Consciousness Thrives on Contrast • Nicole Doherty Ananda

This month I have been so completely fascinated with polarity – light, dark, up, down, past, future and so on. Consciousness thrives in contrast. In the Law of Attraction work we talk about contrast as that which inspires new desires. You know what you don’t like and therefore you begin to hone in on what you do like. We create the world with our choices based on our preferences. So if we just keep choosing what we like, we will always get what we desire, right? Perhaps it’s not so simple.

The interesting part about contrast is that we create labels that we attach to these polarities through conditioning. For example, light is good and dark is bad. Yet, I’m reminded of a great quote that I came across recently that would argue that the dark sounds pretty darn cool and necessary:

[blockquote indent=”yes” ]You are not what you have done, but what you have overcome. All the hardships. All the mistakes. All the rejections. All the pain. All the times you questioned why. All of these things have given birth to the wisdom and strength that will help you shine your light on the world, even in the darkest of hours. ~ Ritu Ghatourey[/blockquote]

Turning Our Focus Toward The Flow Of Energy

The truth is that each of these polarities is just energy. And energy just IS. They co-exist together to create the whole. Pema Chodron predicates that the labeling of everything is what creates suffering and that genuine freedom comes from going beyond labels and projections. If we can start to observe the dualism around us from a place of non-judgement and just recognize the play of opposites in everything, we can turn our focus toward the flow of energy rather than subjectively playing into their meanings.

I’m reminded of the gunas in the Yoga Sutras as well. The gunas are the building blocks of nature – positive, negative and neutral in charge. In any given day we are oscillating through all of these frequencies. We are following the path of nature – we move from a cold, wet day, to a blazing hot day, to a perfect ten (sometimes even all in one day when you live near the beach!). Everything is changing all the time.

My interest in all of this?

Finding The Truth of Balance

Finding the Yoga. Finding the harmony of opposites. I’m engaging in meditations that require me to disengage with the projections and find the truth of balance. I am trying to recognize that whenever there is up, there will be a down and there will also be a middle ground. I am in observation of my attachments to the past and to the future and looking for the Now. I’m letting go of strong opinions of right and wrong that have chained my psyche through human constructs like religion. I’m living more in the present. I’m asking less questions. I’m accepting and forgiving more.

Every Road Leads To Everywhere

I recently downloaded this phrase in one of my meditations that I absolutely love, “Every road leads to everywhere.” We live in a world of endless, limitless possibility filled with choice. With this in mind, I continue to recognize that there is no wrong way. There are many ways. My way is my way, unique in its construction and your way is your way. We can follow others for guidance, but in the end we need to to forge our own journey based on how we feel. What feels good for me, may feel really uncomfortable for someone else. It’s our job as conscious individuals to be in a perpetual state of observation of our reactions, our projections and our labels and to use the contrast everywhere to become conscious of the path our heart and soul desires.