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"Exploring the Shadow"

"To become conscious of our shadow involves recognizing the dark aspects of the personality as present and real. This act is the essential condition for any kind of self-knowledge, and it therefore, as a rule, meets with considerable resistance."
- Carl Jung

Dear Friends,

For some time, I have been exploring my shadow: feelings and thoughts of abandonment, powerlessness, anger, and the sense that I am somehow fundamentally flawed. I share these things with you in the hopes that you will reflect upon the shadow in your own journey towards wholeness. In my exploration, I have discovered many unexamined stories and myths I have held to be true, such as: needing something outside myself to make me OK, or the need to earn love. Like many people I have felt that somehow I don’t deserve to be loved.

I see that these unexamined thoughts and feelings of unworthiness or being unlovable have often served as a justification for not stepping into the fullness of my own light, love and power. In tracing them back to their origin, I found an early childhood incident where I made a decision that "something was wrong." In a seminar I was attending recently, I found that most, perhaps all of us, live inside of this unexplored idea that something is fundamentally wrong with us. It isn’t something that I think, rather it is a place that I think from and it is constantly being reinforced by mainstream media and our perceptions of external circumstances.

In my case, I not only decided that something was wrong, but I added another unexamined assumption, that "it was my fault." From a very early age this left me in a state of perpetual guilt and created barriers to expressing my most authentic self. Whatever problems arose in my life, or for that matter in the world, were somehow my fault. Mind you, I wasn’t consciously thinking this; it came from an explored part of my psyche.

The third aspect of this thinking led me to the belief that because I was somehow flawed, I was unlovable. The impact of these unexamined beliefs led me to act in ways that seemed rational on the surface, but when explored more deeply were completely irrational, like working really hard to be loved, to feel deserving, or to be admired in the hopes that if I did something really good, I would then merit being lovable. These actions in fact reinforced the idea of being flawed. No matter how hard I worked or what I accomplished, it was never enough to feel satisfied, fulfilled or like I was enough, or that I deserved to be loved. I learned that love was a gift to be received, not earned.

At a recent workshop with H.H. Sai Maa Lakshmi Devi, whom I interview for this edition of the Well of Light, I got to examine this shadow of needing to be deserving of love and the corresponding actions that come from the belief that I am not. On the one hand, I see how I have used feelings of inadequacy to avoid being responsible for living out my commitment to make a difference and to move from a world of fear to being a vehicle of sacred love. On the other hand, I saw that even if I were the only one being loving, love would be alive in the world. Instead of looking outside myself for love, I could be the embodiment of love as a practice, especially in those times when I feel that love is missing. Then I could reclaim my own power to have love in my life!

I have discovered that for me, the only way through the shadow is through it, not over, under or around it. It takes a lot of energy to hold our shadow at bay. It is a practice of moving towards that which we naturally want to resist and to explore the unexamined beliefs and assumptions at the heart of our shadow selves. There is an enormous storehouse of energy waiting to be reclaimed when we quit resisting our shadow. I invite you all to step into your own shadow exploration in a way that allows you to step into the light of your own being. A healing anywhere is a healing everywhere... and in that healing we can refocus our attention on things that really matter for the future of all life.

"Roar, lion of the heart, and tear me open!"
- Rumi

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