Romancing The Dark

My fascination with all things dark and shadowy began at my birth. Born blue and not breathing, I was resuscitated and placed in a humicrib, separated from my mother. This disruption to my attachment bond sent my orientation reflex into hyperdrive, and began my desperate search to reconnect with my life-supporting mothership.

Astrologically, I was born with my sun in the eighth house. This is the house of psychology, death, sex, the occult, the taboo and the hidden. Your sun sign tells you where you shine. I was destined by the stars it seems, to shine my light into the dark and hidden shadows of my unconscious mind.

My childhood, although in many ways supportive, also featured frequent beltings from my father and occasionally my mother. On one occasion, at 8 years old, I recall my mother losing her cool. As she unleashed a belting on my bare skin, I gazed up at her looking for mercy, only to see her eyes rolling back in her head. I remember thinking to myself, where did she go? What is causing her behaviour? I had to know. At this point I left my body and, in the resulting dissociative state, my pain vanished.

The spirits of alcohol possessed both my father and my mother, creating a chaotic home environment in which I was raised. As a teenager I too resorted to alcohol to numb my emotional pain. By my early twenties I was in psychotherapy, feeling lost and desperate, searching for the meaning of my life.

After spending ten years on a university campus studying various subjects, I became particularly interested in psychology. I started a career in nursing, gravitating towards work settings where chaos prevailed, such as emergency, drug rehab, prisons and remote indigenous communities. For as long as I could remember, I’d always had a fascination with exploring the hidden motives behind human behaviours, which shaped my preference for traumatic workplaces.

In my thirties, I began practicing and studying yoga and meditation. Surviving six months in an ashram in India, I spent a further 15 years dedicated to kriya yoga practise in the pursuit of examining and understanding my own unconscious impulses and drives.

At times unsatisfied and underwhelmed with the revelations of my mediation practice, I decided I needed to dig deeper and explore the non-ordinary states of consciousness induced through engaging with psychedelic plant medicines. This journey was to last 15 years. For a decade of this time, I was simultaneously working as a trauma therapist and counsellor, witnessing and documenting the horror that is some people’s lives.

Psychedelic compounds have a unique ability to catalyse a dissolution of the structure of the human ego. The social mask, or persona, begins to come down, revealing the deeper truths that lie behind the façade. With each additional journey, I began to realise there was so much more to me than I was comfortable acknowledging and showing. Jung called what lies behind our social mask, the shadow, and I was being schooled by the great plant teachers about the content and workings of my own hidden parts.

Riding on my deep curiosity for all things hidden and taboo, I summoned the courage to go deeper and deeper into the vastness of my psyche. I travelled to Mexico for an encounter with the strongest of all psychedelics, the venom of the Sonoran Desert toad, Bufo Alvarius.

Smoking the toad venom releases the molecule 5 Meo DMT, which instantly de-activates the brains Default Mode Network. This invokes a momentary, complete ego dissolution or death, and a merging of the individual consciousness with the cosmic.

 Having researched all I could about this molecule and the impossible experience it induces, I signed up for a ritual known as Sapohuasca. This involves an night-long journey with the  shamanic brew Ayahuasca, followed by smoking the toad venom in the morning. Psychedelic explorers would agree there is no greater rite of passage than this. Knowing I was pushing myself to the edge with this initiation, I chose to bring to it, a grand intention.

I was invited to attend a private sitting with a small group of brave souls and an accomplished medicine woman. We were asked to speak our intentions out loud, and when it came to my turn, this is what I said:

 “I want to face the darkest aspect of my shadow, in its most destructive, evil, feminine and Kali like form. Give it to me with both barrels and don’t spare me.” (Kali being the Vedic goddess of death, darkness and destruction).

At this point, the woman sitting next to me in the room got up and went to sit somewhere else. And the journey begun.

 Within forty minutes of drinking the ayahuasca it began doing its work. I started to experience the common mystical inner visions that I’d become accustomed to. Only this time, they were even more intense than ever before. The visions were high resolution, polychromatic, astonishing, overwhelming and hyper-real. What played out in cinematic detail behind my closed eyes was a battle of impossible proportions. I was cast in the role of the perpetrator of every crime committed by a human against another human.

 Warning: what follows is very graphic and may not agree with all readers sensitivities.

 I watched in horror as I began dismembering people’s bodies with a machete. In the very next scene, I was shooting peoples torso’s in half with a machine gun. Next, I was pushing live people into large meat grinders and watched as they were butchered alive. These scenes kept repeating in ever greater detail and horror for the next 4 or so or hours. There was nothing I could do to end this nightmare­—I had volunteered for this.

 By the time the ayahuasca began to wear off, I was in a state of deep shock, my body was involuntarily shaking with all the adrenaline and cortisol coursing through my veins. I felt severely traumatised and fatigued by my experience, unable to get up off the floor. About an hour later I completed the ritual by smoking the toad venom.

 This experience was pivotal in shaping my understanding of the shadow side of the human psyche. It had informed me in the most intimate way, that we all have a monster lurking just behind our friendly masks. I came to understand that the responsibility for all the human atrocities in history rests equally with all of mankind. We are all complicit in the collective crimes of humanity. As Jung rightfully points out, I can now see that man is the greatest danger to man, for even the most virtuous among us are capable of the greatest of sins.

 My life mission has become taking what I have learned about the human shadow and educating people about how to integrate the hidden darkness that is in all of us. I believe that through shadow integration work, we can raise our collective consciousness as an antidote to the tyranny that resides in each of our hearts.

 My own personal journey with shadow work has taught me to impose healthy personal boundaries, to stand up to tyranny, to face the uncomfortable and frightening, to own and take responsibility for the parts of me I judge wrong and to avoid the traps of addiction, avoidance, and malaise. More than this though, it brought me love, both in the form of a beautiful woman, and a deep love, trust and respect for myself.

As far as we can discern, the sole purpose of human existence is to kindle a light in the darkness of mere being.

Carl Jung