The Shadow Gift(37 slides)

creatively compiled by dr. michael farnworth

Now we have come to the most difficult part to articulate about the shadow.

Many may want to misinterpret the following ideas as a way to insulate themselves from the darkened shadows they may find in their own sacred

places.

It is a fearful thing to engage energies that one has spent a life time running from.

But such is the nature of the task of embracing the shadow.

I suggested earlier that the shadow had a gift for each of us if we were not to frightened to accept it.

And what is that gift?

That we are each, in need of healing our fragmented personality.

And all our good behavior, intentions and desires of the ego will not change the reality of that need.

But some of us do not want to open the gift.

We pretend that we are not the wounded people we are, but rather simply good people who are doing their best to comply

with what the culture has asked them to do.

(i.e. conformity and obedience to the law)

The problem:

Even if we are culturally good and do not act out by breaking laws which would land us in jail or thrown out of our churches…

we still live in hatred, contempt, abuse, meanness, neglect and loathing in relation to our inner self.

Which are difficult to be awake to but which, are destructive and wrong.

More than one person has awakened to the notion that if we treated others like we treated our self, then we would have no friends, and would be in real

need of change and forgiveness.

When, and if we ever do, open the gift of the shadow…

we will find the energies of anger, sadness, shame, fear and contempt.

All of which will need to be embraced, engaged, felt and engaged.

These energies will be our teachers and they will tell us who we really are and of what happened to us.

The pathway into your heart is through your energies.

If you want to enter into the inner sanctuary again then you will have to experience and process the feelings and emotions embedded in your body.

You will not have ego control over the process.

But you can invite the energies to come by being present with yourself, honoring them when they do appear and by being gentle and safe with

yourself, so they will continue.

Neurocardiology is a relatively new area of medical study which has recognized that the heart has a memory and neural processing mechanism

similar to the brain.

The heart is now recognized as a sensory organ and sophisticated information encoding and processing center with an extensive intrinsic

nervous system capable of making functional decisions independent of the brain.

Armour and Ardell, Neurocardiology, 1994

This being the case, it is important to understand that the heart creates an electrical field 60 times stronger than that of the brain and an electromagnetic field 5000 times more

powerful than the brain.

The heart is a complex memory and sensory organ in it’s own right and has it’s own functional brain which is connected to the

limbic brain and brain stem in the head via the Vagus Nerve!

This being the case, then I think we may want to explore the impact of the heart upon our life, especially in those areas that

are fraught with shadow energies from our past.

For as William Faulkner has said:

The past isn’t dead, it isn’t even past.

So many well meaning people think they can just ignore the shadow side of themselves with it’s energies of anger, sadness,

fear and loneliness.

They think if they just don’t think about it-- then they will be all right.

But these energies live and reside in the domain of body and heart (which is wonderfully and frightfully more powerful than the brain) and will not

simply be dismissed by the adult ego of the mind.

These shadow energies create our thought fields and emotional fields that create the labyrinth of confusion that often stymies the adult ego

into making a tangled mess of dos and don’ts, shoulds and shouldn’ts out of one’s life.

It is called stress!

And creates psychological reversals, where we say we want one thing, but then do the opposite.

“Stress is inner biofeedback, signaling you that frequencies are fighting within your system. The purpose of stress isn't to hurt you, but to let you

know it's time to go back to the heart and start loving.”

Sara Paddison, The Hidden Power of the Heart

If you want to access the shadow energies of your life then you need to intend and desire to do so.

That is the first step, deciding if you really want to.

If you do, then you will need to take the time and intention to develop a relationship with your heart (including those energies which cause you discomfort and

pain).

You can start by creating time to be alone to explore what energies you may be carrying around.

Meditation is a good place to start.

You also need to share your story with an enlightened witness, some one who is already awakened from the trance of deadened living and who can model

compassion for you and create an environment of acceptance and love.

This can help give you permission to embrace your own shadow history of wounds, sins and energies.

Compassion for self and our own history can soften our heart and allow the fact that we are not responsible.

The wound paradigm may enable us to be more forgiving and compassionate towards our own shadows and darkness.

The shadow energies may seem to have taken on a life of their own.

You may be frightened of them.

When we want to experience them and invite them to come when we are alone they are nowhere to be found!

And when we are in a situation that we wouldn’t want them to make an

appearance, we find our self flooded with them.

Go figure.

My guess would be our ego is not in control.

I believe our enlightened child is very wise and will not be easily seduced into coming out of hiding until we become safe and

protective of it.

If we have lived our lives in self contempt and loathing we shouldn’t be too surprised by the inner disconnect in our own

lives.

Why would our metaphorical enlightened child want to manifest itself only to be demeaned, abused and dismissed yet again?

I believe that our inner life is grounded in the energies of our heart.

It is the origins and genesis of our inner and sacred sanctuary and temple.

When we have contempt for self and fragment off those parts which are unacceptable and bad, we in essence, abandon the

inner sanctuary.

More often that not, we are forced to leave, by well meaning others who were experiencing their own shadow issues.

“You can drive the devil our of your own garden but will find him again in the garden of your child.”

Henrich Pestalozzi

To embrace the shadow simply means to have compassion and acceptance for our own energies of which we have split off from in the hope of them

going away.

With love, and patience we can take the time to reintroduce our self to the history of which we may have forgotten (at least our conscious brain may have).

Our body and heart haven’t forgotten.

We will need to feel, emote, process, experience, suffer, and engage the energies of which we have been hiding from.

They have become frozen within us.

Please Read:

Embracing Life, Even the Dark Pieces

by Rachel Naomi Remen Kitchen Table Wisdom

All through my childhood, my parents kept a giant jigsaw puzzle set up on a puzzle table in the living room. My father, who had started all this, always hid the box top. The idea was to put the pieces together without knowing the picture ahead of time. Different members of the family and

visiting friends would work on it, sometime for only a few minutes at a time, until after several weeks hundreds and hundred of pieces would each find their place.

Over the years, we finished dozens of these puzzles. In the end I got quite good at it and took certain satisfaction in being the first one to see where a piece went or how two groups of

pieces fit together. I especially loved the time when the first hint of pattern would emerge and I could see what had been there, hidden, all along.

The puzzle table was my father’s birthday present to my mother. I can see him setting it up and gleefully pouring the pieces of that first puzzle from the box onto the tabletop. I was three or

four and I did not understand my mother’s delight. They hadn’t explained the game to me, doubtless thinking I was too young to participate. But I wanted to participate, even then.

Alone in the living room early one morning I climbed on a chair and spread out hundreds of loose pieces lying on the table. The pieces were fairly small; some were brightly colored and

some dark and shadowy. The dark ones seemed like spiders or bugs, ugly and a little frightening. They made me feel uncomfortable. Gathering up a few of these, I climbed down and hid them under one of the sofa cushions. For several weeks, whenever I was alone in the living room, I

would climb upon the chair, take a few more dark pieces, and add them to the cache under the cushion.

So this first puzzle took the family a very long time to finish. Frustrated, my mother finally counted the pieces and realized that more than a hundred were missing. She asked me if I had seen them. I told her then what I had done with the pieces I didn’t like and she rescued them and completed the puzzle. I remember watching her doing this. As piece after dark piece was

put in place and the picture emerged, I was astonished. I had known there would be a picture. It was quite beautiful, a peaceful scene of a deserted beach. Without the pieces I had hidden, the

game had made no sense.

Perhaps winning requires that we love the game unconditionally. Life provides all the pieces. When I accepted certain parts of life and denied and ignored the rest, I could only see my life a piece at a time- the happiness of a success or a time of celebration, or the ugliness and pain

of a loss or a failure I was trying hard to put behind me out of sight. But like the dark pieces of the puzzle, these sadder events, painful as they are, have proven themselves part of something larger. What brief glimpses I have had of something hidden seem to require accepting as a gift

every last piece.

We are always putting the pieces together without knowing the picture ahead of time. I have been with many people in times of profound loss or grief when they unsuspected meaning begins to emerge from the fragments of their lives. Over time, this meaning has proven itself to

be durable and trustworthy, even transformative. It is a kind of strength that never comes to those who deny their pain.

You think by surrendering to your shadow that it will become more powerful and overwhelm you.

You think it is only your will power and control that is keeping it corralled.

Paradoxically just the opposite is true.

Your fear, attention and preoccupation is feeding it.

Your energies are the food supply that is keeping it strong and powerful.

If you surrender and embrace it, it will lose it’s power.

“The pain of withdrawal is unique, special, even precious (although you probably don't now think so). In a sense, the experience is you, a part of you which has been trying to surface for a long time. You have been avoiding or postponing this pain for a long time now, yet you have never been able to lastingly outrun it. You need to go through withdrawal in order to become a whole person. You need to meet yourself. Behind the terror of what you fear, withdrawal contains the seeds for your own personal wholeness. It must be experienced for you to realize, or make real, that potential for you and your life which has been stored there for so long." The Augustine Fellowship of Boston.

A very important disclaimer:

It must be a considered possibility that you, the reader, are not to the point yet of wanting to surrender and give up your pain

and safety of your familiar past and history.

The unknown of living a life without all your defenses is a very real and legitimate fear.

This possibility is also a very potent resistant technique that

needs to be made conscious before the healing adventure can continues.

“Our neurosis and stress in life is the ego’s attempt to live a lie.”

When we live in a way that is inconsistent with who we really are then we are attempting to live a lie and it takes a tremendous

amount of energy to do so.

If we attempt, through our adult ego, to live an idealized and sanitized life hiding from our fragmented natures via impression

management and looking good, feigned behavior…

then our lives become hollow and void.

If there is meaning to suffering the shadow energies of our life, then anything is possible.

But if there is no meaning and it just seems like more of the

same, next verse, same song, over and over again, then we will resist it.

The meaning of the suffering is the opening of our heart in compassion towards our self.

It is the purpose of the inner journey.

If we have the courage to feel our shadow energies in a safe place and process them we may begin to feel compassion and

acceptance for our wounded and broken natures.

Maybe the energies of self contempt, disgust, and loathing can be replaced by the healing wholeness of Life.

It will be then, that the enlightened child can become the center of our consciousness.

“We are all functioning at a small fraction of our capacity to live fully in its total meaning of loving, caring, creating and adventuring.

Consequently, the actualizing of our potential can become the most exciting adventure of our lifetime.”

Herbert Otto

This is what the adventure of living our life is all about!

What we think is less than what we know.

What we know is less than what we love.

What we love is so much less than what there is.

And to that precise extent we are so much less than what we are.

R.D. Laing, The Politics of Experience

The energies of the heart will reconnect us with the powers of Life and our adult ego will die, (probably a slow and ugly death ) so that we

can be reoriented into a different way to live.

It will be an inner adventure of the first order and we will come to walk the path of wholeness and truth.

The enlightened child will be our guide.

We will be filled with the sweetness of Life.

It is only in love that we will be healed.

Do not allow your self or anyone else to limit the power and involvement of love and acceptance in our life.

We do not have to prove our self worthy of love.

We just need to be courageous enough to embrace and then let go of the self-contempt, loathing and disgust that is currently disconnecting, and thus

negating that wonderful Life Force in our hearts.

As we embrace our shadow, it will teach and instruct us.

Let it have its rightful place within our hearts and then gently surrender it to acceptance and healing.

It is time to come out of hiding.

And what was once a fracture and wound in your life will be made whole.

The gift of the shadow will be a return to the wholeness of self.

This lesson needs to come to an end but before it does, one lesson suggestion:

The Heart Lesson

This lesson will help you explore the domain of the heart which is the sacred home of the Enlightened Child.

the end