Living
in the Light
By Erik Laurentz

“Living in the Light,” a very attractive concept; easy to say, hard to do.

“Living in the Light?” Me? Maybe, parts of me…, maybe…. but, all of me? What are you, nuts???

Or, how about this….“Living in the Light?” Secretly…, yes, but I need to hide it from the world (for a variety of reasons—just fill in the blank).

The first response captures the fear of living in the light. The second captures a fragile sense of superiority that must be defended. When I was younger, the second would have been my honest response—not that I would have been that honest if you’d asked. The first response is closer to my heart today. The following excerpt is taken from the Gospel of Thomas, an early Gnostic Christian Gospel. The statement is attributed to Jesus:

Gospel of Thomas 45, 30-33
If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.

I love this passage: it not only clearly states the imperative to live in the light; it also points to why living in the light is so terrifying. Whatever is buried inside there is so scary, it will destroy me when it gets the chance. The rational mind certainly knows this truth—even if this truth is too scary to own. And, the rational mind has a very rational solution: kill it before it kills me, or bury it so deeply that it will never get out. Could Jesus really have meant that bringing this beast into the light will save me? The second sentence implies that the act of bringing the beast into the light is necessary for a full life. But, what is this beast that inevitably devours the life of the host? The details of the answer are different for each of us. As I’ve begun to step into the light, as I’ve watched the process of others stepping into the light, I’ve come to believe that the beast within each of us is the sum total of all of the undischarged trauma in our bodies. The beast isn’t evil. It is terribly hurt, first in the pain of the original trauma; second, in the isolation that we’ve imposed on it that was necessary to survive the moment of trauma—but not so necessary to survive today. I and the beast are one. The beast is merely the parts of me that hurt too much to hold in my heart. My rational mind shouts:

Damn Right! It would hurt too much! That’s what I’m protecting you from. [So, let’s just stop reading now and watch some nice TV, you’ll feel better. You don’t have to do anything…just buy the right brand of toothpaste…you’ll be ok then.]

The polite response to that sort of dialogue where I come from is, “Ahya…, you could…”

There are many tools we use to hide from ourselves: Ignorance is bliss….. And, there are all the lovely ways we impose ignorance on ourselves: alcohol and drugs are good for a temporary forgetting. We inflame our passions and look outside, not inside. We go numb in depression. We go numb and we wonder why we don’t feel anymore.

Did you notice that everything on the list above will either destroy you outright, or deplete you till you whither away? Sounds a lot like, “If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you,” doesn’t it? Of course, the list is incomplete. And, each of us has our own special way of hiding from ourselves. And, no, I am not saying that all passion is bad—only those passions we use to distract ourselves from ourselves. In fact, as we bring more and more light into our lives, our lives become filled with unexpected passion. Our lives become filled with the gladness of just being alive.
So, how do we bring light back into our lives? Slowly… slowly, and with compassion. Sorry Charlie, no silver bullets, no magic potions, no weekend-wonder workshops today.

MORE from Erik Laurentz, Dynamic Duality School of Energy Healing

Everyone on the path to healing has hit or will hit—a point of resistance that makes us stop and scream (at least to ourselves…) that healing hurts too much to be worth the effort. I have, more than once…. well, more times than I can count, really. Our problem with healing is that we mistake our masks and defenses for our true being. As we begin to heal, as we begin to live more fully, more passionately, we perceive that our masks and defenses are weakening. To the degree that we’ve mistaken our masks and defenses for ourselves, we feel like we’re dying—not healing. It’s an illusion. But, until you’ve healed the particular aspect of your being that you’re working on, you can’t know that the feelings of dying aren’t real.
In past articles, I’ve talked about masks and defenses. Here’s a very quick recap: Our masks and defenses are distortions in our energy field that we adopt after trauma—usually in childhood—that help us feel safe in the world. We really like these distortions, because they make us feel safe. We begin to run the masks and defenses on autopilot to keep feeling safe. And, we run them for so long that we lose the ability to act outside of comfort zone created by these energetic distortions.

The truth is that as we heal, we don’t need these distortions in order to feel safe. And, we don’t lose our ability to return to them—as needed. They may not represent our most resourceful selves, but they sure come in handy when we’re feeling threatened. The good news is that as we heal, we feel threatened less and less often.
Healing is a wonderful and scary time. The wonderful piece doesn’t need much elaboration. We’ve all experienced moments being intensely alive. Whatever their duration in clock time, these moments are truly timeless. The world looks, feels, smells, tastes, and sounds fresh and alive in the most beautiful and intense way possible. When we enter the realm of timeless moments, we literally merge with the Divine. When the timeless moments pass, we feel refreshed to the core of our being. A few days after the experience, we begin to lose exactly what it felt like—even though we promise ourselves that we’ll hold on to that feeling forever. A few weeks later, we may doubt that we ever really experienced anything so grand. Even if we can hold on to the notion that the experience was truly grand, we don’t know who to return to timelessness at will.

The scary part is based on a double whammy of fears: the very real fear of death and the fear that you won’t be able to sustain the feelings of freedom and strength. Both fears are rational. Having taken on a life of their own, our masks and defenses fear that when we no longer need them, they will die. Distorted, our energetic patterns grew inflexible. We repeat the same responses over and over, even when they don’t fully fit the situation. Our masks and defenses don’t understand that undistorted, we move our energy through our system freely. In our newfound freedom, we begin to choose the energetic patterns that we run, instead of having the patterns run us. The second fear is rational too, because all the moments of spontaneous clarity you’ve ever experienced in your life have slipped through your fingers with the passage of time. Of course, fears that are rational aren’t predestined reality. As we change who we are at our most basic level; as we become more of who we are, not less, we will discover that our fears are misplaced. Our joy will increase. Moments of timelessness spontaneously appear in our lives. As we come to see our fears as misperceptions, moments of timelessness become strings of timeless moments. And, someday, we realize that—at least occasionally—our strings of timeless moments become days of timeless moments. Our masks and defenses become treasured tools that we can use whenever we want.

Of course you can always negate the training. Doing so lets you out of the conflict at a relatively small price. You get to go back to having your masks and defenses, live your life for you. The feelings of freedom and strength can become an elusive memory. You get to go back to being the person you always were. Maybe you won’t be happy, but you were really good at living the patterns.

We all get to choose the speed of our healing. If not now, maybe next time? You have an eternity to heal and grow. Why do it now? Hmmm. Pretty seductive, isn’t it? Maybe - but then what’s going to change in this lifetime that will make healing easier at some other time? Will living the same patterns over and over make them easier to change? After death, will absorbing the depth of the lost opportunities of this life motivate you more effectively to heal next lifetime? Did absorbing that knowledge after your last lifetime make it easy for you to heal in this lifetime? And, the truth is, you have the freedom to choose. God, Goddess, the Divine Energy of the Universe doesn’t care when you heal. He, She, It loves you just the same, whether you heal or not. That bears repeating, because it’s a strange concept in our culture: You are a Divine spark of the Divine. You are Loved beyond your wildest imagination. The Divine exists in a timeless realm, where clock time exists is seen as an illusion. From God’s perspective, even the notion that there is anything to heal is an illusion. But, here, in the realm of the ordinary, we live in time and we have healing to do. Only you, and the lives you touch, really care whether you heal or not.

I hope that this helps. I hope that these words bring you peace.

Erik Laurentz teaches at, and is co-founder of, the Dynamic Duality School of Energy Healing. Dynamic Duality leads students to healing through experiencing the Divine. For more information, go to dynamicduality.com.

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