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| God is... |
In last week’s post titled Balance I concluded with: “What if we daily asked our darkness
what it wants from us?” So this
past week I tried it and although I may have missed a day or two, I am
impressed with how my shadow informed me, made priorities apparent, and
smoothed out my week. I also
reviewed my notes from Dr. Philip Sternig’s 1997 class, “The Shadow Knows,” and
found good reasons to keep an on-going dialog with my shadow.
Clarifying definitions and quotes from class handouts
deepened my understanding.
The Shadow:
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It is not an entity. It is more like a quality, a condition, an influencing
force, a “coloring” element within the ego.
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Those elements, feelings, emotions, ideas,
beliefs, with which we can’t identify, which are repressed due to education,
culture, or value system.
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Contains psychic energy—constructive and
destructive.
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Edward Whitmont: “When we can’t see it, it’s time to beware!”
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It is 90% pure gold. It keeps the Ego true to the Self. But when repressed it emerges first in a violent, bizarre,
distorted form.
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Maintains the essential balance inherent in all
that is.
I now better understand the deep struggle I suffered over my
aging parent’s care needs was really a struggle with my shadow. My nightly writing during that difficult
time slowly surfaced my real problems and eventually brought the grace to
overcome them. The following from
“God Never Hurries” is the dawning of my understanding.
“ A secret of life is suffering for
profit. The profit in suffering
comes in the grace in knowing something inside me needs to die so I can
experience new life. What needs to
die is the once easier submissiveness to tyranny. It is so odd to feel I must learn to do more for myself and
die to denial. It is the opposite
of all I’ve been taught. I should
be rejoicing, but so much darkness has been masquerading as light, making this
a truly ugly struggle. But this
difficulty with myself I can offer up.”
And I finished re-reading Carolyn Baker’s “Reclaiming the
Dark Feminine” where she writes of the importance of ritual and how returning
to our indigenous selves reclaims our connection to all things and one
another. I wrote “God Never Hurries” to always remember the sacred ritual times I spent in the natural
world where I experienced Oneness.
Baker also writes, “…the transformational process is never finished and
the completion of one initiation is organically linked to the beginning of
another.” What’s next?
What if we could all come to befriend our shadow?
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