The Dimmer Switch

Video Blog Transcription:

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There's nothing more natural and more beautiful than allowing our inner light to shine, opening our heart, letting our beauty naturally express itself, and letting our essential nature just beam and flow and shine.

And yet there's this tendency to dim our inner light. We tend to dim it to fit into the experiences and the relationships and the people, the situations that we're in. Sometimes it just seems like it makes more sense to just dim our light down.

It's like we have this dimmer switch to dim our light down a little bit, and we do this unconsciously.

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But why would we do this? I mean, we worked hard to let our light shine and reawaken our light. I know I did. It wasn't easy going in and taking the shrouds off my heart and letting my light shine again, you know? So why would we dim it down? That's what this blog is about.

Anyway, there are kind of two sides to this equation of why we might dim our inner light. It basically involves the people around us and our side of things. So we'll start with the people around us.

So people in general, ourselves included, are comfortable and accustomed to a certain level of people allowing their light out. A certain level of brightness, if you will, in the people around us. And so when that brightness is brighter than what people are accustomed to, it's often out of their comfort zone.

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And what they start doing is giving signals to please turn that down a little bit. They're unconscious of this, but they might offer a little sarcastic comment, or make fun of what you’re saying, or call you woo-woo or whatever else.

They’re basically saying, “Dude, your light's a little bright. Could you please dial it back a little bit? It's kind of in my eyes a little bit here.” And again, they're not conscious of it, but they definitely will do that. I'm sure you've experienced people doing that before.

So from our side of things, we tend to feel a little bit vulnerable when we allow our light to shine brightly, especially at first. You may notice this when you come back from a retreat, a backpacking trip, or being in nature, and your light is shining more brightly.

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And there's a little bit of a vulnerable feeling of if I let my light shine brightly with my family or with my friend, are they going to still like me? What are they going to think? Are they gonna think I'm different, and I don't love them anymore? So we tend to be a little self-conscious.

So what we tend to do is we allow our light to shine, and then we pay close attention to how people are responding to it.

So now you can see both sides of this dance, right? We're self-conscious about shining our light, and they're giving us signals about whether it's too bright or not. And you can see how this dance happens, in which the end result of the dance often is us dimming our light.

We dim our light to the level that that interaction is comfortable with- comfortable for both sides. Because they're not comfortable with it being bright, and we're not comfortable with them not being comfortable.

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And so we unconsciously dance this thing out, and then we make an unspoken agreement to have our light shine at this amount. All this is unconscious, but it definitely happens.

So we tend to adjust our light to the level that the people around us and ourselves are comfortable with. And this almost doesn't seem bad; it’s got a practical sense. There's no need to blast our light in people's faces, we figure. It almost seems respectful or considerate to dim our light a little bit.

But the thing is, it's not natural to dim your light. And it's actually painful spiritually. Your light wants to shine. And when we start shrouding that or dimming it or covering it up, it gets painful. And besides that, it's not what we came here to do. We came here to shine our light.

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And perhaps, the people around you need you to shine your light brightly. They may not be comfortable with it, and they may give you signals to please stop doing it. But when you shine your light brightly, it challenges them to shine their light.

So the obvious alternative is to let your light shine, to allow your beauty out, to crank that dimmer switch up and let it rip. But in order to do this, we need to become conscious of our dimmer switch. We need to notice when we're dimming our light down, or when we have dimmed our light down, and when we are allowing it to shine.