Luminous Darkness: An Engaged Buddhist Approach to Embracing the Unknown

A resonant call to explore the darkness in life, in nature, and in consciousness--including difficult emotions like uncertainty, grief, fear, and xenophobia--through teachings, embodied meditations, and mindful inquiry that provide us with a powerful path to healing.

Darkness is deeply misunderstood in today’s world; yet it offers powerful medicine, serenity, strength, healing, and regeneration. All insight, vision, creativity, and revelation arise from darkness. It is through learning to stay present and meet the dark with curiosity rather than judgment that we connect to an unwavering light within. Welcoming darkness with curiosity, rather than fear or judgment, enables us to access our innate capacity for compassion and collective healing.

Dharma teacher, shamanic practitioner, and deep ecologist Deborah Eden Tull addresses the spiritual, ecological, psychological, and interpersonal ramifications of our bias towards light.

Tull explores the medicine of darkness for personal and collective healing, through topics such as:

Befriending the Night: The Radiant Teachings of Darkness

Honoring Our Pain for Our World

Seeing in the Dark: The Quiet Power of Receptivity

Dreams, Possibility, and Moral Imagination

Releasing Fear--Embracing Emergence

Tull shows us how the labeling of darkness as ＂negative＂ becomes a collective excuse to justify avoiding everything that makes us uncomfortable: racism, spiritual bypass, environmental destruction. We can only find the radical path to wholeness by learning to embrace the interplay of both darkness and light.

DEBORAH EDEN TULL, founder of Mindful Living Revolution, is a Zen meditation and engaged mindfulness teacher, author, activist, deep ecologist, and sustainability educator. Eden spent seven years training as a Buddhist monk, has been teaching dharma for 20 years. Her work has been featured in The Los Angeles Times, Tricycle, GOOP, and The Ecologist. Eden also teaches The Work That Reconnects created by Joanna Macy, and for UCLA’s Mindful Awareness Research Center. Eden offers retreats, online courses, and consultations internationally. In 2022 she is launching a 2-year Spiritual Activist Leadership Training program with female Buddhist teachers, Konda Mason, Kaira Jewel Lingo, Pawan Baraj, and Amma Thanasanti. She is the author of Relational Mindfulness (Wisdom 2018) and The Natural Kitchen (Process 2008).