Book Review: Dark Side of the Light Chasers by Debbie Ford

Apr 6, 2023

Dark Side of the Light Chasers
Reclaiming Your Power, Creativity, Brilliance, and Dreams
by Debbie Ford

This is an excellent book – clearly written, using personal and relatable examples from the author’s life and experience including her drug addiction. She’s been to some dark places and found her out. I found it inspirational and very grounded. My husband and I took a Hay House cruise in 2009 and had the pleasure of watching Debbie Ford give one of the lectures. She blew both of us away because here she is talking about our shadow sides and how to deal with them – it was pretty much straight down the line very close to my husband’s working theories on Darkness at the time. After seeing her lecture, I pulled this book out of my cabinet and gave it a good read. I have always been a big proponent of facing our rejected parts in order to alchemize that iron into gold, and that is exactly what this book is all about.

You must go into the dark in order to bring forth your light. … When we can accept ourselves, and forgive ourselves, we automatically accept and forgive others.

I particularly like all the exercises given through this book. Having gone back through them all, they added so much value to the content of this book it’s truly a very highly recommend from me if you are serious about pursuing genuine spiritual and emotional intelligence, dedicated to stepping up to your potential because that is the most loving thing we can do. as you read through the quotes, I hope you’ll begin to understand the value that I’m referring to – not only in terms of content but also inspiration. Below are all the quotes that I highlighted, but I’ve removed the exercises themselves. If you want to exercises, buy the book. Unfortunately, Debbie Ford passed away in 2013 but her wisdom echoes on. Having a copy of this book is WELL worth the money for those folks who are serious about their interior work.

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Quotes:
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Pg xiii: “The dark side have been a part of all of our religious traditions. But we are always in need of new containers and new language that is contemporaneous with the human predicament.” … Each generation needs new ways to speak of the phenomenon of shadow, both the positive and the negative shadow.

Pg xiv: The greatest sin may be the unlived life.

Pg xiv: The more we seek the light, the denser the Shadow becomes.

Pg xv: Shadow-making runs parallel to ego development. … Robert Bly calls the shadow the “long bag we drag behind us. We spend our life until we’re 20 deciding what parts of ourselves to put in the bag, and we spend the rest of our lives trying to get them out again.” …. shadow integration gives us a unifying awareness that allows us to reduce the shadow’s inhibiting or destructive potentials, releasing trapped life energies that may be caught in the pretense and posturing required to conceal what we can’t accept about ourselves.

Pg xvi: I Ching, Hexagram 5, Hsu, Waiting (Nourishment)

It is only when we have the courage
to face things exactly as they are,
without any self-deception or illusion,
that a light will develop out of events,
by which the path to success
may be recognized.

Pg xviii: “All of your so-called faults, all the things which you don’t like about yourself are your greatest assets. They are simply over-amplified. The volume has been turned up a bit too much, that’s all. Just turn down the volume a little.”

Pg 1: [This book] is about unmasking that aspect of ourselves which destroys our relationships, kills our spirit, and keeps us from fulfilling our dreams. It is what … Carl Jung called the shadow. It contains all the parts of ourselves that we have tried to hide or deny.

Pg 2. As long as we keep hiding, masquerading, and projecting what is inside us, we have no freedom to be and no freedom to choose.

Pg 4: Love is inclusive: it accepts the full range of human emotion — the emotions we hide, the emotions we fear. Jung once said “I’d rather be whole than good.”

Pg 5: The Persian poet Rumi said, “By God, when you see your beauty, you’ll be the idol of yourself.” … [Jung said] “the shadow is the person you would rather not be.”

Pg 6: You must go into the dark in order to bring forth your light. … When we can accept ourselves, and forgive ourselves, we automatically accept and forgive others.

Pg 8: What you don’t own, owns you.

Pg 9: I made a list of all the parts of myself I didn’t like, and worked on finding the gifts in them.

Pg 12: One of the biggest pitfalls of the Information Age is the “I know that” syndrome. Knowing often prevents us from experiencing through our hearts. Shadow work is not intellectual; it’s a journey from the head to the heart. Many on the path to self-improvement believe they have completed the process but are unwilling to see the truth about themselves. Most of us long to see the light, and to live in the beauty of our highest self, but we try to do this without integrating all of ourselves.

Pg 14: Because I had worked so hard to shut myself down, I had no patience for others who might be exposing their imperfections. I become intolerant and judgemental.

Pg 18: Our shadow is here to point out where we are incomplete.

Pg 20: The gold is in the dark.

Exercises: pgs 21-22

Pg 23: We are not alone, the world is within us. … The holographic model of the universe teaches us that each of us is a microcosm of the macrocosm.

Pg 24: understand that you contain everything you see in others …. When we make peace with ourselves we spontaneously make peace with the world.

Pg 25: If we do not possess a certain quality we could not recognize it in another.

Pg 30: Sometimes the question is not whether you have a specific trait at the moment but whether you could display that trait under different circumstances. … I realized that I only judged people when they displayed a quality I could not accept in myself.

Pg 31: Hold your hand straight out in front of you and point at someone. Notice that you have one finger pointing at them and 3 fingers pointing back at yourself. … If you don’t see yourself as a macrocosm of the entire universe you’ll continue to life your life as a separate individual. You’ll look outward instead of inward for answers and direction, and make judgements about what is good and what is bad.

Pg 33: As Gunther Bernard so aptly said, “We choose to forget who we are and then forget that we’ve forgotten.” Aspects that are hidden from ourselves have a particularly powerful influence on our present reality. They have a life of their own and are always trying to get our attention in order to be accepted and integrated into our whole self.

Exercises: pgs 35-38

Pg 39: Projection … is an involuntary transfer of our own unconscious behavior onto others, so it appears to us that these qualities actually exist in the other people.

Pg 39-40: Imagine having a hundred different electrical outlets in your chest. Each outlet represents a different quality. The qualities we acknowledge and embrace have cover plates over them. They are safe: no electricity run through them. But the qualities that are not okay with us, which have not yet owned, no have a charge. So when others come along who act out one of these qualities they plug right into us. … It is only when you’re lying to yourself or hating some aspect of yourself that you’ll get an emotional charge from someone else’s behavior.

Pg 43: … when you embrace a quality within yourself, other people with the same quality can no longer plug into your. Then they become free to experience you and you are free to experience them. .. Ken Wilber’s Meeting the Shadow: “Projection on the Ego Level is very easily identified: if a person or thing in the environment informs us, we probably aren’t projecting; on the other hand, if it affects us, chances are that we are a victim of our own projections.”

Pg 44: Our indignation over the behavior of others is usually about an unresolved aspect of ourselves.

Pg 45: When we judge others we are judging ourselves. … In this holographic world, everyone is you and you are always talking to yourself.

Pg 48: If you have to act in a particular way to avoid being something you don’t life, you’re trapped. You’ve limited your freedom and robbed yourself of your wholeness. … It’s not only our negative traits that we project onto other people; it’s also our positive traits.

Pg 49: When you are not living up to your potential, it’s easy to project your positive traits onto people who are living up to theirs.

Pg 51: Whatever inspires you is an aspect of yourself.

Exercises: pg 54

Pg 55: Un-concealing your shadow reveals your mask. We must look at this mask with love and compassion for there is great value in understanding what we hide behind.

Pg 57: Your outer shell is the you who faces the world. It hides the characteristics that make up your shadow. … You need to see your outer shell as having served as protection, not just something that keeps you from fulfilling your dreams.

Pg 58: When you get to know your whole self, you will no longer need your shell to protect you. … Challenge the person you think you are in order to unveil the person you are capable of becoming.

Pg 59: Using other people as mirrors helps you to decipher your mask. Go out and interview people close to you. Ask them which 3 things they life most about you and which 3 things they like the least. … if we are afraid to hear what the people closest to us have to say, we should take notice. … Think of denial as an acronym for Don’t Even Notice I Am Lying.

Pg 62: Emerson said, “Who you are speaks so loud, I can’t hear what you’re saying.” … 86% of communication is nonverbal. … You want to ask yourself: “What am I communicating in the silence? What are the messages I’m sending out?”

Pg 64-65: Another way to expose your hidden aspects is to make a list of 3 people you admire and of 3 people you hate. … Write down 3 qualities you like or admire most about each person, and those you dislike or hate the most. Then make a list of all the positive qualities you’ve down on one side & all the negative on the other.

Pg 68: We do not have any say about the events in our lives, Nietzsche commented, but we do have say over how we interpret them. … Un-concealing is the first step of the shadow process.

Exercises: pg 69-71

Pg 72: Once we have unconcealed all of our disowned aspects, we are ready to move into the second stage of the process, which is to own all of these traits. … 3 helpful questions … (1) Have I ever demonstrated that behavior in the past? (2) Am I demonstrating that behavior now? (3) Under different circumstances am I capable of demonstrating that behavior? Once you answer yes to any of these questions, you have started the process of owning a trait.

Pg 72-73: But it’s just as important to be ruthless with yourself as it to be gentle. Be willing to find out that you “are” what you least want to be.

Pg 73: Resist the temptation to judge yourself. … If you want to manifest your full potential you have to reclaim the parts of yourself that you’ve denied, hidden or given away to others.

Pg 74: If there is an aspect of ourselves that we don’t accept [positive AND negative], we’ll continually attract people in our lives who act that aspect.

Pg 76: James Baldwin “One can only face in others what one can face in oneself.”

Pg 79: If our soul’s purpose is to become complete, we’ll continually call forth what we need to see to be whole. As we own more of ourselves, healthier people will show up in our lives.

Pg 83: Transformation itself only takes seconds. It is a shift in perception, a change in the lenses we look through.

Pg 84: When we believe we can only be one or the other, we continue our internal struggle to only be the right things.

Pg 87: The pain of our perceived flaws compels us to cover them up.

Exercises: pg 90-91

Pg 92: … our fear-driven egos use judgements to protect us (future episode link) — protection that ironically prevents us from self-realization.

Pg 94-96 –> Description of the Bus Meditation

Pg 96: “I would have to look in the eyes of everyone I met with love and compassion to see myself fully.” (Hall of Mirrors)

Pg 104: As you go about embracing your disowned traits, it can be useful to retrace the steps that led you to believe a certain quality was bad in the first place.

Pg 105: Most of us are driven by the 8-year-old within us. That child who didn’t get his needs met is begging for acceptance.

Pg 106: If we don’t shift our perceptions of our true selves, we’ll be stuck repeating our past behaviors.

Exercises: pg 109-111

Pg 113: If you want to manifest your desires you must be accountable for everything that takes place in your world.

Pg 117: Proverb: “The world is a teacher to the wise man and an enemy to the fool.”

Pg 122: Every word, incident, and person that still has an emotional charge [for me] needs to be retraced, faced, replaced, and embraced.

Pg 130: [noted in the side margin that my anger at organized religion is an inherited familial issue.]

Pg 133: We must fully embrace the dark in order to embrace the light.

Exercises: pg 133-135

Pg 136: “Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure,” says Marianne Williamson in A Return To Love. “It is our light, not our darkness, that most frightens us. We ask ourselves ‘Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous?’ Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small doesn’t serve the world. … You were born to manifest the glory of God that is within you. … as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we’re liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.”

Pg 137: The only thing that stops us from being our whole, authentic selves is fear (future link). … It’s just as difficult to take back all the light aspects of ourselves as it the dark ones.

Pg 138: For some reason, I had always believed that downplaying the best parts of myself made me a better person.

Pg 142: Feeling the pain of embracing certain things you’ve denied is essential to this process.

Pg 145: Peace comes when we stop pretending to be something other than our true selves.

Pg 147: If you are fearful about discovering your anger, remember that your power is buried along with it. Anger is only a negative emotion when it is suppressed or dealt with in an unhealthy way.

Exercises: pg 155-157

Pg 158: If we don’t challenge our most basic beliefs we won’t grow as spiritual beings.

Pg 159: … literally change your internal statements to questions. Change “I am a failure” to “Could I be a success?” etc

Pg 163: Don’t be afraid if you don’t know what you want. Simply make a commitment to live up to your full potential. Live in the moment, and the universe will show you your unique gifts.

Pg 165: [person] was more committed to the obstacles than he was to discovering if his vision has any validity. We have to un-conceal all the beliefs that keep us from attaining our dreams.

Pg 168: Prayer without action is not prayer. It’s dreaming.

Pg 172: If you have a commitment to alter an area of your life and are not meeting your objective, look at what underlying commitments you are fulfilling instead.

Pg 173: Your word, if not taken seriously, is nothing but noise.

pg 174: People often ignore their intuition and their inner guides for so long they silence the part of them that can help them the most.

Pg 175: I suggest you create a personal mission statement. Write down 5 to 10 words that really inspire you. Then use the words to write a powerful statement that will guide your and keep you on the track of fulfilling your soul’s purpose.

Pg 176: Gandhi said, “The only devils in the world are those running around in our hearts.”

Exercises: pg 177-180