Judith Duerk: How Might Your Life Be Different If You Could Trust Your Own Darkness?

I first met and sat in retreat with author and psychotherapist Judith Duerk in the spring of 1990. And ever since that time, it is Judith who has companioned me in my heart as I have rooted into this amazing journey of taking down the walls I had built around my heart and instead opening to embrace, know, and love myself and others. Again and again I am reminded that we shrivel and die small deaths each day that we endure and experience our lives in a state of disconnection. Through her books, her retreats, her extending herself to me over the years, Judith modeled and taught me how to be brave, how to open my heart, how to feel and heal and discover the light hidden in dark places, and how to remember what I had forgotten - that I am lovable and beautiful, as are we all. I will always carry Judith in my heart and all those who encouraged and supported and cared enough to help me awaken. Now, and for many years, I have grown strong enough to know how to be a heart with ears and how to reach out my hand to other women, men, children, and other beings. As I have learned to open to my own darkness - all the false beliefs I carried, all the ungrieved losses I had survived, all the unclaimed gifts I possessed - everything has changed. And, today, my life is very different... May we all find what it is that we need to open to our wholeness and to experience the truth of who we are.  

♥ Molly

Judith Duerk & myself, on a women's retreat, 1996

How Might Your Life Have Been Different?

How might your life have been different, if, as a young woman, there had been a place for you, a place where you could go to be among women ... a place for you when you had feelings of darkness? And, if there had been another woman, somewhat older, to be with you in your darkness, to be with you until you spoke ... spoke out your pain and anger and sorrow.

And, if you had spoken until you had understood the sense of your feelings, how they reflected your own nature, your own deepest nature, crying out of the darkness, struggling to be heard.

And, what if, after that, every time you had feelings of darkness, you knew that the woman would come to be with you? And would sit quietly by as you went into your darkness to listen to your feelings and bring them to birth ... So that, over the years, companioned by the woman, you learned to no longer fear your darkness, but to trust it ... to trust it as the place where you could meet your own deepest nature and give it voice.

How might your life be different if you could trust your darkness ... could trust your own darkness?

- Judith Duerk, Circle of Stones:

Woman's Journey to Herself