A few weeks ago, while spending some time in a secluded little spot in the countryside, with no phone service or internet coverage, I was able to re-connect… to myself, nature, and the present moment. In that silent presence, I was also confronted with my “Shadow Self”.
This often happens when we stop all the busyness, and there is nothing left to distract us from ourselves. That is one of the main reasons why most of us don’t do it very often.
Through my journey with CPTSD, I have realized that it’s part of the reason it has always been so hard for me to sit still. It often brings up a sense of unpleasant restlessness. When I go deeper, it reveals the unsafe feeling that provoked me to develop the habit of busyness and stress in the first place.
Over the years, as I have become adept at Mindfulness and specifically at what Tara Brach calls, “Attending and Be-friending” (making space to feel our emotions and bring kindness to them), I have learned to go beyond the initial discomfort and discover the root of the pattern. This is so healing and empowering because it means I can finally stop running. I can rest. I can be…instead of getting trapped in the incessant, desperate doing that leads to anxiety, stress, and burnout.
Now, most of the time, I am able to detect that underlying feeling of unease before it turns into full-blown anxiety. Then I can take a sacred pause, allowing it to reveal to me its magic.
Our Shadow can be our greatest teacher if we just give her some room to emerge. She stops being a scary monster under the bed, around the corner, or in our minds when we bring her out into the light of day.
According to the famous Swiss psychologist, Carl Jung, the shadow is a part of our unconscious mind made up mainly of parts of ourselves that we repress in order to “fit in” and see ourselves as “good” people. The very existence of our Shadow comes from trying to hide and suppress what we have deemed unacceptable.
The thing is, denying our “dark side” doesn’t make it go away. It just twists and distorts it, often causing us to project it onto others and worst of all, to be afraid of ourselves. This fear shows up in how we are incessantly doing, achieving, proving, and distracting ourselves.
“Everyone carries a shadow, and the less it is embodied in the individual’s conscious life the blacker and denser it is.”
Carl Jung
When I finally stopped and faced what was coming up inside of me that I had not wanted to deal with, I wasn’t confronted with any horrible beast. On the contrary, I felt a huge sense of relief and a surge of energy. I felt connected to my innate inner power.
I shed a few tears and acknowledged the confusion and uncertainty swirling around my heart and mind. I sat with the discomfort in my belly from some choices I had made. I listened to the inconvenient longings that had tried to whisper in my plugged ears. In doing so, I lightened my load and re-connected to a sense of aliveness, innocence, and freedom.
I realized in a very visceral way, that there is nothing within me that I need to be frightened of, certainly not any shadow projected on the wall. And so, I laughed, and I danced, and I played with my Shadow and then I sat and listened to the birds sing, enjoying the stillness within and around me.