By cultivating fearlessness, we can truly understand darkness and its necessary place in our unfoldment, and not give it power that it does not truly have.

What is wounded and unhealed in us is projected into the Unknown, and so we relegate the unknown to the realm of darkness instead of the realm of light and of possibility. We then may attempt to use the practices of light and radiance to try to escape the darkness instead of illuminating it, un-patterning and claiming the potentials therein — especially the potentials we all have to inflict hurt.

All of us have experiences and memories of being wounded by the exercise of arbitrary force (counterfeit power) to suppress and control, and the unconscious belief is that in incubating guilt and fear of misusing our own power, we will not therefore be like those who wounded us. Perhaps that is what led many of us to a path of “love, harmony, and beauty.”

But actually, the opposite is true: By harboring guilt and fear, we empower the darkness instead of containing and finally mastering it, and thereby increase the likelihood that we will misuse it — against ourselves, if nothing else.

Our practices with light and radiance have to be integrated in a very physical and sensate way, with the very flesh itself. Work with the aura or an awareness of the planes of light is not enough, because this integration requires working with energy as well as attunement, and energy work exposes the contractions that are the somato-psychic “countenances” of our fear of darkness.

Related to fearlessness is a basic trust of the larger process, a relationship of a certain essential ease in the world, a friendliness and at-home-ness with our human incarnation — a sense that, regardless of how tough things get, they are workable and we are not irrevocably alienated from our soul’s purpose.

Many, perhaps most, of us do not arrive at adult-hood with this intact, but it is nevertheless our divine inheritance and can be reclaimed through spiritual practice and the movement of grace. This is less a psychological problem than a spiritual quality that manifests in the psyche, and without that breakthrough to that of our own being that transcends time, space, and our history, we can chip away at this for decades.