StevePavlina.com Podcast #019 – Owning Your Dark Side

This first half of this podcast explores the idea of turning your seemingly “dark” life experiences into positive strengths. I tell the story of how being a kleptomaniac in my late teens helped me develop focus and courage, qualities that serve me well to this day.

The second half covers the topic of polarity and the fundamental question that determines our choice of polarity: Are we fundamentally, unconditionally safe here?

There’s an interesting story behind this podcast. I originally recorded it on August 13, 2006, so this would have been podcast #16 if I’d posted it back then. Somehow every time I sat down to edit and post it, I’d get interrupted by something that would pull me away from the computer. The pattern became so ridiculous that even a couple weeks later, I still hadn’t been able to edit it yet. I began wondering if I wasn’t supposed to post it for some reason. With some frustration I put it on the back burner and went on to record and post other podcasts instead, experiencing no trouble with those. The podcast that became #16 was The True Nature of Reality, one of the most popular podcasts I’ve recorded (and also one of the longest).

Now more recently I’ve been meaning to do a podcast on polarity to help clarify and unify some of the concepts from recent articles on this topic. Once again I experienced this strange pattern of delay. Every time I tried to sit down and create the podcast, something unexpected would interrupt me and take me away from my desk. For example, our network would mysteriously cut out, and Erin would be yelling that her Internet connection went down.

Eventually I remembered this old podcast I recorded but never finished editing. I wondered if I should edit and post it now and thought, Nah. My views on this topic have been refined a lot since then, and I’m sure I can do a better job on this today. Plus it will only take about 30 minutes to do a fresh recording. But each time I rejected the idea and went to work on the new podcast, I’d get mysteriously interrupted.

Today I decided to listen to the old podcast to refresh myself on what I’d recorded. Out of habit I fell into the pattern of editing it as I went along. In seemingly no time, I had a finished recording ready to post. By the time I got to the end, I thought it was decent considering it was recorded before I wrote any of the polarity articles. There’s a lot more I could say on the subject, but perhaps this simpler treatment was somehow meant to be posted now.

I want to point out a couple differences in the terminology I use in this podcast vs. my recent polarity articles. First, at one point in the podcast, I mention how polarizing on the light (love) side can raise your consciousness. I’m not referring to your level of consciousness here but rather your general state of awareness. So I’m not saying that polarizing is going to instantly move you up in levels, merely that it will help make you aware of different things because you’re seeing reality through a new lens.

Secondly, this podcast is clearly lightworker-biased, so I definitely don’t give a balanced treatment to the dark side. The whole first half is about how you can use your dark side experiences to benefit you on the light side, implying that being on the dark side is somehow a mistake. Near the end of the podcast, I do mention that you’re free to make a conscious choice between the two polarities, but only after I’ve introduced it with labels like “evil” and “negative.” This isn’t because I’m biased against darkworkers — it’s because I’m talking from the perspective of my own personal experience. When I was dabbling with the dark side, my application of this energy was self-destructive. You could have said I was suffering from darkworker syndrome. But as I’ve stated more recently, it’s possible to act from a fear-based model of reality without self-destructing if your level of consciousness is high enough.

What I like about this podcast is that it explains where the fear and love polarities ultimately come from — your personal answer to the fundamental question we all face. How you answer this question is what determines your polarity. Since most people cannot answer it with a firm yes or no, most people aren’t polarized. But life gets pretty interesting once you start leaning harder to one side or the other.

Enjoy the podcast.

Owning Your Dark Side

18:47 • Download

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