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September 8 - September 17, 2019
At any moment when you feel that your world is falling apart, what is really falling apart is the self and its confidence that it understands reality. After any major trauma to body or mind, it takes time for the fragile ego-personality to recover. (We are very lucky that an old adage is true: “Souls don’t break; they bounce.”)
they were in bad conditions that allowed dark forces to emerge.
We resist our shadow and deny its existence because of past indoctrination and the hypnosis of social conditioning. Childhood experiences cause unending later reminders that “this is good, this is bad; this is divine, this is diabolical.” Such indoctrination is the way all societies are structured. What we overlook is that we are creating a shared self at the same time. If children were taught to become aware of their shadow, sharing even dark feelings, forgiving themselves for not being “good” all the time, learning how to release shadow impulses through healthy outlets, then there would be
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even slightly heightening your inner world causes the outer world to automatically follow suit.
Anything that keeps you unconscious is the result of the shadow, because the shadow is the hiding place of pain and stress.
No one sets out to increase the power of the shadow, yet we all do. The shadow increases whenever you resort to the following:
We’ve taken the first step in removing the shadow’s power by exposing the process that fuels it. There’s a downward spiral. It begins by thinking you have to keep secrets, and then those secrets, instead of remaining quietly hidden, become the source of shame and guilt. Self-judgment enters.
Stop projecting. Detach and let go. Give up self-judgment. Rebuild your emotional body.
Look at yourself and what the blame game says about you.
But once you see that you are participating in a shared self, you can also see that every impulse of anger, fear, resentment, and aggression leads directly from you to the collective unconscious and back again.
traits you need if you want to feel what is hidden inside: alertness, willingness, openness, honesty, and courage. Or to put it another way, if you don’t stop yourself and ask, “What am I really feeling right now?” you are turning your back on alertness, willingness, openness, honesty, and courage. You are letting the shadow win.
Feel the feeling, whether it’s anger, fear, envy, aggression, or anything else, and say, “I see you. You belong to me.”
Most stories are rooted in childhood, because childhood is the learning ground for guilt, shame, resentment, inferiority, and all of the most primal negativity we carry around with us.
When you find ways to undo the stickiness of negativity, you will become more detached. The following statements work toward detachment: “I can get through this. It won’t last forever.”
How do you make them true? By wanting them to be. You must intend to be detached, centered, patient, and self-aware.
I place a high value on sympathy. If you can look at yourself and say, “It’s all right. I understand,” you are doing two things at once. You are taking the judgment out of your emotions, and you are giving yourself permission to be who you are.
You are living near the source of consciousness when the following are true: You are at peace.
To find love, you must be capable of seeing yourself as lovable. The core self takes a simple view—“I am love”—because at the source that is exactly who you are. But in a world of conflicting values, this simple statement becomes confused and complex. The fog of illusion creates fear. Remove the fear, and what remains is love.
Surrender is not of the mind. You cannot think your way there. Instead, you must journey into pure consciousness, before words and thoughts arise. That’s the whole purpose of meditation, to carry a person beyond the thinking mind, which means beyond conflict.
In shutting out the darkness we fear lurks within us because we fear the destruction it might cause, we also shut off the competent, powerful, successful, sexy, funny, and brilliant parts of ourselves that are yearning for expression. This is the root cause of the boredom we often feel in some or many areas of our life.
Embracing our inner beast is the ticket to freedom. It is the conduit for tapping into all our greatness. It makes our inner life rich and meaningful and our outer life more enjoyable. It allows us to bask in wholeness rather than be constrained by the limitations of a self that was created by smoke and mirrors. Why smoke and mirrors? Because if we have created our public image or persona out of only those qualities we have deemed acceptable, we will have left out some of the most important, potent, and flavorful parts of ourselves.
If we routinely cover over feelings of loneliness, they may surface in the quiet of the night as an insatiable hunger for sugar, alcohol, or sedatives to fill the emptiness we feel.
However, to free ourselves from the unmanageable compulsions that cause us to live a secret life, we must find healthy ways to express our repressed aspects so that we can be safe from behaviors that can sabotage our life.
And the purpose of my life, as it is the purpose of all our lives, is to remember the love within me by remembering its presence in everyone else.
Having focused on aspects of someone else’s shadow, I cannot but enter my own: the angry one, the controlling one, the needy one, the dishonest one, the manipulative one, and so forth. Once I enter the darkness of blame and judgment, I’m blinded to my own light and cannot find my better self.
Like any habit, it becomes easier to cultivate when we’re around others doing the same. In developing the habits of spiritual practice, you ground yourself in the light of your true being. If you do not so ground yourself, do not be surprised when you say or do things that you later regret.
As soon as I filled my mind with gratitude, the shadow trait of self-hatred could no longer exist. In the presence of love, fear is gone.
Your character defects are not where you’re bad, but where you’re wounded. But no matter who or what caused the wound, it’s yours now and you’re responsible for it. The only person who can bring it up and release it is you.
Your character defects are the way you self-sabotage, the way you hurt yourself and others.
More damage is inflicted by people who think they have it all together than by people who have been humbled by the realization that they probably do not.
We miraculously heal in the presence of someone who believes in our light even when we are lost in our darkness.
Forgiveness is an action, but it springs from an attitude. It can be difficult to forgive someone whose behavior has hurt us, unless we have grounded our perceptions in a constant effort to see beyond the darkness of the personality.
It is our light, not our darkness, that most frightens us.
Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure.
