Have you ever found yourself-acting out of character, doing and saying things that did not take you to your desired outcome, and that you later regretted?
If you have, you are not alone. There seems to be something in us humans, which we are not aware of, which is a major obstacle in our quest to achieve all great human pursuits.
Could it be that the problems we face and our never-ending energy spent in trying to control situations, people, and things are a manifestation of a dance of opposites inside ourselves? Could it be because we don’t yet know or have power and control over our own dark side—our shadow?
When we break our challenges down to the basics, we can see that anything that presents as “an issue” in life is a never-ending battle between darkness and light, good and evil, fear and love.
We have adopted the stance that only we are good, and the bad or negative parts of our human experience are others’ issues or are outside of our control. However, our state of health, our relationships, and the discord in our smaller and our global communities reflect that we could be missing the boat by not making amends and working with (instead of against) our dark side, our shadow!
This may be the perfect time to realize the impact of fully recognizing and embracing our shadow—the one thing that stands between us and our ability to reclaim our personal power and change the trajectory of any aspect of our existence.
What is our shadow?
Carl Gustav Jung (1875-1961), the father of psychoanalysis and world-renowned for his theory of individuation, described the shadow as “any unconscious part of our personality that we do not identify in ourselves.” The shadow is the collection of the parts of us that were rejected, not rewarded, or not acknowledged by our environment during the early years of our life. We therefore hid those parts away establishing them as “unacceptable” and rejected. But what happens with all that stuff we put away deep in our unconscious?
Imagine if while you were sleeping at night, there was a stranger walking through your house. How would that feel?
What if instead of a stranger, your significant other is in your kitchen cleaning up after your wonderful dinner while you are given the luxury of some needed self- care before retiring to sleep at night? How would that feel in comparison?
All the things we have disowned in ourselves formulate a stranger, or shadow, that we carry along in all that we do and which, without our permission, runs our life on autopilot.
But our shadow is also the ultimate ticket to our personal freedom from everything that does not serve us.
Getting to know our shadow and bringing it to the light is kind of like replacing the sensation of a stranger walking through our house with the sensation of a person we love and trust, whose actions are predictable, tried, and true and aim toward the best outcomes for us.
Shadow work involves the exciting discovery of what we don’t yet know about our self and bringing back to the surface that vulnerable part of ourselves that was unprotected and unrecognized when we first formed our inner self.
How do we know when our shadow runs our life? What can we do about it?
The shadow is a universal element among all of us. I have one and you have one too. However, since our shadow is comprised of all the things that we stashed away throughout our life, by default, most of us are not aware of its existence. We work hard to maintain a self-image that is acceptable to the status quo and that provides us with the biggest rewards and acceptance from our environment. But what I have learned from deciding to venture down the path to make friends with my shadow is that our shadow is truly the biggest saboteur in anything we ever strive for.
Here are some ways our shadow sabotages our life without our permission until we choose to invest in the work to blast it with light:
- We find ourselves wasting a good chunk of our energy in judging others.
According to Carl Jung, anything that we have established as unacceptable and we do not yet recognize in ourselves, we unconsciously project onto others. Projection is a defense mechanism where any of our intolerable thoughts, traits, feelings, or actions are ascribed to other people as an attempt to establish a false sense of superiority for ourselves and to continue to deny their existence in us. Judging others as a way of finding relief with the things we have not yet processed and made coherent stories of in ourselves creates major issues for us.
The problem:
- It deprives us of the opportunity for change.
- It alienates us from others, disrupting the sense of trust and authentic connection, which is hardwired into our DNA.
- It forms a lifelong source of unnecessary suffering.
The solution: If you find yourself choosing the path of defining another’s experience by subjecting them to your disapproval and judgments, take a step back and instead of judging them make a list of all your judgments. This list presents an incredible key to unlocking the secrets to what it is you judge unconsciously in your self. Ultimate freedom is when we are free of judging others, which is a clear indication that we have come to the point where we love and honor ourselves, and our relationships are defined by empathy and goodwill, even when we have to communicate unpleasant emotions.
- We have a hard time being accountable.
Saying or doing something that hurts another’s feelings is part of our human experience. A problem arises when we are made aware of the impact of our actions and are not able to take responsibility. Instead we shift the responsibility onto the other person. We have mastered the art of acting as if we were accountable, for example by saying “I am sorry,” but we don’t blast with light what was the true force behind our actions. We apologize for the way the other person feels, instead of acknowledging how, momentarily, we disrupted connection with them through our own actions.
The problem:
- We continue to disown the one thing we have control over and perpetrate a behavior that does not serve us.
- We allow our shadow to keep us imprisoned in unconscious games of manipulation.
The solution: The next time you find yourself in a position where someone is brave enough to hold you accountable for your actions, see it as an invaluable pearl of knowledge toward the incredible adventure of discovering your true self. After all, our behaviors are born from our state, which is driven by our emotions. Recognizing the negative emotions that propel us to not want to take responsibility for our own mishaps, which sabotage our efforts toward anything noble, is a powerful way to carve the path ahead towards self-mastery!
- We work so hard to present a positive self-image, but deep down our fears drive our ship.
Fear is a powerful human emotion and one that has kept us alive for millions of years. However, there is a healthy dose of fear and an unhealthy dose. An unhealthy amount of fear has a tremendous impact on destruction of ourselves, our community, and the world we live in today. We are afraid of our own brother and sister; we are afraid of our differences; we are afraid of losing what we have; we are afraid of things that are not here now.
The problem: “Whatever we focus on becomes our reality.” Neuroplasticity, which is the greatest neuroscience discovery in the last 150 years, has proven this statement with hard-core science. When we look at ourselves, our fellow human beings, and life situations from an unconscious stance of fear, we not only operate at diminished capacity, but we continue to aid in the development of nerve cell connections in parts of our brain that are associated with weaknesses and not with inner strengths.
The solution: The next time you find yourself experiencing physiological arousal that relates to fear, such as increased heart rate or defensiveness, recognize it and chose to put your attention on something neutral, like your breath. Once you reinstate your internal state of balance, you can spend some time exploring what it is you are truly afraid of. The practice of challenging our challenges by having a dialogue with ourselves is extremely powerful in dismantling emotional bombs of self-destruction. Then we can have a fair battle and defeat the imaginary culprit called fear, that is ever present when we don’t own our own shadow.
- What we say, what we think, and what we do are not in alignment.
We say we are fine when our body language shows we are obviously upset. We say we want true, authentic connections, but we aren’t brave enough to let others see who we truly are. We think that we are “easy breezy” and that we need nothing from others, but then we are upset when our needs are not met. We love someone with all our heart, but we don’t do the small things often that build the foundation of safety and trust. We deny and challenge reality when someone points out our incongruences.
The problem: There is a tremendous amount of energy that is used up by our body and mind trying to reconcile differences, both practically and from a neurobiological perspective. Many of our physical and emotional health issues are a result of our inability to practice energy efficiency in ourselves. Internal misalignments clearly are the result of the disruption of the dance of the opposites within us—our shadow self and our true self.
The solution: Chose today to be the day you commit to recognizing and making friends with the parts in you that lead to any and all misalignments in your life. One of the biggest parts of our shadow is its’ bratty nature and the collection of ways it will act up when ignored and unattended, such as: manipulation, entitlement, self-righteousness, taking everything personally, criticism, stonewalling, contempt, and much more. Lighting up the candle of knowledge by simply recognizing the ways we ourselves are incongruent is the most important step toward creating harmony, first and foremost, within ourselves. After all, we cannot receive anything from the external world until we master it first in ourselves.
For the greatest part of my life, I thought that my path to wholeness was all about reaping the fruits of my labor to be a good citizen to the world I am blessed to live in. But when I found myself at the peak of my outward success with no fulfillment, accompanied by unexplained health complications, I was finally set free to see the truth:
True mastery can only be found when we dare to consciously face the dance of opposites within our true self, and are brave enough to get reacquainted and make amends with the dark aspects of our being.
When we have the courage to take the journey into discovering the parts of ourselves we have disowned and end the facade of our false self it is unnerving and challenging. However, this journey truly is the greatest adventure we can ever possibly take.
Things will continue to happen that challenge us. But freeing ourselves of the fear that comes from what we have forbidden ourselves to see and, finally, not being afraid of our own shadow is the first step toward entering the grace of our unlimited potential, our true divinity, and being the change we want to see in this world.