THE BRIGHT SIDE OF SHADOW
When you go deep enough, you find the light.
Shadows are often misunderstood for something dark and uncomfortable, but that’s not true at all. The term “shadow work” has an almost eerie touch to itself, because we associate it with projections, disappointments and the brutality of disillusion. But in reality what we refer to as shadow ist just everything that we are unconscious of. That also refers to (for example) the awareness of world peace. Nobody who is alive today while I am writing this blog has grown up in peace consciousness. None of us have grown up in union consciousness. We have, however, all grown up in a collective consciousness that is based on danger by division. “Don’t take the candy from the stranger”, is one example. With that, we we were all told that our family is safe, whereas people WE DON’T KNOW are unsafe.
If in doubt, don’t take the candy! Don’t trust the unknown!
Simultaneously, the known is also based on division in many ways. Almost all of us grew up in disconnected households, because that’s the essence of the time that we live in. Parents fight and break up, divorce is an everyday thing and overwhelmed parents send their children out of the room to go and sit in solitude or let their babies cry alone until they fall asleep. We grow up in a system of judgement, dodging bullets left and right and we adjust our behaviour to feel loved and accepted somehow. That’s not a shadow, that is our reaction to the world around us. That reaction then creates a shadow.
The superficial shadow and what everyone is so afraid of is our dark side, which is the sometimes much needed reaction against injustice. That can mean that we push someone away who is dangerous, burn a building to the ground that holds us prisoner or hide in a hole in the ground from someone who makes us feel powerless. It’s a drastic measure against imbalance, inequality and injustice. Some people live their entire lives like this, moving from shadow to shadow, unconsciously fighting and struggling against a reality that they keep recreating in their minds. The biggest and most rewarding shadow to discover however is the belief system that backs all these reactions.
Underneath everything that you are unconscious of is a system of beliefs that backs every thought and action. This is comparable to the hypothesis that a scientist wants to prove with his experiments.
With everything you do in this life you will naturally try to back your own thesis which could be as grim as: “Humans don’t deserve love”.
Then you can buy all the flowers that you want, you will end up losing love over and over again, because your subconscious belief backs that we don’t deserve love.
But: once you discover the thesis that you’re trying to prove, you can flip it around and find the healed piece. This is why shadow work is actually like a treasure hunt.
You follow one clue after the other, until you land in a messy dirty cave, where underneath the painful chaos you find a chest full of gold.
The chest full of gold is the belief that is true to your soul and part of the contract that you made to live your highest destiny on this earth. In that particular example, the ultimate healed shadow could be “Love is in our nature as humans”. The deeper you dare to go into shadow work, the brighter it gets.
The problem is that so many of us don’t dare to go deep enough and just turn around at the first layer, which can be rather disappointing because we only see the destructive side which would then be the belief “humans don’t deserve love”. And that’s how we end up doing countless workshops on shadow work, while still running into the same karmic loops. But that’s only half of the truth, because the truth is that you’re afraid to dig deeper, because the depths are the UNKNOWN, and that’s what you’ve been told to stay away from.
Looking at the world right now, the UNKNOWN is the only place where we can possibly find healing. The known has already failed.
Peace and union are unknown to all of us. Even though we all talk about it and claim to want it, we don’t actually know how it feels, because we didn’t experience it in this lifetime, and neither did our parents, our grandparents or our great grandparents. We as humans in the western world have not known peace for centuries if not millennia.
As a leader, healer and mentor you will inevitably have to find the belief deep inside your soul that knows union, right relationship and peace, so you can lead others to it. You have to dig until you reach the gold. There is no other way. And I guarantee you, deep down you will find a sentence like “All is well”, which will be your unique sentence connected to everything that you are meant to be in this lifetime. Once the unknown becomes known, it’s not a shadow anymore. Once plenty of us have dared to climb into the depths of their own shadow, the collective shadow will flip, because peace consciousness becomes a reality again, regardless of wether our parents are divorced or not.
