Dark/Light Activity

Source: https://www.uvm.edu/~dewey/reflection_manual/activities.html

Instructions: 

  • Use phone lights in place of candles

  • After the event, have all the participants sit in a circle with lit candles. 

  • The facilitator shares a dark part (or feeling) of (about) the experience and blows out their candle. 

  • The next person shares until the room is dark. 

  • The facilitator lights his/her candle and shares a happy moment of the experience (or something that they would like to improve on over a period of time).

  • S/he lights the candle of the person sitting next to him/her with his/her candle. Slowly the room becomes light. 

  • With lights on, debrief

    • (An intense sharing--lots of analogies can be made with dark and light.) Questions to promote discussion: Are you the candle, which emits light, or the mirror, which reflects the light of others?

Praxis (why + theory):

This is a bonding exercise, not an icebreaker. In order to execute this exercise meaningfully and safely, participants there should be some familiarity existent in the group already.

This brilliant exercise emphasizes a phenomenon all humans share: the nuances of having both light and darkness within us. In testifying and witnessing this nuance, participants are doing shadow work.

“According to Massi, our shadows are the parts of ourselves that we’ve rejected, hidden away, and buried deep within our unconscious mind. And shadow work… is the process of bringing those unconscious shadows to our conscious awareness in order to heal them.”

Many of us carry those shadows with deep shame. Publicly naming our shadows enables us to relinquish that shame as we move away from individualism and back into community where we can exist more fully. 

The exercise also teaches us safety by necessitating that each of us commit to withholding judgment in order to hold space for one another’s traumas and flaws. Monique Morris explains that "[s]afety is not a condition that can be implemented, however, it must be co-constructed through a set of agreements with all of those involved in the creation of a learning space” (30). The commitments are reciprocal–we must also trust that we will be fully seen by others. That no one will hold our experiences against us. Instead, we can lean into the hope that we will connect through the darkness and struggle together as we regain our light.