Posts

The Secret Laws of the Shadow: Part 2

http://www.flickr.com/photos/31199592@N03/3459484586/sizes/s/in/photostream/

Carl Jung once wrote “that which we don’t confront within we will meet as fate.” In other words, there is a direct correlation betweenthe repressed emotion in our psyche and what will later manifest in our experience.

The Consequences of Repressed Emotion

Our shadow is composed of all the difficult and traumatic experiences we have endured but never confronted, processed, and cleared from our system. These experiences are latent in our psyche, obscure, hidden, and dangerous to our well-being. Just because we have forgotten them does not mean they have forgotten us. In fact, it is our conscious failure to remember these repressed emotional experiences that gives them their tremendous power to wreak havoc in our life. What we ignore eventually becomes the dominant power in our life.

Subconscious Immortality

The second secret law of the shadow states that the repressed emotion we fail to consciously confront and clear becomes exalted in our subconscious  attaining a state of conditional immortality. This means that whatever repressed emotion we have warehoused in our subconscious by not consciously confronting it has been given a license to not only repeat in this life but in future lifetimes as well. This extraordinary situation occurs because what we fail to clear in any one lifetime will burrow deeper into our system and be stored as a toxic condition in our soul. The deeper these  repressed emotions and toxic conditions  penetrate into our system the more difficult they are to find and clear. When we incarnate next time with these repressed emotions  firmly entrenched in our soul and outside our conscious remembrance they will initiate the negative cycle all over again. What we refuse or fail to face will remain immortal until we consciously face and clear it. That is the only condition that will defeat it, destroy its exalted status as a subconscious troublemaker, and completely remove its immortal status. Repressed emotion rules our life until we confront and clear it.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/27787901@N06/5731191030/sizes/m/in/photostream/

Psychic Balance

When we clear these toxic conditions and their repressed emotional content  from our system we come back to internal balance. This creates, in turn, an opportunity to consciously reunite with our Soul and remember who we really are. Consciously confronting our subconscious toxicity is then the key to transforming our experience and elevating our life.

A Transformative Event

Hector came to a healing workshop I gave at the University of Illinois. He was a slightly built man of medium height with a gentle and kind demeanor who was very eager to exploit his healing opportunity. When he first got on the healing table and the energies began to flow into him he quickly got peaceful. A moment later everything changed. His body got rigid and taut, and he started kicking and screaming, furiously trying to clear an intense and intolerable internal event. This went on for nearly forty-five minutes. When it was over his clothing was soaking wet and his body exhausted. Yet there was also a deep sense of peace within him that had not been there before. When his session was over Hector told me an amazing story.

When the energy began flowing into him he had immediately felt a deep sense of peace. He was completely relaxed when the unexpected began to unfold in his mind’s inner eye. He saw himself as a priest accused of heresy during the Inquisition. He denied the charges against him and was subjected to intense torture. First he was beaten severely. When he refused to recant he was put on the rack. When the rack failed to break him he was castrated and left to die in a pool of his own blood. He died swearing eternal revenge on those who had done this terrible thing to him.

flckr mcveja http://www.flickr.com/photos/mcveja/2900325006/sizes/s/in/photostream/

Free as a Bird

Emotional Repression and Disease

His story was prelude to an unfortunate circumstance in this life. Three years earlier he had been diagnosed with testicular cancer and one of his testicles had been surgically removed. The repressed emotional trauma  that he had no conscious awareness of had manifested as cancer. Nowit was over. He had found his repressed emotional demon, faced it, re-experienced it and in doing so cleared it. The toxic experience that had plagued him for hundreds of years was robbed of its exalted status, deprived of its immortality, and completely defeated. Hector was free.

The Secret Laws of The Shadow: Part 1

http://www.flickr.com/photos/stuartbarr/3122717154/sizes/s/in/photostream/

 

Everyone has a shadow. The shadow is composed of repressed negative emotional reactions to traumatic events. These repressed emotions include , terror, resentment, rage, hatred, grief, depression, and toxic shame. These painful feelings don’t dissolve once the events that caused them have passed. Instead they are gradually ignored and buried in the body.

When these emotions are buried in the body they fall under the control of the subconscious mind. Two things happen when negative emotions are warehoused in the body and neither is good. First, we lose our conscious connection to these feelings and the events that produced them. While we may dismiss these traumatic emotions they do not dismiss us. Instead they function as powerful magnetic blocks in our psyche that will continue to attract similar wounding experiences into our lives, over and over again. They are free to wreak havoc in our lives because they are no longer available to the conscious mind.

The Power of the Negative

The first secret law of the shadow is this: The negative energies in our psyche rule our life until we find them, confront them, and clear them. One of the central tasks of our life is to clear our shadow. If we don’t clear our shadow we won’t regain our wholeness. Overcoming the shadow is the fulcrum on which all spiritual progress turns. When we avoid facing our shadow we prevent our growth and guarantee the continuation of our unhappiness.

Here’s a true story that perfectly illustrates this law. Miriam grew up in Europe. She was born after her father went off to war and did not actually meet him until she was three years old. When her father came home from the war she quickly became his favorite. He took her everywhere with him. Unfortunately for Miriam being her father’s favorite upset her mother tremendously.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/abbyfleur/3982801181/sizes/s/in/photostream/

Emotional Abandonment

When Miriam’s mother was a child she was emotionally abandoned by her parents. Her own childhood emotional needs had never been fulfilled. As an adult she wanted her husband’s attention to be solely on her, not on her daughter. She fumed that she was second fiddle to her daughter in her husband’s affections. So she came up with a cruel solution to get her needs met. When Miriam turned five her mother sent her away to live in a Catholic orphanage. Suddenly Miriam had no family. She was abandoned and alone in a nightmare from which she could not escape. What her grandparents had done to her mother, her mother had done to her, only worse.

Decades later, when she was in her mid fifties, Miriam came to me with persistent pain in her mid back that neither her doctor nor chiropractor had been able to heal. She told me that she sensed that there were hidden emotional issues there that needed to be addressed, but she hadn’t been able to connect to them in any conscious fashion. At this point I knew nothing about her childhood. But when I put my hand on her back a moment later I knew immediately that her pain had to do with her mother.

My goal in that first session was twofold. I wanted to connect her conscious mind to the repressed emotional energy in her back then mobilize her blocked energy so it would be ready to emerge into her consciousness in future sessions. During that first session I placed my left hand on her back and my right hand on the base of her spine. I then had her make nonverbal sounds as if they were coming out of the blocked energy that was stuck in her mid back. She found making these sounds tiring and felt self-conscious in doing so.

Deep Healing

I told her that both reactions were completely normal, but the work she was doing was necessary to prepare her psyche for deep healing. We were setting the groundwork now for what would occur in future sessions. In her second session that groundwork bore fruit. This time, as soon as I touched her mid back she broke wide open and her repressed grief, shame, and rage poured out of her. As our sessions continued the heartbreak in her system cleared and she realized how her initial heartbreak had affected the entire course of her adult life. She saw that her best friend in the orphanage, who had also become her best friend as an adult, was cold, critical, and distant, just like her mother. Eventually this woman also betrayed her, causing her considerable heartache. She realized that both of her husbands had been cold, distant, and critical as well. They too had used and betrayed her, continuing the ongoing, unconscious cycle of bringing wounding experiences into her life.

Virtually all the people with whom she had established close emotional ties, in fact, were emotional replications of her mother. Wherever she went she had drawn the same shaming characteristics into her life, symbolically re-engaging her mother. She might be a mature woman in her mid-fifties but she had never outgrown her childhood trauma; never put it to rest. While she had turned her back on her mother’s cruel betrayal, that betrayal had not turned it’s back on her. It had craftily followed her wherever she went, appearing in a different guise and a different person each time, but creating the same kind of wounding event over and over again.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/ospohlminhas/23350360/sizes/s/in/photostream/

Wholeness and Integration

Now as she faced and confronted her toxic shame she remembered the source of her life long wounding and cleared this piece of her shadow from her system. As she cleared it the pain in her back completely disappeared and a bright light shone in her eyes. Her face glowed. She had become whole and integrated. The light in her soul, instead of the pain in her shadow, now appeared in her eyes.

Lao Tsu, the ancient sage and founder of Taoism, once said, “Because the sage confronts his difficulties he never experiences them.” When Miriam finally turned back to confront the unconscious pain in her back her difficulties disappeared. It is often the case that we go forward by not pushing ahead but by going back to clear the past.