The dark times we experience are the void from which all things come. When we fall back into a pattern of sadness, anger, depression, we can think – why this again? But it is the yin and the yang. It is part of our human experience to see the light and the dark as separate. We know in theory that we need the darkness to balance the light, but in practice it can be so hard to love and accept what we’re going through when it’s painful or challenging. We want to reject the discomfort of the experience and we search for anything to bring us out of it, as if the current version of ourselves is not already whole and perfect. But we forget our wholeness, and we forget often. It is brave to choose self love over self hate. It is brave to open up to what is instead of what we wish could be. It is brave to step into the void that is the vastness that’s leftover when we stop trying to change who we are. The darkness is the void from which all things come; like a womb space. No longer filled with expectation or grasping, we can soften and be born to each moment, at ease in the current. When we allow this unfolding to occur, we can then bloom into all that we were born to be. Think of the surrender that is needed to briefly sink in a body of water. Only then, engulfed in the depth, light dim, sounds distorted by the fluid, do we find what we need to inspire the rise back up to the surface. From there, in that moment of suspension, we open ourselves to infinite possibilities… anything can happen. As we walk through the final days leading up to the darkness of the Winter Solstice, I invite you to allow for this undoing into who you are. “May we live like the lotus, at home in the muddy water.”