I won't go too into detail since my policy is that anything that gets shared in private stays private barring direct permission from the other person, and if there's permission to share I'd rather the other person speak for themselves than do it myself.
The long and short of it is that I've been communicating heavily with both Andrew and blossom for the last month. With Andrew, I initiated correspondence to see if we could facilitate mutual respect and understanding. With blossom, it felt like we had a lot in common so I figured, "why not?" With her, polarity didn't come into the conversation until... A week, maybe two weeks ago? She was asking for information so I elaborated on my side of things.
With Andrew, I posed a challenge: we would each partake of something the other person suggested barring an intuitive nudge which would indicate that doing so would slow our progress, in which case something else would be chosen. As a show of good will I volunteered to go first. It seemed only fair considering he had looked at everything I posted prior to contacting him. In the month leading up to the first part of the challenge I shared the basics of my personal story and I talked about my take on darkworking and how certain strong emotions had been brought to the surface by the work I was doing.
I considered it an open stage; he was free to add anything to the conversation that he wanted just as I did. Since I could see he was dealing with some heavy-duty anger issues I suggested
The Foci Exercise and
Collaging. Neither of those is particularly "dark" and as I see it they can easily be adapted to serve someone on the opposite side of the spectrum. It's not like introspection is our
thing, everybody's going to do it to varying degrees no matter what road they walk, it's just a specialty of the dark path.
However, I felt the conversation was very one-sided. I did most of the talking. Occasionally something I said might spark a forum thread which wasn't so bad; it was actually kind of nice to get some of those
ideas out into the open, especially when it helped me see where I was clinging to an old
tendency that was holding me back. So long as he'd respond directly to my notes on our challenge, I really didn't care how much or how little he said to me in private.
Around one week ago I finished my first challenge by reading "The Power of Now." At first I was uncertain whether or not I should but I figured if merely reading a book would be enough to undo my progress I hadn't made any progress at all. Plus, I didn't want to be the type of person who judges something without ever having read it. See, I wanted to pierce some of my own prejudices too-namely that everything lightworkers use is new age gobbledygook with no practical basis. Now, in my opinion that book had plenty of that, but it had a lot more substance than I was expected and even gave me a helpful tool for centering myself. Indeed, drawing into the present moment is something I think everyone needs to master because everyone will need 100% of their focus on what's going on -now- when the situation calls for it. Where lightworkers and darkworkers differ, again, is how and why they'll do it. I've got more thoughts on the book but I'm not going to turn this thread into a critique on it so there might be a topic on it later.
Anyways, I posed a challenge back to Andrew-read "The Family." I finished it not too long ago myself and I thought it was a perfect example of how well meaning people can do a lot of damage. There are darkworkers in there, too, make no mistake, but the central figures of the book-Jonathan Edwards, Abraham Vereide, Doug Coe-are all what I'd classify as twisted lightworkers. The intent was to show Andrew how some people, people like me, have been hurt by lightworkers and how both twisted lightworkers and darkworkers are responsible for the terrible things that happen in our world.
A short time later, I got a message from him saying that he was going to stop communicating with me. He used the word "nightmarish" again-a term he had always used to describe me-and said he felt I was draining his energy. I didn't see that there was any way to convince the guy that I wasn't trying to suck out his soul so I wrote a quick reply and reminded him, in light of the tone of his message, "we've all got our choices to make."
Yesterday I sent another message to him after his initial post in
do lightworkers ever tire of giving? in which I mirrored back to him what he had given me. I told him that he felt really fake to me, like he was using lightworker speak to cover over his pain and pretend it wasn't a problem. I noted that the extreme sensitivity he often talks about is neither natural nor healthy as it indicates there is deeply rooted pain that hasn't been dealt with. I didn't say this, but so long as it's present it will run him. At the end I tagged on, "And it really doesn't matter if I'm wrong because if I intuited it it must be right" or something like that. The whole thing was very much in line with, "do unto others as they do unto you" and it fit with what I told him when we first started talking-respect me and I'll respect you. It works for the negative side of things as well. I was, or at least tried to be, a lot more constructive than I may have been in other situations because I think Andrew has potential, he's just not going to do anything with it so long as he blames other people for his problems.
I know he sent another message after that but I haven't looked at it. I'll be honest-I deleted it. He was becoming a drain on
my energy. If things cool down and he wants to talk later, fine, I might give it another shot. For now things are best left as they are.