Healing and Transformation-
Through the Shadows and to the Light
"For me, the path of transformation means not only going for the feelings of bliss, joy, and all those other fun emotions, but the willingness to dive into all aspects of myself, even the places within myself I have consciously or unconsciously disowned because they seem unacceptable to me or I fear they are unacceptable to those around me.
These shadow places with the psyche contain vast amounts of energy that is bound up by our inner editor, the part of our self that sanitizes our behavior and the expression of our emotions in order to attempt to gain control of reality by controlling our selves. This, in and of it self, is not necessarily a bad thing. The ability to have self-control is a necessary part of the process of alchemical transformation of the self, like a child who learns how to use the toilet instead of peeing in his pants.
The exploration of our unacceptable emotions and places of pain must be done with the utmost precision and mindfulness. By approaching our dis-empowered aspects of our psyche with compassionate awareness, we set them free to be transformed instead of locking them in the closet to unexpectedly come bursting out when their particular brand of pain gets triggered by life experience. By embracing those negative emotions, such as fear and anger, I am eventually able to strip off a layer of the pain that is there and transform it. Eventually, that energy that is transformed may becomes bliss, but in order to do that it means moving through a tremendous amount of resistance. All those years of shoving stuff down is a hard habit to break. The resistance and denial of suppressed emotions we have in our bodies takes up space in our psyches, leaving less room for joy and bliss. When we do that big spring cleaning, suddenly there is more room for the things we love, more room for an unlimited life. It is possible to dive into your darkness to transform that stuck energy. With its release comes the possibility for more experiences of ecstasy.
Q:What is the darkness that you talk about?
The darkness is the shadow parts of yourself that are the hard places to look inside of yourself. Places where there's anger or there's fear, emotions that we would call 'negative emotions', even numbness. A lot of times I view the psyche like an onion, and a lot of times that outer layer is very much like an onion, sort of crusty and dry, and that's the numbness. It is how we have shielded ourselves from our own discomfort, where we have shielded ourselves from feeling or seeing aspects of ourselves that cause us pain. When you get through the numbness, you can start to feel the feeling that's underneath it, and usually underneath it there's some other emotion like fear, anger or grief. When you go down another layer, another emotion is likely to be there, and so on and so on. Usually, we have the emotions we feel the most comfort in expressing closer to the top, and the ones that we feel are the most unacceptable are hidden in a deeper layer. For instance, if a person believes that anger is a very bad thing, that person is more likely to express sadness when they feel angry, instead of anger, or visa versa.
On of the remarkable things I have noticed, is that just the process of acknowledging the feelings submerged in these layers with loving compassion is enormously helpful in the process of self transformation. It is also very helpful to to track the origins of a feelings in order to understand and transform them, as many of our strong reactions to events are based on years of repeated reactions to circumstances. In order for this to be helpful on the highest level, it is important to pay attention with your body, as well as your mind. Sensation is an incredible springboard for self transformation.
Most of the time, people want to avoid those emotions because they don't fit a person's idea of goodness. They don't fit a person's idea lovability. For instance, if they were a "good person," they wouldn't feel anger, if they were a "strong person," they wouldn't feel fear. Those emotions can be very uncomfortable to feel, but generally what's even more uncomfortable to feel is the resistance to those emotions. Those controls and all that bottled up energy is like an ever present static in the background, which grates of the nerves, fogs the mind, and dulls a person's vitality.
These shadows are often somewhere else on the time line: where you're afraid something is going to happen in the future or you're angry something is going to happen in the future. Or it's locked in the past somewhere and it seems somehow inaccessible. When we place our pain some where other than now on the time line, we also place some of our power somewhere other than now. Those emotions are raw energy that we have disenfranchised ourselves from. Through this process of investigation, we can tap this raw power and transform it into pure energy that we can use for our lives in the here and now.
Q: What are some of the methods that you use to transform what is there?
Some people try to fill themselves with light, with the intention to make those dark places become smaller relative to the parts that are light. But one of the inherent difficulties with that path is that it can be coupled with denial. People can be focused on seeking goodness and light, but even though they have the intention of moving towards the light, they are just suppressing their darkness further down in. This suppression is sort of like cleaning your house by shoving all the stuff that feels too complicated to deal with into the closet. The house can look really nice.. until you open the closet.. and there it all is.. it doesn't go away or magically disappear. Eventually we have to move, and then we have a really big mess to clean up.. sometimes when we least expect it.
I don't know how many times I have been in a session with a person, and something old comes up , and that person says to me, "I thought I got rid of that!" Sure enough, it was just waiting in the closet, getting ready to be unearthed. My personal preference is to dive in, dive down, and transmute the dark places instead of turning them aside. In order to really heal we have to love every part of ourselves. By staying present with those unacceptable parts in a loving way, we are making room for that healing to occur on the deepest level. We are there for the event. We aren't checking out, we aren't glossing over. We aren't making things look good in order to be loveable..by ourselves.. or by others. We are already doing the job of loving, so there is nothing that needs hiding. There is nothing to be ashamed of.
I have heard it said, that "You are only as sick as your secrets." Staying present doesn't mean that when we investigate our anger we get a license to be abusive with our anger. But to therapeutically work with anger and fear as a way of changing the way we're holding energy in our body changes how we are manifesting our reality because our lives are mirrors of our experiences. Our lives are mirrors of how we hold the energy in our bodies or how we hold our belief systems. According to quantum physics, the way that we perceive reality dictates how reality will respond to us. We are in the free will zone. We are not as subject to fate as much as we are subject to how our free will, emanating from both our subconscious, and our conscious mind is dictating reality. By airing out the closet of our shadow self, we have a powerful opportunity to become fully whole, and fully well. In so doing we can transform not only our interior realty, but how the story of our life unfolds.
Love is the glue of the universe. It's love that holds everything together. It binds everything together and makes everything one thing. Love is the ultimate healer. I've heard it said that the root of all disease is the belief in separateness. When we really believe that we are separate some part of us dies inside. I believe our souls long for the realization of One-ness…for the realization that we are inseparable from the Great Spirit.. God, Goddess, the universe… what ever you want to call that being-ness that is everything. It's love that brings true healing, and divine love, the love of Spirit, is perhaps the greatest healer. But there are many ways we receive that love. We can receive that through the vehicles of other human beings, of animals. If we are fortunate, we receive that love from our families of origin: from our parents, and from our siblings. The love of self can bring us great healing, and bring us closer to Spirit.
Sometimes people get confused when you talk about self-love. They get it confused with conceit, or think that self love is exclusionary and selfish. Perhaps one of the distinctions between conceit and self-love lies in the need to compare your self to others as a way to measure lovability. The kind of self-love I am talking about does not need to compare. Unconditional self love recognizes that we all have our strengths and weaknesses. It recognizes that comparing creates more separation, which makes less room for love. Any lack of love in the world effects all of the world. Self love brings us closer to Spirit, because even in our limited forms, we are an indivisible aspect of Spirit.
In any healing process love must be present. In order to heal any aspect of ourselves it is immensely helpful to love even the seemingly unlovable aspects of ourselves, because anything we resist, persists. When we are in dislike of self, we are in a fight with ourself. There is love missing there. What could be easier? It's not that we want to slack off and not even try, but there's a way in which if we can love ourselves enough to allow effortlessness to arise inside of our process, there is a great healing there.
We're in a culture that's always pushing, that's always striving, it's good to feel enthusiastic and allow yourself to be moved with your passion. But there's a difference between being moved by your passion and being moved by the whip of your own self-trial. And we can come to our healing process with enthusiasm and kindness and there can be that much more movement inside of the process.
Q: Can you be a little bit more specific about what love is?
Let's refer to love as compassion and kindness. There are many kinds of love: filial love where we just love another human being, romantic love where we "fall in love", and often put a lot of projections on the other person in the process, agape which is spiritual love,which is the pure essence of love that is unconditional. The kind of love we are speaking about here is unconditional, it's compassionate, and it's kind. It's love that can embrace the dark as well as the light, because when we only love the pretty part of the other person than we're not really loving them. We are loving our idea or projection of who we want to believe that person is. Unconditional love is the ability to have compassion for people's hardship and for our own hardship. That kind of love is an exceptionally great healer. The other kinds of love are also healing, when we love a friend, when we love a family member, when we love a lover. These all help us to experience love on a deeper level. And any way that we can experience love helps us to give the pattern of love.
Sadly enough, there are some people who don't really have a strong pattern in their body for love. They've been through a lot of hardship, they weren't raised with a lot of kindness, and so when we talk about love, they don't even really know what that means. So the more that we can have experiences of love in our life, the more we get to know what love is, and so receive that pattern. That's why it's oh so important that children are raised with a lot of love and kindness. When children are given a lot of unconditional love as well as direction, they have been given one of the greatest gifts: the pattern for knowing how to love and be loved.
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