From Darkness Into Light: Living the Insight
~6 MINS READ
The Long Night and the Quiet Turn
The Winter Solstice has passed. The longest night of the year is behind us, even though nothing obvious has changed. The cold still holds. The days are still short. And yet, the direction has shifted. There is now a little more light than there was yesterday. Not enough to notice unless you are paying attention, but enough to matter. Across cultures, humans have always gathered around this moment. Christmas, Hanukkah, Yule, and ancient Egyptian solar rites all arrive here. Different symbols, different stories, the same instinct.
In esoteric traditions, light is not the opposite of darkness. It is born from it. Darkness is not a mistake in the system. It is the womb. The light does not rush in to rescue us. It returns slowly, teaching patience, humility, and timing. This moment invites us to notice what may already be turning in our own lives, even if we cannot yet name it.
“You cannot heal what you do not bring into awareness.”
Our Uneasy Relationship With Darkness
In many modern spiritual spaces, darkness makes people uncomfortable. There is an unspoken pressure to stay uplifting, expansive, and resolved. Grief is tolerated briefly, then redirected. Anger is softened before it is understood. Confusion is rushed toward clarity. I understand the impulse. Life is heavy, and no one wants to drown. But I have learned that what we avoid does not disappear, it waits.
Ancient alchemical traditions understood this well. The nigredo, the blackening, was not a failure of the work. It was the beginning of it. Without descent, there was no transformation. When darkness is excluded from our conversations, it expresses itself sideways, through projection, rigidity, spiritual superiority, or the quiet exhaustion of pretending everything is fine. The refusal to engage darkness does not make us lighter. It makes us brittle.
This brittleness shows up most clearly in how we relate to grief. I’ve written more about this threshold, and what happens when grief is rushed, bypassed, or prematurely reframed, in Grief and the Path Back to Ourselves.
The Darkness I Learned to Carry
For a long time, I believed there was something fundamentally wrong with me. That belief took root early through religious upbringing and hardened over time. Later, it was reinforced through war, where I participated in systems that produced real harm and death. Then, through intelligence work overseas, where mistrust was not paranoia but a survival skill. Add a series of relationships where I kept choosing partners who mirrored unresolved wounds, and the story felt complete. Broken. Dangerous. Unworthy.
None of that shifted until I stopped trying to exile those parts of myself and began relating to them. I did not need to absolve myself of my past. I needed to understand how it lived in my body, my relationships, and my reflexes. Darkness did not need to be forgiven away. It needed to be metabolized.
For me, psychedelic work did not erase this darkness, but became part of a longer psychedelic healing and integration process. It brought it into sharper focus. In the right context, these experiences can accelerate awareness, revealing the shape of what has long been carried. But awareness alone is not enough.
When Insight Comes Home
Psychedelic experiences often accelerate this reckoning. A journey can feel like standing on a mountaintop at sunrise. Everything feels clear. Love feels universal. Forgiveness feels possible. Purpose feels obvious. And then you come home. The emails are still there. The neighbor is still loud. Your nervous system still remembers its habits. This is where many people feel confused or disappointed. The experience was real, so why does life feel the same? Because insight alone does not reorganize a life.
Psychedelic experiences can illuminate this truth quickly. They have a way of revealing what has been buried, bypassed, or carried silently for years. But what they offer is not resolution. They offer contact. What happens next determines whether that contact becomes wisdom or another memory we admire from a distance. I’ve lived this gap personally, not as theory, but as a slow re-entry from despair into steadier ground. I share that arc more fully in My Psychedelic Journey: A Path Through the Fog of Depression.
Integration is the slow work of teaching insight how to live in the body, in relationships, and in time, the heart of trauma-aware psychedelic integration. It is not about chasing another experience. It is about allowing what was seen to reshape how we live.
What Integration Actually Asks
Integration is rarely dramatic. It is subtle and often inconvenient. It asks us to slow down enough to notice where insight wants to land and to resist the urge to rush toward resolution. In practice, it often sounds like:
What patterns did I recognize that already exist in my daily life?
What truth felt undeniable, even if it disrupted my self-image?
Where am I being asked to change behavior rather than seek another explanation?
How does this insight want to show up in my relationships, work, and rest?
This is why integration must be trauma-aware. Expanded states open material that requires pacing, safety, and humility, not pressure to improve or perform spiritual maturity.
“The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.”
Projection, Othering, and the Comedy of Being Human
One of the clearest signs that integration is actually taking root is a subtle shift in how we relate to other people. The noisy neighbor. The misunderstood sibling. The colleague who really should run meetings differently. The client who just will not listen. The public figure we are convinced is ruining everything. These moments are rarely about the other person alone. Projection is not a character flaw or a moral failure. It is human.
Psychedelic states can make this mechanism difficult to ignore. By softening our usual defenses, they often reveal where we project, split, or disown parts of ourselves. Without integration, this exposure can feel destabilizing or overwhelming, especially for a nervous system shaped by trauma. With care, it becomes something else entirely: an invitation to take responsibility for what we see reflected back at us. During a recent integration circle, a client spoke about recognizing how often he “othered” people he disagreed with. Expanding his compassion to include those he resisted felt like the real edge of his work. This does not mean we stop having opinions or discernment. It means we stop outsourcing our inner work to whoever happens to irritate us that day.
For those carrying heavier versions of this pattern, where vigilance, mistrust, and moral injury have become reflexive, I explore that terrain more deeply in 11.11: War After War A Veteran’s Battle to Heal.
Masculine, Feminine, and Shared Responsibility
This work has also brought me into deeper reflection around masculine and feminine wounds, both personally and culturally. Feminism arose as a necessary response to centuries of patriarchal harm. That history matters. And when collective pain remains unintegrated, pendulum swings can create new forms of harm.
Accountability, especially as a white male, has not meant collapsing into shame or defensiveness. It has meant staying present with the shared human story. We inherit pain we did not choose, and we still have responsibility for how we carry it forward. Masculine and feminine wounds are not separate. They are entangled. Healing does not come from erasing difference, but from staying in relationship long enough to allow understanding to emerge.
Letting the Light Arrive
The Solstice reminds us that change rarely announces itself. It begins quietly, almost imperceptibly. A minute more light. Then another. No dramatic breakthrough. No sudden relief. Just a subtle reorientation that only becomes visible over time. Integration works in the same way. The most lasting transformations are not born from force or urgency, but from small, honest choices repeated again and again. A slightly different response in a familiar moment. A softer boundary. A deeper pause before reacting. These moments may seem insignificant, but they are how new baselines are formed.
Esoteric traditions have long understood that light does not conquer darkness. Light emerges through darkness, shaped by it, informed by it. Illumination is not about ascent away from the human condition, but about learning how to inhabit it more fully. Darkness becomes a teacher rather than an enemy. When we stop trying to escape these places, they begin to soften. As Richard Rohr writes:
“Spiritual maturity is not measured by peak experiences but by how we live ordinary life.”
If you are curious about how I support this work through trauma-informed coaching, psychedelic ceremony preparation, and integration, you can explore my approach from my Offerings Overview page or book a discovery call below. As you move forward, I invite you to sit with one final reflection: where in your life are you being asked not to fix or explain away the darkness, but to walk with it more honestly? The light does not erase what came before. It learns how to move with it.