Celebrating the Dark Parts that make us Whole with Deborah Eden Tull

NitN 88 - Three of Cups

Today I spoke with Deborah Eden Tull, brilliant author of the Buddhist manual on embracing the shadow, Luminous Darkness.

We spoke about Endarkenment of course! That's her concept, an alternative to enlightenment that is required if we are to reach the wholeness that our interesting moment of history demands. We dive into all-caps LOVE that creates opportunities to balance the Yin and the Yang of Receptivity and Agency, Feminine and Masculine, Earth and Heaven.

We explore concrete tips for listening, achieving stillness, and celebrating every aspect of being human, regardless of how stigmatized or repressed some of those experiences can sometimes be in this Patriarchal, White Supremacist, Colonialist, Capitalist hellscape.

Deborah Eden Tull, founder of the nonprofit Mindful Living Revolution, is Zen meditation/mindfulness teacher, author, and spiritual activist. She spent seven years as a monastic at a silent Zen Monastery, and has been immersed in sustainable communities for 25 years. Eden’s teaching style is grounded in compassionate awareness, non-duality, mindful inquiry, and an unwavering commitment to personal transformation. She teaches dharma intertwined with post-patriarchal thought and practices, resting upon a lived knowledge of our unity with the more than human world. She also facilitates The Work That Reconnects, as created by Buddhist scholar Joanna Macy. Eden has been practicing meditation for the past 30 years and teaching for over 20 years. Her books include Luminous Darkness: An Engaged Buddhist Approach to Embracing the Unknown (Shambhala 2022), Relational Mindfulness: A Handbook for Deepening Our Connection with Our Self, Each Other, and Our Planet (Wisdom 2018), and The Natural Kitchen: Your Guide to the Sustainable Food Revolution (Process Media 2011). She lives in Black Mountain,North Carolina, Cherokee land, and offers retreats, workshops, leadership trainings, and consultations internationally.

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Intro: Shadow LARPing

I’m pacing back and forth. Hyperventilating. I’d call it the stressed pacing of a caged tiger, but that would be more self-aggrandizement than I’m comfortable with. It would convey too much calm, predatory precision.

It doesn’t fit. In this memory, I am frantic. Wild-eyed. Near to feral.

The door to exit the room is blocked by the person I’m arguing with. They’re a quarter of the way to crouching and holding up their hands like a football player trying to prevent a sack. I hear them say:

“You’re acting crazy. Just calm down.”

The strange thing is, I feel calm. I feel totally, utterly calm. Calmly, I watch my chest heave. With calm, detached curiosity, I note my flailing expression of limbs as I snarl, “Just let me leave.”

Thanks to TikTok, I will learn later that this “calmness” is called dissociation. 

I will understand myself a bit better the next time it shows up. When I am free of that terrible relationship, better acquainted with my Bipolar diagnosis, and only experiencing echoes of similar behavior through being unintentionally triggered. Only losing my shit like that when confronted with the confounding variables of catastrophes as severe as a global pandemic.

It’s mostly behind me. But learning about it sheds light on another phenomenon. In a way, that dissociative sensation is present in just about all enactments of my shadow. 

If I can generate enough mindfulness, I can watch my body go through the motions of being an asshole, of choosing to consume something I know I’ll regret, of making a snippy or off-color comment I can tell—even as I say it—will become fodder for future shame and remorse.

All of it is a bit like a LARP. 

That’s “Live Action Role-Playing” for people who had less nerdy childhoods. Even those cooler kids among the Nodes in the Net audience will probably remember the goofily dressed teenagers shouting, “Firebolt! Firebolt! Firebolt!” while throwing bean bags at each other on early YouTube. 

Ultimately, the expression of shadow characteristics is me roleplaying. Like acting out a little scene that I don’t really feel, identify with, or intend. Roleplaying as the Elitist, or the Hothead, or the Doormat. None of those is truly me.

(Is there even a “me”?)

Ultimately, the entire human experience is one of pretending to be something other than we truly are: a single soul field, a single source roleplaying as billions of humans, pretending that we are each separate individuals with our own unique problems and strengths and purposes for incarnating. 

Like a madman conversing with his own finger puppets, pretending each digit has a different personality.

Nothing is real. Nothing can be identified with. Everything is God in drag. The divine in cosplay. Brahmin LARPing as Atmans LARPing as egos. 

And the more we embrace, integrate and love the aspects of ourselves that we would cast into shadow—the wisdom of the Elitist, or the anger of the Hothead, or the submissiveness of the Doormat—the less often our bodies can become hijacked and express those characteristics in a way that causes harm.

It gets to be that when the angry part of you whispers that the world needs your anger, you listen right away. Anger becomes a healthy, effective way to get your needs met, set firm boundaries, and dismantle injustice. 

It’s a solid way to go from being dissociatively mystified by my “Hothead” LARP: anger doesn’t need to scream to get my attention. 

My shadow is coming to learn that I respect it enough to express it when it can be of service.