Luminous Darkness: An Engaged Buddhist Approach to Embracing the Unknown

"We tend to want to avoid and ignore our dark or difficult emotions, biases, and tendencies-and we eschew them on a cultural and societal level because they reveal painful, ugly truths. The labeling of darkness as "negative" becomes a collective excuse to justify avoiding everything that makes humans uncomfortable: racism, spiritual bypass, environmental destruction. Welcoming darkness with curiosity and reverence, rather than fear or judgment, enables us to access our innate capacity for compassion and collective healing. In Seeing with the Heart, dharma teacher, shaman, and deep ecologist Deborah Eden Tull asks us to recognize, explore, and engage with the darkness we experience in our lives in order to learn important lessons and tools for bringing awakening, healing, and compassion to ourselves-and to our world. In an age of global uncertainty, Tull presents the radical teaching of endarkenment--that we can only awaken to wholeness through fully embracing the dark. Darkness, she posits, is not the absence of light, but an intrinsic, vital, healing, and restorative aspect of nature. Tull addresses the spiritual, ecological, psychological, and interpersonal ramifications of our bias towards light over dark. She offers a radical path to wholeness that can be found only through learning to embrace the interplay of both darkness and light, within ourselves and within our world. She offers inspiring teachings, meditations, and mindful inquiry questions to integrate into our daily practice an experiential understanding of endarkenment"--
A resonant call to explore the darkness in life, in nature, and in consciousness—including difficult emotions like uncertainty, grief, fear, and xenophobia—through teachings, embodied meditations, and mindful inquiry that provide us with a powerful path to healing.Darkness is deeply misunderstood in today’s world; yet it offers powerful medicine, serenity, strength, healing, and regeneration. All insight, vision, creativity, and revelation arise from darkness. It is through learning to stay present and meet the dark with curiosity rather than judgment that we connect to an unwavering light within. Welcoming darkness with curiosity, rather than fear or judgment, enables us to access our innate capacity for compassion and collective healing. Dharma teacher, shamanic practitioner, and deep ecologist Deborah Eden Tull addresses the spiritual, ecological, psychological, and interpersonal ramifications of our bias towards light.  Tull explores the medicine of darkness for personal and collective healing, through topics such as: Befriending the Night: The Radiant Teachings of DarknessHonoring Our Pain for Our WorldSeeing in the Dark: The Quiet Power of ReceptivityDreams, Possibility, and Moral ImaginationReleasing Fear—Embracing Emergence Tull shows us how the labeling of darkness as “negative” becomes a collective excuse to justify avoiding everything that makes us uncomfortable: racism, spiritual bypass, environmental destruction.  We can only find the radical path to wholeness by learning to embrace the interplay of both darkness and light.