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Deborah Eden Tull is a Zen meditation and mindfulness teacher, author, activist, and sustainability educator. She spent seven years training as a Buddhist monk\\xa0 and has been living in sustainable communities for over 25 years. She teaches engaged awareness practice, which emphasizes the connection between personal awakening and global engagement. Eden draws upon teachings from the natural world and an embodied understanding of animism. She is the author of Luminous Darkness: An Engaged Buddhist Approach to Embracing the Unknown and other books. Eden offers retreats, online courses, and consultations internationally. To learn more, go to DeborahEdenTull.com.

\\xa0If you\\u2019re an activist or a spiritual person, do you need \\u2018endarkenment\\u2019 as much as \\u2018enlightenment\\u2019? Hear Eden Tull explain in this interview why her answer is a resounding \\u2018yes.\\u2019

In this conversation, Eden and I discuss:

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• Why our \\u2018outer work\\u2019 of activism or contribution needs to be supported by \\u2018inner work\\u2019 that feeds compassion, resilience, and purpose. We are wildly creative beings who are meant to experience darkness \\u201cas the field of absolute rest and regeneration\\u201d that inspires our creativity.
• A \\u2018dark time\\u2019 can be a personal experience or an experience a people or culture are going through. It can be \\u2018dark\\u2019 as in \\u2018unpleasant,\\u2019 or \\u2018dark\\u2019 as in \\u2018mysterious, uncertain or visionary.\\u2019
• It\\u2019s counter-cultural to embrace darkness. But darkness includes beautiful halves of our reality such as the night, sleep, rest, interiority, sadness, wisdom, crisis, and fertile soil.\\xa0
• Ignoring darkness within and without can be a mistake because suppressing or ignoring our grief or horror at the world\\u2019s suffering prevents us from acting in healing ways.
• Darkness can be a fertile space where we listen and discover creative solutions that are based in fierce compassion. \\u201cIt\\u2019s in metabolizing our grief that we\\u2019re freed up to act in more constructive and creative ways.\\u201d
• How her book offers a structure for going into \\u2018dark\\u2019 spaces\\u2014whether meditation, open inquiry, or grief for a planet in crisis\\u2014and letting them be fertile instead of without life. Endarkenment can be a process of transmuting pain into vision and vitality.
• \\u201cWe need to wake up more fully to our partnership with nature\\u201d\\u2014not by seeing ourselves as separate, but \\u201cby recognizing our innate oneness with the more than human world and Gaia consciousness\\u2026when we do this, we receive guidance and information.\\u201d\\xa0

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