BRILLIANCE
Winter, 2009
Everyone carries brilliance. Few of us know that about ourselves. The dust of our tedious lives settles so thickly and so quickly on our souls that we forget who we are, what we came here for.
Who were you as a child? How did you see the world back then? When you got into trouble, what was it in yourself that got you into trouble? What were you told to stop doing, stop saying, stop thinking? What in yourself did you say “hush!” to as you pushed it down out of sight and out of memory?
Sometimes, the things about ourselves that we’re most afraid of turn out to be the gold. What we diligently hide is our unclaimed treasure. The vision of who we might be passes before our eyes and we pass out cold. We fail to ask the question that would secure the beautiful dream for our own souls: whom does this fantasy of mine serve? Why has it been given to me and what am I to do with it...and in service to whom or what? Asking the question with sincerity begins to heal us, our family, our community, our culture.
Why is that so? Because the question implies humility. It begs responsibility. The vision of who we can become is not about garnering wealth for ourselves so that we can kiss our jobs goodbye and lie on the beach all day. The dream of becoming all that we are by nature can be fully realized only by serving others and the physical world in which we live. Our brilliance belongs to the greater good.
To find out who we can be, we must move out of our heads, out of the mere setting of goals, and reach down into the dark recesses of our bodies and our psyches. For each of us, the pearl of great price resides within our shadow. There we find our unlived life. There we stumble over the rejected and undeveloped parts of ourselves—the parts that got left behind as we learned to be acceptable adolescents and adults.
Most of us avoid our shadow side because we believe only our inner monsters live there. We’ve shoved our skeletons into the shadow-closet and unscrewed the light bulb.
On first glance, monsters and skeletons are frightening. One of them pops out of the dark closet and we go unconscious through our drug of choice—food, shopping, sleep, TV. We fail to ask the question: what do you have that would serve me in fulfilling my purpose in this world? Asking the question begins to open the storehouse of gold and pearls.
Why is this so? In truth, our monsters and skeletons are simply the wounds and feelings and gifts that we’ve ignored over a lifetime. They have become monstrous through neglect. Not only do they scare us, they also hoard a lot of our life energy. They carry the light and beauty that we desire in our lives.
Would you like to discover your brilliance? When the vision passes before your eyes, stay awake and ask the question. When the closet door creaks open, stay put and ask the question. The stirring fantasy and the unsettling fear are not uncommon. Bringing reverent attention to them is.