By now, you have no doubt discovered that life is an experience of contrast. Everything about the world in which we live is based on the co-existence of opposing forces: internal and external; feminine and masculine; darkness and light; birth and death. Even the axis around which the earth rotates is determined by opposing north and south poles. Polarity is intrinsic to our experience of life. It’s universal.
On a personal level, what this means is that if you were to think about something you desire – whether it’s something material like a new car, or something immaterial like being in love – the experience of you having it and not having it both exist simultaneously. In the same way that when half the planet is covered in darkness, the other half is illumined by the sun’s light, the possibility of you having what you desire exists right alongside the possibility of you not having what you desire. Having and not having are inseparable, like the front and the back of the hand.
An interesting thing happens when we acknowledge something we desire (and it happens whether this acknowledgment is made out loud or only to ourselves; the universe hears and responds to our vibration, regardless of whether it is ever verbalized): The moment a new desire is born within us, the moment we become aware of a longing to experience something bigger, better, or different than we are now experiencing, it heightens our awareness of the fact that – in the present moment at least – what we desire is not yet a part of our experience. In other words, desire generates contrast.
Contrast is what we experience when something shows up in our outer world that is out of alignment with what we desire to create. Sometimes it manifests as an immediate unwanted situation: An event you’ve been looking forward to falls through at the last minute, or your child gets hurt and has to be rushed to the hospital. Other times, contrast shows up as an accumulation of mildly aggravating factors: hitting every red light on your way to an important meeting; encountering an exceptionally rude waitress; or just having “one of those days” where you’re constantly dropping or bumping into things.
Whether it shows up as something mildly irritating or majorly troubling, and whether we experience it as the absence of something wanted or the presence of something unwanted, contrast serves a very specific purpose. It draws our attention to a discord that exists between our inner desires and our outer reality, and this discord creates a point of tension that is registered in our bodies and minds as a feeling of discontent. But it’s from this very point of tension that an intention is born, and with a clarity that can only arise from raw, unfiltered feeling, a powerful signal is transmitted instantaneously through every fiber of our being: I want something different! I want something more!!
What happens next depends almost entirely on how we choose to respond to the discontent generated by contrast. If we choose to focus only on what’s “wrong” – on what we don’t yet have or feel that we are lacking, that focus will act like a filter that will keep us from seeing any other possibility. If on the other hand we use the contrast of what we don’t want to bring us clarity about what we do, we become more magnetic to the having of it than the not having of it, and we literally draw that possibility into our experience. The important thing to remember is that any time life presents us with an experience that is other than the experience we want, we are faced with a fundamental choice: We can focus on and complain about all that appears to be falling apart, or we can use that contrast to clarify exactly what we want to rebuild in its place.
At every moment, and with every thought and emotion we offer, we are breathing life into one of two realities: a reality that we dread, or a reality that we desire. Contrast is a powerful invitation to believe in ourselves and to keep working toward our success, even in the absence of tangible evidence that we will in fact succeed. It is to live with the certainty that when we lose our footing (and we will), we will find it once again. It’s holding the image of a giant, blossoming tree firmly in our minds even as we press its fragile little seed into the soil. It’s having faith in what is still invisible to everyone around us, while knowing in our hearts that we are right this moment in the process of manifesting it into being. This is using contrast in the way it was intended – as a catalyst for manifestation.
