Today we're talking about know your shadow.
Know your shadow.
Being good in quotes isn't.
Your good perfect high achieving self is not who you are.
Get acquainted with your shadow and invite it to be a part of you.
Your wild reckless unreasonable unrestrained self has much to teach you.
Find your shadow and ask it to join you.
There is wisdom when you are no longer afraid of the dark,
The universe.
The shadow self is the shadow within all of us that a lot of people consider as our dark side.
That's one way of looking at it.
You could look at your shadow as all your flaws and all your foibles and all your bad habits.
All your unsorted angers and your unexplored fears and sometimes like in Jungian thought you know the shadows are archetypes.
So that's one way to look at it.
Another way to look at it is you know bad habits,
Ways we self-sabotage and so forth.
But what I like to think of a shadow is a shadow.
A shadow is a place that is it's a piece of a place of a piece of darkness.
It's a piece that isn't lit up.
Their light is is not shining through the shadow because then it would become light.
So it's a place where we haven't fully opened or we haven't become fully transparent or we haven't opened fully to the light and this is fine.
Your good perfect high achieving self is not who you are.
Now some of this ideas of being a spiritual overachiever or spiritual materialism like this idea of the need to be so good,
The need to be so perfect in your habits.
You know I only drink a green smoothie or I only watch spiritual movies or I only live this particular way that I consider to be good.
And then one day you know you're drinking your green smoothie and suddenly you eat a piece of chocolate or you have a big huge growler of beer or something along those lines.
Things that you consider not good and then there's this kind of terror or this schism that breaks out like who are you?
I want to be this good person in quotes and yet I'm behaving badly and the thing is that you're both.
You're both the good and the bad.
I used to have a phrase that I used like we're the good,
The bad,
The all of it.
This is who we are.
We're not all good.
We're not all bad.
We're this combination of dark and light.
Our shadows are important parts of us because they inform us of deeper inner longings that need to be looked at and and worked with.
Your wild reckless unreasonable unrestrained self has much to teach you.
Wow.
So we go along trying to be good because we are basically all humans are basically good but then these shadows pop up,
These habits or these ways of being or the self-sabotage and we're like where did that come from?
Find your shadow and ask it to join you.
So instead of being ashamed of your shadow or not wanting to admit your shadow,
Just admit it fully.
You know I knew a person once a really really highly evolved person and and that person would would openly say yeah back when I was a heroin addict.
A lot of people would have a lot of shame around something like that and this person was like yeah that was that was where I was at or I have another friend who you know back when I was like this raging alcoholic or maybe maybe now it's I'm a raging alcoholic now or back when I you know had this eating disorder or I have an eating disorder now or back when I was trolling on social media like I'm trolling on social media now I'm not actually but I'm just using that as an example and I'm not perfect I'm just saying I don't troll on social media because I think it's really horrible but I have my own share of bad habits just as you do we all do.
So we invite the shadow in and we just say hey shadow thanks for showing me the things that I'm still working on that the things that I'm working on that haven't been brought to light yet and then as you can explore with your shadow like tell me about why you're there tell me about why just I have this need to to be on heroin for one person or I need to be an alcoholic for another person or I need to have an eating disorder for another person or I need to troll on social media for another person tell me show you know you invite the shadow in as if you're having tea with someone and sit down and chat it out talk it through shadow why are you there on this issue what's there for me to look at and you know the answers always go back to fear anger always goes back to pain and so sometimes we can say to the shadow yes there was pain in the past but it's not here now or sometimes we can say to the shadow yes there was pain in the past and we're willing to look at it now finally we're strong enough to look at it or we can go to the shadow and say yes there was pain in the past and yes yes that pain is still here and we hope for a time when we'll be able to work through that that time isn't yet but we can see that in the future that time will come so don't try and cover up or don't even try don't even try to be in quotes good just let that whole trip go you know even even this idea of Christianity Jesus the Father Son Holy Spirit and Jesus the Son was brought down as human in the Christian belief system so that he could experience life from a human perspective instead of from divine perspective and I think that in other belief systems and mythologies are a similar idea that God comes down as human and this is because the divine understands which whatever background you're from the divine understands that to be human is to be perfectly beautifully flawed and perfectly beautifully whole both at the same time what's the dichotomy of the good the bad the all of it so you know just let go of this need to be so awesome you're awesome whether you're awesome or not you know you're awesome as a good and you're awesome as good and bad and you're awesome as bad just let it be the more you explore your shadow the more it kind of dissipates and goes away the timing is up to you again there's wisdom when you're no longer afraid of the dark
