“Come there, there’s a path in the forest, I know its name, do you want to know it too?” It’s an old song that my mother often sang while doing the chores… today I had that tune in my head and the more I sang it, the more I realized that reaching higher consciousness is like entering a path in the dark forest and, step by step, getting to a clearing.
I remember that, when I attended some meditation group or some family constellation workshops, the organizers of those events used to tell me “Congrats for being so brave!”. At first I didn’t understand what they were referring to, but now, this phrase has become very clear:
It takes a lot of guts to look within and do the inner work.
In order to be able to do this, we must be ready to see aspects of our personality that we may not like, that can make us feel uncomfortable, that we reject at first. We can find out things that we did not even know about ourselves, such as discovering that our humility is nothing more than a strategy of our ego to win the acceptance and love of others. Seeing what we have inside can actually make us understand that we are not as good, honest, heroic, optimist as we thought we were.
Now that I am a holistic therapist, I feel great respect and tenderness every time someone asks for a session, because I know that looking within is very difficult and not everyone is able to do it. A beautiful phrase that I often read on the internet is
Everything I know about my light, I learnt from my darkness
This is what, in the end, really makes us shine: to look deep into our shadows. Shine bright, brave souls, enter the forest without fear and shine more than ever!
Cover picture by Martina García Andreoli