"To get more familiar with our shadow, we can begin with doing our best to answer questions such as the following (however partial our answers might be): What do I least want others to know about me? What do I tend to have a disproportionate reaction to? What qualities of mine do I often feel aversion toward? What do I most easily project onto others? Which emotions do I consider to be negative? Which emotions am I the least comfortable expressing? Who or what specifically was I trying to get away from in those dreams of mine in which I was trapped or being pursued? What am I most scared to openly express or share in a relationship? If we don’t face our shadow or, worse, deny its existence, it nonetheless persists, largely functioning beneath our radar, infiltrating our lives in all kinds of ways. It’s as if someone other than us is pulling our strings. And that someone, that dark stranger, that alien other, is none other than us in disguise — which we will know right to our core once we have left the safety of our conventional self and made the journey into our shadowlands. But face it we must, if we are cease being a victim or pawn of our shadow elements. We can avoid our shadow — and much of our life may be precisely about this — in whole or part, keeping ourselves so far away from acknowledging its presence that we might act as if it’s not even there, while at the same time seeing its various qualities in others (so that they have the problem, not us!). And we can also fuse with our shadow in whole or part, losing ourselves in its darkness and programming, having no distance from it, including the distance needed to keep it in clear focus. In both cases — avoidance or fusion — we are being run by our shadow, run by that conditioning of ours that we are all but blind to."
Posted on: Mon, 30 Sep 2013 18:11:47 +0000
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