Excerpt from "Entangled in Darkness: Seeking the Light"

The following is an excerpt from Entangled in Darkness: Seeking the Light by Deborah King, published by Hay House, available March 5, 2013, in bookstores or at www.hayhouse.com .

“Turn your face to the sun and the shadows fall behind you.”

— Maori Proverb

It was the very last hour of the last day of a three-day workshop I was teaching in Arizona, and I was tired. I’d been out on a rigorous book tour for five months, and my fatigue was catching up to me. All of a sudden, as I was helping a student onstage with an issue, someone in the front row started to moan loudly. When I glanced down, I was surprised to see a case of what appeared to be partial possession in my student Lin Lin. I was so tired that I seriously considered ignoring it. Was it something I could handle in my current state of exhaustion? Because Lin Lin was a gifted aspirant and her heart was in the right place, I felt compelled to address it. Even though she was actively seeking the light and was in training to do healing work, somehow she had gotten connected to something dark.

As quickly as I could, I completed my work with the person on the stage and then stepped down to where Lin Lin was seated. At this point, she was literally roaring, throwing her head back and forth as in the movie The Exorcist. Understandably, the audience members seated around her were uncomfortable. “This is not the real you,” I gently explained to Lin Lin. “I know you’re in there, though, and I really want to reach you. Would you like to be dissociated from this energy?”

“Yes, yes,” she replied. “Please help me.”

I began, and a real battle ensued. To bolster my strength, I called in every guide and pulled forth every resource I knew. It turns out that the “demon” that had infected my gifted student was an ancient dragon energy from her Chinese heritage. “You’re okay,” I reassured her. “You have in you a once-revered lineage that, although it was originally in the light, became dark after many years. You, however, are very attracted to the light. That’s why you’ve come to this workshop. So, you can choose. This is entirely up to you. I want to encourage you to go to the light, but in order to do that, we will have to release this other energy.”

With an “Okay,” Lin Lin gave me her consent, and I worked to disconnect the dragon spirit from her. The possession in this case was very modest. Despite the fact that darkness was residing in her, it hadn’t taken over completely.

The fact that this student worked in corporate America and was an educated and sophisticated modern gal didn’t change the reality of carrying a darkness embedded within her psyche (although this was unbeknownst to her). After its removal, she said, “When I started to make those sounds—and they were just coming up and out of me of their own volition—I didn’t know what they meant.”

***

I wish this were an isolated incident, but as a healer who helps thousands of people, I do periodically encounter those in need of a partial or even full exorcism. These are frequently as dramatic as in Lin Lin’s case and often scary, especially for those witnessing the depossession.

What sort of deal with the devil has a possessed individual or his or her ancestors made to attract such darkness? And what do these extreme dark events have to do with you, a seeker of the light?

Well, we are all on a pilgrimage of the soul. Life is a journey into higher consciousness, whether we’re aware of it or not. This is how I see it: we come to this physical plane to be bearers of the light. By “the light” I mean the highest energetic frequency that exists in our world and from which we originate. This energy is sometimes called Source, Spirit, oneness, love, or God. You might think of this supreme vibration as the lofty peak of a mountain, where the air is fresh and you have a breathtaking, 360-degree view of creation. In fact, we often use mountain-related words like pinnacle, peak, and summit to describe the ultimate or most perfect state of something—in this case, the perfection of our essence, our consciousness.

Just as there is a higher self where these attributes are stored, there is inevitably also a lower self, where our more base ones reside—where there is light, there must be darkness. It shows up as our “issues”—our life challenges, childhood wounds, negative personality traits, and limited mind-sets. Although your dark side may be hidden from your view, it always plays itself out in your life. It is fixated on physical safety and survival, and its traits, which stem from fear, constitute your propensity toward one or more of the seven deadly sins: lust, gluttony, greed, sloth, anger, envy, and pride. You might think of your lower self as the valley between two majestic mountain ranges. Indeed, one definition of the word valley is a place that is filled with fear, despair, or apprehension—a pretty good characterization of the lower self.

We can watch the news and see one example after another of the dark side in action: the sports coach who turns out to be a pedophile, the movie star on drugs and alcohol who crashes her car, or the politician caught in a tawdry affair. We are all, it seems, made up of both light and dark.