It’s been a long time since I posted a blog entry. It’s been a fairly busy time with a few ceremonies and of course ongoing classes and then attending the Unity Canada Conference in Nanaimo last weekend. It has been rich indeed.
The shadow work in ongoing and as strange as this may sound, I am loving it. There’s a fair bit of discomfort to start with but when I really let myself go there the results are so amazingly freeing. If you aren’t sure what I mean by shadow work, it’s opening to becoming aware of those things we find hard to love about ourselves and so we supressed them at some point on our journey so that we are unaware of their presence. Now that doesn’t mean they aren’t still active, au contraire mon frere, we find them most often in our reactions to others and to events in our life. In other words, they become projections as we disown them. Doing shadow work is about taking back our projections as we bring our awareness to the way these disowned parts live in us.
Many of these disowned parts (beliefs, assumptions, personality traits, gifts) tend to be on what we consider to be the negative side of course, but many of them are actually positive qualities that for any number of reasons we rejected, mainly having to do with wounding in early life. What I’ve noticed is that wounding for me was often related to humiliation that was either overt or covert or just in my own perception. Regardless of how it got there we decided there was something unacceptable, unlovable about us so into the shadow it went. I have been finding anger, hatred, revenge hidden deep in those recesses and what I have also found is a form of creativity that was repressed in behind those ‘negative’ pieces. It is still revealing itself, but it has a lot to do with the gifts of appreciation, encouragement and support which are creative energies in and of themselves that lay hidden in me for a large part. Some of it got through all the barriers over the years but most of it lay in those dark recesses of the unconscious being covered over by the skeptic, the critic and the judge.
Oh, what freedom and energy release there is when I accept whatever part is being revealed rather than trying to change it, which is what I tended to do so much of the time.
The unconscious is chock full of shadow parts so even though we may have become aware of some of these aspects in the past, that doesn’t mean they won’t come up again as we journey on. It’s all part of this amazing game of life and as I continue to learn the ‘rules’ of the game it just keeps getting better and better.
Namaste
ps the picture is from our new back gate.
