.

"Just like light, nature has its darkness. Just as there are sunny days, so there shall be rainy days. Just as there is calm... so there shall be chaos. Yin and Yang depicts the presence of counter forces in life."

I then ask, how does one manage or avoid the darker side of life?

She then replied, that is the difference between those who are still asleep and those who have awakened. "The more one avoids the darker side of life, the more it will continue to appear, until the lesson is learned. Our society teaches us to manage adversity. To avoid it at all costs and to defy its existence. Sadness, loss, grief, and death are all part of the darker qualities of life. Society has taught us to seek help in eliminating these forces, or perhaps in being able to remove the feeling from our lives. However, the reality is...even sadness, grief, loss and death are part of life. They are life. The shadows of life. The more we avoid them, the bigger and more mysterious their existence become.

The way to manage these forces is not to fight them... it is not to run away from them... or to try and find solace for them. The way to manage these forces is to face them...to embrace them...to welcome them in our lives so they become a part of us... and then allow us to rise above ourselves.  If we experience a loss... then embrace the feeling of loss. If we encounter the feeling of grief, then embrace grief. Relish the feeling of coldness... of sadness... of darkness until these dissipates from the body and into the outer consciousness. Once we become familiar with the worst effect of these counterveiling forces in lives... then we reach nothingness.

We are left with nothing...we become nothing. When we embrace the darker qualities in life by allowing the emotion to flow through our body, we experience the moment of losing everything. But in the moment of experiencing total loss, when we encounter nothingness... we will also discover ourselves. We will then discover that we have an existence apart from the world.

Nothingness brings us to the level of numbness. In that instant, there is no more emotion because we have experienced the worst emotion (which is just the mirror image of the best emotion we have also experienced). In that moment, there is no more thought because we have exhausted all thoughts (as to why such emotion of grief, sadness, loss or death have occurred). In that moment, there is no more past because it no longer matters. There is no more future because it also does not matter.

There is only the present moment. The moment when you are breathing. The moment when you suddenly realize you are part of a body that has arms, legs, head, feet and heart existing in the realm of consciousness. There is nothing left except your consciousness - your consciousness to existence.

The discovery of that consciousness of existence will make you realize that inspite of everything you have experienced and lost, you are still alive. And if your are still alive you can experience life. And if you can still experience life, then you can still find joy (as well as sorrow), warmth (as well as coldness), rise (as well as fall), victory (as well as defeat), abundance (as well as nothingness).

In that nothingness resides that womb of creation that welcomes you to the bridge between humanity and spirituality.

Between the here and now, and the everlasting. Between what is and what is to become and what can not be destroyed.