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