The Shadow and the Soul
by Alan Mesher
Author of Just Who Do You Think You Are? The Power of Personal Evolution
Everyone has a shadow. The shadow is composed of our repressed negative emotional reactions to traumatic events. These repressed emotions include fear, terror, resentment, rage, hatred, grief, depression, and toxic shame. These emotions become elements of our shadow because we have never confronted, processed, and cleared them from our system. 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 regulated by the conscious mind. The famous psychologist, Carl Jung, put it this way. "That which we don't confront within," he wrote, "we will meet as fate." What we ignore eventually becomes the dominant power in our life. 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.
The Second Secret Law of the Shadow states that what we fail to consciously confront and clear attains a state of conditional immortality. This means that whatever we have warehoused in our soul by failing to confront it has been given license to repeat in this life and future lifetimes. As a result, we can be toxic in the physical, emotional, and mental levels of our being and in our soul as well.
In essence, whatever we refuse to face remains immortal until we consciously face and clear it. That is the only solution that will defeat the tyranny of unconscious toxicity, and destroy its immortal status. When we clear these toxic conditions from our system we come back to internal balance. Being in balance creates the internal condition necessary to consciously reunite with our Soul and remember who we really are. Consciously confronting our subconscious toxicity is the key to transforming our experience and elevating our life.
The Third Secret Law of the Shadow concerns the adversarial relationship that exists between the shadow and the soul. The chief feature of that antagonism is this: The degree of emotional toxicity in our shadow is the degree to which we are separated from our true identity.
Virtually everyone on this planet is disconnected in some respect from who they really are. The transcendent, overarching purpose of life is to discover our true identity and reclaim our Divine connection. We are locked to the wheel of birth, death, and rebirth until we do. For the most part we are more in tune with our shadow than we are with our soul; more in touch with suffering and self-absorption than with joy and unconditional love. While this condition need not be true, the reason it is true is that the vast majority of people who inhabit this planet have not gone to the trouble of confronting and clearing the unconscious toxicity from their psyche. Clearing that toxicity is the foundation of all spiritual endeavor and all real growth. Without our doing that work the shadow finds it remarkably easy to frustrate our goals and limit our growth.
Think of life as proceeding along two axes. One axis is vertical. The other is horizontal. Where they intersect is where life begins. The vertical axis is the axis of our soul. It contains our identity and purpose. Its qualities are a deep peace, unconditional love, insight, joy, and a clear acceptance for all the varied experiences that life brings us, the good as well as the bad. The farther up we travel on the vertical scale the more light we have in our psyche.
The horizontal axis is the axis of physical existence. It is the axis of success/failure, happiness/sorrow, and birth/death. The farther we travel along this axis from where it is intersected by the vertical access the more material success we have.
Where the vertical axis is defined by unity and oneness, the horizontal axis is defined by duality and separation. When we live in duality we want to experience the positive side of each duality and avoid the negative side. We strive mightily toward what we think will make us happy and attempt to avoid what we fear will bring us suffering. How ironic is it then that what we struggle to avoid we often end up attracting into our lives?
The culprit creating this intolerable situation is the shadow. The shadow is not only sly but has also silently infiltrated every aspect of our lives. It operates without our awareness or our conscious permission. It could care less what we think, what we want, or what we hope for. It is not our friend but our enemy. Its mission is to defeat us and deprive us of fulfillment.
The shadow functions on both axes of life. On the horizontal axis it limits and controls our success, while on the vertical axis it locks us into darkness and deprives us of contact with our soul. As long as the shadow is charged with unconscious toxicity we are lost, ignorant of who we really are, and unable to fulfill our potential. However, when we heal that unconscious toxicity we release our internal obstacles to success and remove the hidden barriers to discovering our true identity.
Some years ago, I remember reading the story of a man who had attended a Yoga/meditation camp in Europe. Hundreds of people attended this camp and they all meditated together for several hours every day. During those meditations this man had amazing out of the body experiences, astral traveling in spiritual dimensions of great light. Many of his fellow meditators had similar experiences.
Yet when he returned to the states, and the energy of those experiences had worn off, he found himself back where he had been, with the same internal problems and issues. Despite his transcendental experiences nothing fundamental had transformed within him. Why? The answer is quite simple. He had gone "up" into higher consciousness rather than "down" into the darkness of his shadow. While the higher light that he had gained from his meditations in Europe circulated in his system he was unaware of his shadow. Unfortunately, when he used up that light his problems returned with a vengeance.
His shadow hadn't been defeated as he had hoped. It was only waiting for the right moment to reassert its power in his life. Seen from this context, meditation often functions as a drug. While it takes us away from our problems by lifting us into a higher orbit of consciousness, it does not necessarily resolve them. While it is non-toxic and centering, its effects are often temporary until we face, confront, and clear our shadow. All true growth starts in darkness, not in light. What starts in light leaves the darkness intact; what starts by facing that darkness will emerge into a higher light.
For more secrets to the shadow contact Alan Mesher or read his new book Just Who Do You Think You Are? The Power of Personal Evolution. Alan is available for individual healing consultations, and frequently facilitates his group healing sessions Circles of Light. To contact Alan, subscribe to his newsletter "siriuscomments", or purchase his book visit www.siriuscreations.com