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The Secret Laws of the Shadow: Part 4

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The Purpose of Life

The real purpose of life is to heal ourselves so we may realize who we are at highest level of our being. While this may sound like a simple task the truth is that the fulfillment of this purpose is anything but simple and the time required to reach this goal is anything but short. The fulfillment of this purpose takes hundreds of lifetimes.

Soul Age

While we are all at different physical ages we are also all at different soul ages. See the work of Holly Coleman for a more complete discussion on this fascinating topic.  Soul ages range from infant, baby, young, mature, to old. Each age has seven levels. Seventh level Old Souls are those closest to Self-realization.

Old Souls

The entire Old Soul level makes up no more than 12 to 13% of the world’s population. Seventh level Old Souls are even rarer, making up no more than 1/7th of that 12 to 13%, or approximately 1.85% of the world’s population. Since the soul age of most people on the planet is heavily bunched in the young and early mature brackets our society embodies the values of young and early mature souls. Image and personal success are more important than healing, compassion and service. Old Souls often feel estranged from the conventional world around them because the prevailing societal values are not in alignment with their own.

Destiny

Regardless of  soul age we can do much to heal our lives, move forward in our growth, and accelerate our evolutionary process. However, if we choose to live our life within the constraints of conventional values and not work to heal our inner landscape our progress will be virtually undetectable. Our shadow will act as a drag on our progress and both the level of success we hoped to experience and the degree of consciousness we wished to attain will remain beyond our reach. Denial of destiny is the fourth secret law of the shadow. As long as the shadow remains intact the negative ego continues to be the dominant player in the psyche and the soul is excluded from having an uplifting impact in our life. When the soul is excluded from participation in our life there can be no healing or movement toward Self- realization.

However, once we decide to transform ourselves we are in position to change our life. The first task of transformation is to tackle the shadow. We do this in a fourfold process:

• First, we must find the hidden traumas in our subconscious.

• Second, we must face them.

• Third, we must feel and express the toxic emotions hidden in our bodies.

• Fourth, we must forgive those who have hurt us as well as ourselves.

When we are able to take all four steps we heal that piece of karma and deactivate that part of our shadow. This process must be repeated for each layer of our karma.

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Medieval Europe

Sam came to a lecture I gave at Michigan State University. At the end of the lecture I channeled healing energy to everyone in the audience to facilitate their healing. Two weeks later I received a call from Sam. He said that he had definitely felt something the night of the lecture and wanted to see if I might be able to help him heal his life over the phone. For many years he had experienced an acute pain in his back that no form of medicine or therapy had been able to alleviate. He had tried conventional medicine, chiropractic, rolfing, physical therapy, and massage. Nothing had worked. We scheduled a session for the next week. When he called I began by sending the healing energy over the phone to relax him and within a few minutes he was deeply relaxed. As the healing light circulated in his body I was able to see the blocked energy in his back and the cause of it. In another life in medieval Europe he had been a soldier. During a battle he had been run through with a broadsword.

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I knew that as soon as I told him what I had seen it would elicit a powerful reaction in him. It did. Just mentioning the word broadsword touched the hidden emotions that were stored in his back. He wailed uncontrollably for the rest of that session as his toxicity  poured out of him. At the end of the session he reported that he was burning up, his clothing was soaking wet, and for the first time in more than a decade he had no pain in his back. The healing had begun.

We did a follow up session a week later. The pain had never come back, he was experiencing more peace than he had ever thought possible, and he was even an inch taller!

When I told him about that medieval life we had found the source of his problem. The healing energy pouring through his system had brought the first three steps of the healing cycle together at the same moment. He found the source of his pain, faced it, and felt it simultaneously. By clearing it completely out of his system he had also achieved forgiveness and completion. Healing the shadow often produces miracles, freeing us to have a deeper, richer, happier, healthier, and more fulfilling life. Sam did.

The Secret Laws of The Shadow: Part 1

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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.

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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.

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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.