Luminous Darkness
An Engaged Buddhist Approach to Embracing the Unknown
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- $24.99
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- $24.99
Publisher Description
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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
These disorganized musings by Zen meditation teacher Tull (Relational Mindfulness) cobble together material related to darkness and spirituality. "It is only when we allow ourselves... to commune with the elemental darkness that we gradually open to an unwavering inner light," Tull contends, encouraging readers to interrogate the negative connotations that literal and metaphoric darkness has assumed in the Western world and to face the fear darkness represents. She suggests that exploring the power of darkness "celebrates" one's connection to the earth and rejects hierarchy, but she neglects to spell out why, offering instead a tenuously related anecdote about how the author's time in a monastery affirmed her opposition to hierarchy. Many of her assertions rely for evidence on elliptical observations, such as when she posits that the "balance of dark and light... is relevant to all of life" and cites as proof crystals growing in unlit caves and human embryos forming in the darkness of the womb. Even the material that lands—such as the author's realization that her fear of darkness was actually a "fear of emptiness"—is stranded in an aimless narrative that struggles to find a coherent through line. This eclectic and baffling meditation gets lost in the dark.
