Pavlina-019-Owning-Your-Dark-Side

This first half of this podcast explores the idea of turning your seemingly “dark” life experiences into positive strengths.  I tell the story of how being a kleptomaniac in my late teens helped me develop focus and courage, qualities that serve me well to this day.

The second half covers the topic of polarity and the fundamental question that determines our choice of polarity:  Are we fundamentally, unconditionally safe here?

There’s an interesting story behind this podcast.  I originally recorded it on August 13, 2006, so this would have been podcast #16 if I’d posted it back then.  Somehow every time I sat down to edit and post it, I’d get interrupted by something that would pull me away from the computer.  The pattern became so ridiculous that even a couple weeks later, I still hadn’t been able to edit it yet.  I began wondering if I wasn’t supposed to post it for some reason.  With some frustration I put it on the back burner and went on to record and post other podcasts instead, experiencing no trouble with those.  The podcast that became #16 was The True Nature of Reality, one of the most popular podcasts I’ve recorded (and also one of the longest).

Now more recently I’ve been meaning to do a podcast on polarity to help clarify and unify some of the concepts from recent articles on this topic.  Once again I experienced this strange pattern of delay.  Every time I tried to sit down and create the podcast, something unexpected would interrupt me and take me away from my desk.  For example, our network would mysteriously cut out, and Erin would be yelling that her Internet connection went down.

Eventually I remembered this old podcast I recorded but never finished editing.  I wondered if I should edit and post it now and thought, “Nah.  My views on this topic have been refined a lot since then, and I’m sure I can do a better job on this today.  Plus it will only take about 30 minutes to do a fresh recording.”  But each time I rejected the idea and went to work on the new podcast, I’d get mysteriously interrupted.

Today I decided to just listen to the old podcast to see how “bad” it was.  Out of habit I fell into the pattern of editing it as I went along.  In seemingly no time, I had a finished recording ready to post.  By the time I got to the end, I thought it was halfway decent considering it was recorded before I wrote any of the polarity articles.  There’s a lot more I could say on the subject, but perhaps this simpler treatment was somehow meant to be posted now.