Honoring the dark might seem a little strange if you equate the dark with bad and evil. Yet during this winter solstice, when we experience the longest days of darkness, it seems appropriate to recognize the significance of the dark in the same way we honored the light last week.

Personally, I’ve been struggling for years with the notion that darkness has been relegated to represent what is not good. We talk about spiritual triumphs as coming out of the dark and into the light. We talk about our painful emotional periods as dark times with a sense of relief that we have emerged into the light.

As an energy healer, when I am able to see into the spiritual field of the body, I often see energies that represent illness or wounds as dark energies. In fact, when I see spirits, the mischievous ones are often dark. It has been easy for me to surmise, like so many of us have, that dark represents what is not good—not of the light.

But what about the Black Madonna, I would wonder? What about this beautiful black sky I gaze into at night? What about a cool, dark basement on a hot summer day? What about the intrigue of an underground cave?

My views about light and dark turned around a few times, when I began meditating within the primordial womb of all life. I had been taken into this reality in a very powerful spiritual experience many years ago when I was traveling through Egypt. Here at home I was being called into this reality once again.

The primordial womb of life is dark, endless, and pregnant with all the possibilities of life. All possibilities—none of them distinguished as good or bad—simply potentials. This womb is what I know as the Sacred Feminine. In this womb, the Mother holds all of the potentials of her children—of creation—and loves them all.

As a child or act of creation comes into life, the sound or longing of that creation emerges and becomes a ray of light streaming through the darkness, and eventually into the form of its longing.

Along the way, it may find itself bumping into other forms, creating friction and discomfort. We know the friction as feelings of helplessness, frustration, anger, hurt, jealousy, sorrow and pain. Intentions collide, and sometimes producing difficult results.

When I take these feelings into the darkness of the primordial womb, where all potentials are loved equally, the painful feelings gently ebb and flow away. In their place emerge longings of original intent. For me, those intentions are ecstatically beautiful, and in their presence the creation of my life is reborn.

I wonder this: if every injustice ever committed, and every accompanying feeling were to be held consciously within our loving wombs, would there be anything left that we would call evil?

Is the darkness I see in energy healing, evil or bad at all? Or is it life longing to be loved and it is showing its true color—the color of the primordial womb? Is it trying to find its way home?

When I call to the darkness within myself or another in compassion, for the truth of the darkness as it knows itself, the darkness, like my painful feelings, unravels itself and is born anew.

During this winter season, I honor the dark. I honor the womb of the Sacred Feminine. I honor it knowing that in the dark, there is hope.

A prayer honoring the dark: Return to the Womb of the Sacred Mother