In the last video, I talked about the idea of the shadow, this part of ourselves, anything about ourselves that we don’t want to accept, exactly those things that you don’t want to share with anybody and even with yourself, all the things that fall far short of any ideal that we have about ourselves and maybe go completely against those ideals.
But when we dismiss some part of ourselves as being “Well, that’s bad.
I don’t want to be that way”, then we push it into the darkness.
We push it into the unknown, where it kind of acts as this kind of ghostly force.
That’s why it’s called the shadow.
It lives in the darkness, it’s never fully revealed, but it still has power that can pop up at any time, kind of influence us in the background.
It has a lot of energy to it, there’s a lot of it, because that’s part of who we are.
It’s part of the forces that make up our total person.
But we don’t acknowledge it.
It’s the part of ourselves that we say no to.
So we don’t see it as part of ourselves, and yet it still is part of ourselves.
It still has like a chunk of our energy.
So that shadow is like potential there’s so much potential energy inside that shadow.
That the things we want that we know we shouldn’t want, the things we want to do that we know we shouldn’t do, the aspects of ourselves that we simply think are bad – and everybody has these in one way or another – – there’s a lot of power there.
If we leave the shadow as this in the darkness, in the unknown, then we’re kind of at the mercy of it, because it does whatever it wants.
Maybe we can keep it sort of down, but then it can pop up at any time.
But it seems like the best thing to do, and the ideal, is that we can integrate the shadow.
We can bring it into the light and make it part of our complete personality, our complete character, our complete person.
Much easier said than done, because these are all the very things that we don’t want.
How can we make that part of ourselves? It seems like we have this energy that’s kind of blocked in some way.
It’s not able to express itself doing the things that we find acceptable to do.
So it wants to come out doing all the bad things.
So we can’t- of course we can’t actually do the bad things.
That would probably be a very bad idea.
I mean, it’s a good reason why we choose to not make that part of who we are.
But that same energy, that energy, the dark energy: that is not itself a bad thing.
That itself is not something that needs to be suppressed.
It’s just a matter of how can we bring this energy into doing what we really want to do, what we think is best, to make a a full picture for our lives, to really make this part of our lives.
Rather than having our life be, you know, we have one thing, and then we secretly we feel like doing other things, and there’s kind of a conflict, we have this kind of internal conflict between the light and the shadow.
But the ideal is to merge them together, so that we can acknowledge that this is part of who we are.
All the things we don’t want to acknowledge: imagine just being OK with accepting that that’s part of who we are.
And then what do we do with it? We have to somehow make a negotiation, and almost like imagine like a conference you have the warring parties, the light and the darkness.
The things that we find acceptable, the things we find unacceptable.
And they can kind of have a meeting, and they discuss OK, you know, we’re going to do things the right way.
We’re not going to do bad things.
We’re going to have a good overall life and do the things that we consider to be good.
But those things that we don’t like about ourselves: that still has to be part of the full picture.
That can still be part of who we are.
We can accept them and say it’s OK to have those feelings.
It’s OK to want things that are unacceptable, becaue it’s all part of the full picture of who we are.
And accept that it’s OK for them to exist as soon.
As soon as we don’t accept that they exist, we can’t accept that we have any aspects of ourselves that are unacceptable, that’s when it goes into the darkness but if we just accept it’s OK for some of me to be “bad” or unacceptable, and that’s all part of the complete picture of who I am: now all those shadow influences can become part of the light.
And then there’s the question of how do we actually express that energy without doing bad things? And that seems to be a bigger challenge.
But at least it seems like just acknowledging that it’s OK for the shadow to be there and be part of our personality and our person: that seems to be the beginning to accepting our full character.
And by doing so, we can then bring all that energy together into a complete person.
#shadow #shadowintegration #wholeperson