Dark side, light side
(shortpost)
One of the bits of advice I found myself giving most frequently, as a parkour instructor, was:
“Don’t do this one with the dark side. Light side only.”
This is a sazen, so I’ll unpack it (as I did for my students and protégés). The short version is “it’s the same as the distinction we make between cold-blooded murder and hot-blooded murder.”
Imagine that what you have to do is take four steps in a space about the size of a large bedroom, reach top speed, and then catch the corner of a concrete wall that’s another bedroom away and a foot or two higher than your takeoff.
A lot of the time, people working up to a movement like this will huff and puff and yell and stomp their feet and get hype and you can visibly see them sort of … building up a head of steam, overfilling themselves with explosive energy, and then they YAAAAAAAAAAAAA and go for it.
This is valid, in general, as a tool in one’s toolkit. I don’t actually think you should never use the dark side.
But there’s a different thing you can do, which is to be calm, and centered, and level, and focused, and to draw in a long, slow breath, and hold it for a moment, and let it leak and trickle out of your lungs, and then you run.
People use the dark side to do something like overwhelm a part of themselves. To push past fear or exhaustion or hesitation, to break through barriers.
(Or sometimes just to push past and quiet-down the explicit, conscious, verbal parts of their brain. The dark side is good for becoming more animal, and there are situations in which being more animal is exactly what you need.)
The light side mode doesn’t let you do that. The light side mode only allows you to work within your preexisting limits, and your overall ability to get all of the different parts of your psyche on board (including your higher reasoning).
The dark side mode tends to be erratic. You end up falling back on muscle memory and reflex, and your body is outside of its comfort zone and therefore everything is sort of fundamentally less predictable. Dark side motions are more visceral, more feral, less clean.
The light side mode tends to be more controlled. More intentional. More “doing things we’ve done before,” even if there’s some limited novel aspect to it, some new combination.
In literal actual parkour practice, the main reason I would tell a traceur that they shouldn’t use the dark side, for a given motion, is because I felt like the-parts-that-would-be-overwhelmed were right, actually.
Like, the person was feeling some sort of fear-based mental block, and they were tempted to just push the emotional OVERRIDE button, and I didn’t trust that they were correct to do so. I had some instinct that the block was, in some crucial way, keeping them safe, and I said things like “I think if you can’t do this one calmly then it’s too much for you to handle.”
But also! Sometimes I would just tell someone “I think you should just scream a bunch and stomp your feet and run around in circles and then do it, without thinking.”
Because sometimes their higher brain was just … getting in the way, and I could tell that their animal was thoroughly capable and ready to handle it and begging to be unleashed.
This distinction works in a lot of places besides physical movement. Useful questions:
Is this a situation where I expect using the dark side of the force to be more appropriate in general/overall, or is this a context that requires the light side?
Separate from my generic priors: is this a situation where my particular unleashed animal is likely to be well-suited and to do well? If I let my current, existing autopilot take over, do I think that will be good, or should I maintain manual control?
In the past, have I hurt myself more by being dark side when I should have been light side, or by being light side when I should have been dark? Which mistake is the mistake I should be trying to make, this year?
What are the flaws in my current dark side? What mistakes does it make? Ditto my current light side?
Why do I find myself tempted by the dark side mode, in this moment? Why am I hesitant to let go of the light side? Or (for the opposite kind of person): Why am I feeling called toward the light side, and what feels bad about letting the fires cool down a little, or maybe even temporarily go out?
My partner and I started to write a book about Magic for our tween and we spent much time setting up a framework that differentiated Dark and Light magic - it feels like it rhymes with your post.
We leveraged several folks' idea that "Everyone is a magician, most Dark in that they are unconscious of the fact"
Light = Integrated/Conscious/Connected/Consensual
Dark = Dis-Integrated/Unconscious/Disconnected/Non-Consensual
The Internal Family Systems framework of integrating the 'family dynamic' of 'parts' ('no bad parts') was something that we could have included had we been aware of it. Also the NonViolent Communication idea that everything is either Please or Thank You feels related (and would have been tremendously helpful).