The "dark side" isn't negative but necessary for growth
Music is a huge part of my life. When I was young, I was like a lot of kids, grooving to what was on the radio and loving top 40 countdowns. As I got older, I really started to appreciate rock music. It was as if the music I’d heard my dad listening to had quietly grown on me until I was old enough to really appreciate musicianship and the meaning of lyrics.
There was a lot of darkness in my life, starting from a very young age, and I dealt with it largely on my own, as do most kids who have similar experiences. Not surprisingly, when I was mature enough to appreciate and grasp the meaning of lyrics, I found myself very attracted to deeply meaningful lyrics (usually paired with highly emotion-evoking music) that were often dark and psychological in nature. What my husband jokingly refers to as “your devil music,” though that description couldn’t be further from the truth.
When I consider the road I’ve been on throughout my life, it’s no surprise at all that I love doing transformational work with people. I’ve never understood the desire to run from our inner darkness - after all, isn’t it what makes us complex? Interesting? Human? The trend we see toward toxic positivity, which denies “negative” feelings and insists on viewing the world through rose-colored glasses, is, well, toxic AF. That’s not reality. We shouldn’t deny who we are and what we feel. We need both the shadow and the light to be fully realized.
I hope you don’t mind if I give you a glimpse into the words that move me through the medium of music from time to time. Perhaps they’ll inspire you as much as they do me.
I've been crawling on my belly
Clearing out what could've been
I've been wallowing in my own chaotic
Insecure delusions
I wanna feel the change consume me
Feel the outside turning in
I wanna feel the metamorphosis and
Cleansing I've endured in
My shadow
----Tool, Forty-six &2
P.S. There’s extra nerd value for me in this particular song as someone with a graduate degree in genetics, as the forty-six refers to the number of chromosomes in human cells, the “& 2” referring to the next step in human evolution. You’re welcome. ;)