‘Dark’ Enchantment

My theme this year is Dark Enchantment: enchanting myself for my own sake, to make my life more mysterious and thrilling. Sounds fun, but it’s ‘dark’ for a reason - there’s an element of danger and destruction if and when we have the temerity to enter our Darkness.

Within darkness is mystery, the unknown, the fearful and secret desires. There lies the desires we haven’t fully acknowledged, or have resisted unconsciously because they go against our current life foundations. Upon spying them they may appear unrealistic to the life we have committed ourselves to uphold. We can turn away in fear others will judge us for them. Bringing things out of darkness will require some destruction of the norms we know to make space for them.

Thus: Dark Enchantment. The Dark Arts. It’s a war to be waged and the verbiage and arms of battle are apt: prepare yourself well, know your allies, choose weaponry that can do the job, and understand what opposes you. It’s combat against the inner doubt and the voices of others needing you to stay as you are, to keep existing as they are.

If you’re enchanted by the idea of drama - ‘blowing your life up’ might seem the only way: running headlong into CHANGE - and blasting your current life away or running from it to start over completely. If you have a bit more restraint the Dark Arts can lead to gradually releasing yourself from things that just don’t fit, and add in things that do.

But the reward is freedom. Casting a dark enchantment is drawing a picture of your life from the truest sense of self you can muster. If you’ve a sense that there’s something more going on, that you haven’t fully realized yourself yet, that might be a knock from the dark side.

Step one, in all the times this occurred to me, was to first stop being the person I was pretending to be. The Enchantments of Light blur the edges, soften the pain, ease your way back to the middle of the road. They might sound like this:

--I’m perfectly fine the way I am

--I’ll make do, I always have

--Others have it worse

--Others are worse than me

--I should be happy I even have this job/partner

--My desire to do X is stupid. Or childish

--If I do that, people will make fun of me

--There’s nothing I can do anyway

--All the alternatives suck

--That’s life…

Dark enchantments start with the truth - “I hate it!” “I can do better!” “I am worth more than this!” Of course people say things like ‘I hate my job’ but they keep doing that job.

The next part is to reach deep down further and paint a picture of - not what’s possible, not what’s likely, not what others might offer - but what’s deeply true. I hate my job *and I’d rather be doing X*. Maybe it’s: I’d rather be living on the beach. Is it? Maybe it’s: I’d rather be the boss. Or rather be doing creative work. Or rather reading philosophy books all day.

Tim Ferriss touched on this with his early work on how to craft the life you live (geared toward entrepreneurs, but nonetheless useful). Example, don’t presuppose you need a high paying job to make money to get a fancy car, just focus on the fact that it’s the fancy car you want to drive, and skip the part where you ‘KNOW’ what you have to do to get to the vision. There’s value in that methodology. It’s uncovering the vision itself that people can get stumped by.

Then what? There are dimensions of enchantment to work: that vision of the self, the habits and foundations in your life, the friends and ideas you fill yourself with, the look and feel of the places you live and frequent, the work you do, the inspiration and teachers who give you new ideas, and the sense that you, your ideas, friends, and work are contributing to an ultimate world you want to see evolve.