Become an Authentic Swan by Embracing Your White Swan- Black Swan

"Oh what a tangled web we weave when first we practice to deceive."

Sir Walter Scott

The lesson to be learned from the film “Black Swan” seems simple to me: We have to bridge the waters between our own inner White Swan and Black Swan if we are to swim authentically through this life. We all have a light side (White Swan) and a dark side (Black Swan). But there are very few of us who honestly engage in the struggle between these two sides of ourselves. Like the lead character of Nina in “Black Swan,” most of us are comfortable with our light sides and we are equally uncomfortable with our dark sides.

From the time we are born we face a constant struggle between our dark and light sides. Unfortunately, we are also taught by adults that our dark sides are bad and that we should fear them. We are often taught to keep them at arms-length. Instead of learning to process our darker thoughts, feelings and desires, we learn to avoid them at all costs. We are sometimes even told to pray them away. This never works. We can’t pray away a side of our authentic self. Instead, we need to face our darkness, befriend it and learn the lessons that God has intended us to learn from it. We must place our heads into the mouths of the very demons we fear. This takes great courage, but we don’t have to face our fears alone: God can help us through prayer to face our own inner-darkness.

Once we face our fear, we take our power back from it. We learn that it isn’t so bad or powerful in itself as we had imagined, and we learn that the power of God is stronger than any darkness that dwells within us. In undergoing the struggle to unite our White Swan/Black Swan, we face the painful process of complete, unconditional self-acceptance. We must accept our inner-demons of lust, manipulation, seduction, selfishness, envy, pride, jealousy, greed, et al, and ask God to help us to learn the lessons that each of them has to teach us about ourselves.

Failure to embrace our inner-darkness forces us to run from it, and leaves us powerless. Our inner Black Swan then becomes a dreadful shadow that looms over us 24 hours a day. Our fear and repression of it leaves us mentally, emotionally, physically and spiritually off-balance. The fear that it may devour us or that others will learn that we have these demons, can then lead us into addictive medicating. What we have given our power to will control us in secretive, unhealthy ways. We may find ourselves indulging in alcohol, drugs, or overeating; or carousing adult bookstores or pickup bars. Suddenly we become White Swan by day and Black Swan by night (Think “Looking for Mr. Goodbar”). Instead of being united and whole in ourselves, we are divided and living two separate lives.

In “Black Swan,” we graphically see the inner-struggle Nina goes through to become a complete person; one who is so in-touch with her light and dark sides that she is able to play both the White Swan and the Black Swan in Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake with authenticity, total devotion and great passion. I don’t believe we have to die to attain a sense of wholeness and completeness (as Nina seemingly does at the end of the film); though we must die to attain any sense of perfection. None of us can attain perfection in this world. But we can attain authenticity by accepting and embracing our complete selves: light side and dark side.

Once we accept our complete selves, we will be truly comfortable in our own skin. We will no longer feel like phonies. We will be able to accept that we do good and that we sometimes fail to do good, and we will be better equipped to take responsibility for our actions when we fail. Those who don’t accept their dark sides are rarely able to take responsibility for their bad behavior. This is the real reason why we sometimes feel like phonies. We feel this way because we allow our darkness to haunt us. We refuse to embrace, accept and learn from it, and so we are ever fearful of being “found out” as not being real or good enough. We fear being a fraud.

No one is a “fraud” unless they choose to run from their darkness while painting a self-righteous portrait of themselves as perfectly good. No one can be perfectly good, but we can be imperfectly real. We can embrace our White Swan/Black Swan and allow God to bring us to the point of authentic wholeness; a wholeness that serves goodness in this world while taking responsibility for its mistakes. We can then become complete in the way God intended: Black Swan and White Swan merge simply into Swan. And we can live our lives with authenticity, total devotion and a passion that allows our souls to shine!