Integrating the Shadow

I used to be afraid of my short comings. I didn’t know I was afraid of them. I had an elaborate system of hiding them from myself: they’re “no big deal”. Just don’t look over there (where they are) and all will be well.

Until a time came when I had to look, I wanted to look. To see all of myself, in sorrow and in ecstasy.

It’s terrifying and liberating to see your limitations, your addictions, the points at which you turn off your awareness and coast in that quiet, destructive place of non-awareness.

I found there everything I’d been hiding. I was hiding because I knew I couldn’t feign wellness in those areas, they were the areas where I was weak. They were the areas where I COULDN’T. No matter how hard I tried, I would collapse in the areas of my short comings. Most accurately, my ego would collapse. I could not hold on to doing the “right things” and since I couldn’t fully face doing the “wrong things” I would disappear from myself.

The first few times I stayed with myself as I was doing an unconscious activity, it was very uncomfortable. Even more uncomfortable was trying to stop or shift the behavior while it was happening. I couldn’t. I could only observe, just barely. As the pull to remain “unconscious” was so strong. By unconscious I mean awake and operating, but “no one is home”.

I found I was doing this all the time. I knew I was an expert at dissociating, but I didn’t realize how often I wasn’t really present. It wasn’t just at times when I was stressed or overwhelmed, I had become accustomed to being only partially present consistently.

Reapplying consciousness (awakeness) to those moments shook up my entire life like a snow globe. I began to see my avoidance, my fear, my hatred of life and the present moment. I hated the present moment. “Anywhere but here.”

That’s what I found, sprinkled everywhere in my life. “Anywhere but here.” A fairly consistent, thin layer of hatred and avoidance overlaid with joy, over indulgence, distraction, and fantasy.

As I kept being with myself in as many moments as I could, I felt an anger quaking within me. Like the rumbles of an earthquake. The more I tried to be aware and present, the angrier I became.

Had I been angry all my life? I hated this anger. It was so inconvenient. It kept interrupting my persona. I needed to be nice and pleasant. I needed to pretend to enjoy my environment and what I was doing.

And here something beautiful started emerging. Why was I pretending? Why was I lying to myself? I discovered what I felt deep down, that I would never be happy. That my environment would always be uncomfortable. That the reality of being comfortable somewhere didn’t exist.

So everywhere I went, I quietly and internally prepared to be uncomfortable. I had been doing this for so long that I didn’t know I was doing it. I was constantly bracing myself, hiding myself because I had long ago concluded that the external world mostly sucked. The only safe and happy place was inside my own private world. So I became practiced in creating this part of me that could live in the outside world long enough to survive, until I could run back to myself in my solitude.

It’s strange to suddenly discover these operating systems you’re running, without realizing it. That there’s a whole quiet, emotional landscape reacting to the environment without your awareness.

I saw myself in the present moment in my relationships, in my work, in how I relate to food, body, and money. In those quiet moments where I don’t pay attention, where I was used to acting and thinking in the same ways. And I pressed pause and LOOKED.

I was feeling things I never acknowledged. Making judgment calls without awareness. Living in old, irrelevant patterns and reacting based on fear and avoidance.

The terror I felt shifted to absolute liberation. (A bone rattling shift.)

I loved this hateful, angry, fearful Me. She existed all along, I just never accepted it. I had no idea how to integrate these aspects of me. I didn’t know how to live with them and be successful and happy in ways I had come to understand success and happiness.

I had to accept that sometimes I wanted to destroy myself. That sometimes I couldn’t stop eating until all the food ran out. That I couldn’t shake myself into enough awareness to help myself, but that I could at least be with myself.

I had to accept that sometimes I would make terrible decisions for the chance to feel full and seen.

I had to accept that sometimes I would be absolutely powerless to help myself. And after the shame of that lifted, I felt such beautiful relief.

There is no love greater than being with yourself in the moments of your greatest shame and powerlessness and not shutting yourself out. Saying, ‘well, I’m here and I’m not going anywhere. I accept my ugly as much as my beautiful.’

That all the parts of you are colors with which you create the painting that is You, ever dynamic, flawed, and perfect in its spontaneous expression of Living.

It’s a blessing to experience life from this fullness of experience. To reclaim what was left behind long ago, and to understand yourself from a richer perspective.

“These are my limitations, bless them. This is where I fall, so let me rest here. This is where I Rise, watch me soar.”

I Love You Anyway

I want you, anyway.

It seems in this life we constantly strive towards perfection. It’s part of the human condition I say, to constantly seek Better.

I love us for this, for this painful striving. It’s a beautiful gift that births invention, evolution, and expansion.

It’s a beautiful curse that takes us from gratitude to “never enough”. We want the broken things fixed, and the empty things to be filled. Then we want to break the fixed things, and empty what is full.

In this ever-pulsating, boiling stew of creation – where do we find love? Where or what is that thing that we want to roll around in bed with, to spend time refining and building and appreciating?

How do we define purpose?

I propose that your love is that thing you want unconditionally. When there is no time or space for it, but you still you find a way to make time and space.

I invite you think of something that is Yours. An activity or an idea that always lights up for you. Even if it has never seen the light of the manifested world, only lived in the spaces of your mind.

Maybe you’ve tried to bring it to life before, and failed.

Maybe you’ve tried to bring it to life before, and it was ugly. It didn’t look like the idea in your mind.

I invite you to love it anyway. To squeeze it into your life where it doesn’t fit, to lean into its inconvenience. And when you try to grow a piece of it, and it doesn’t work…say “thank you, I love you anyway. I want you anyway”.

I found that true love, true creation from the heart, speaks the language of non-condition. It says yes no matter what.

Say yes no matter what to your creation of choice. Find the yes, find the space no matter what.

If you feel push back, pause. And say, “Ok, I’ll listen. Talk to me.”

I’ve found that this is the language of the universe. It looks for openings, for flow. It doesn’t care if it’s pretty or refined or perfect. If there is space, opportunity, it says “GO”. And as the space widens or flows better elsewhere, it’s “Go there, now”.

If there is no space, it pauses…because Space and Flow are inevitable. An opening is imminent, in perfect timing. So be ready to say yes, even to the tiniest “GO”.

And in this, you practice ‘riding the waves’ with energy, with the universe. You feel how it moves, how it is never dismayed. Because it looks for movement, flow, and timing. All else is less relevant in the attitude of creation. All else, is what it is. Let it be.

Here is the ultimate secret: when you say I could do that “but”, you are not speaking the language of creation. When you say I want to do this “and”, now you’re on track! This is quite literally the language of how things become enlivened.

Feel how limitation feels awful when you feel like you “can’t” and how beautiful it feels when you move the limitation to the side and find a “way”. The universe sees limitation as a gift to creativity.

You are a creative genius, use this gift that you are to gaze at difficulty with a new attitude. Look at the hard things or the limitations straight in the face and breathe, in that moment say to yourself, “I am a creative genius. I am here to play, to create, and to discover.”

What do you want to love anyway? What do you want to pull through the cracks and crevices of your life? I support you. I’ll ride with you, as you make your way, giving endless birth to your love, to your creation.

Take it and Run.

That good feeling that just swept through, that impulse of clarity that quietly peaked and then fell…take it and run. Take it and run into its sweet, misty air. Embrace those small lifts when they come. Notice. Notice when you suddenly feel free, or light in your spirit. Take it and run. Lend your attention to it and say yes.

It doesn’t have to relate to anything, it doesn’t have to fit into the larger world of your circumstances. Let it mean nothing in relation to your life, let it be what it is and say “I see you”.

[ In fact, give yourself the greatest gift you may ever know. Feeling good for no reason, on purpose. ‘Is it because my hair looks good today? Is it because the sun is shining? Is it because I love them?’

No, it’s nothing. Let it be nothing. Grab hold of that joy and say, ‘I live you for no reason. I am joy, for no earthly reason. I gift this to myself, I breathe into it to remind myself.’

Remind yourself of what? Nothing. ]

Those moments are the exact moments when your healing, clarity, and life’s wishes are coming to you. That is where those things live, in the feeling of relief. Relief from carrying your ‘circumstances’ along with you wherever you go. Behind those circumstances is a place where all possibility exists, not beholden to your past or your current details of life.

That place sees you as free, creative, and able. It does not hold you to anything, it does not know you as a concept burdened by thousands of other concepts.

It knows you as Free.

And in those moments where you feel joy, unburdened, creative, excited (especially for no reason) you are living in that space that exists without the stories you’ve built. It invites you to speak the new story.

And that story begins with “I am”.

That story begins with that feeling, “Ahh”. Relief. Possibility. Freedom.

I am relief. I am possibility. I am freedom.

I weave my stories from the place of No Constructs. And so, I begin to build.

Let those moments be an invitation to create your life with more ease.

Let those moments come without substance. Without drink, or food, or drug, or intervention. Let them come in empty moments of mediocrity.

And if they come through substance or activity, say “hello, thank you, I know you. can you also come back for no reason and show me that I don’t need anything specific to find you and live you?”

Then, notice.

Eclipsing Light

I had a friend tell me once that I was a lighthouse. I thought it was a nice thing to say, but I didn’t totally understand what that meant. I guess, simply, someone who emits light.

Then, many years later I met someone and thought…that person is a lighthouse. Because at the time, I was in dark, stormy waters. But in their eyes was something familiar. Like someone lighting a match in the middle of a dark room.

I felt like one of those boats, out in choppy waters on a moon-less night, trying to stay afloat. And there, in the distance and through the fog…a light. A light that says, you are not lost, come this way.

I am reminded of a trip my sister and I took to St. Augustine, FL. She was walking and dancing on a wall of stones by the bay, while the lighthouse in the distance flashed its lights in intervals. I stood with my camera, soaking up the night sky and watching her skirt sway in the wind and in rhythm with her dance.

I had to wait for the times when the light would shine in our direction, to be able to get the picture of it illuminating the scene.

And I now sit here feeling in my heart the importance of darkness and the light, and how one seems to follow the other. And even more so, that when the light isn’t shining in one direction, it’s shining somewhere else.

In May of this year, I lost all of my light. I had nothing to give and nothing to shine on anyone. I thought I might die of nothingness, as all I knew was giving.

This came as a result of “healing”. Healing that was unlike anything I’d known before. It twisted me inside out and backwards, it chewed me up, spit me out and chewed me back up again.

I came face to face with the ugliest parts of me and the ugly in others too. And for the first time, I didn’t want to run. I wanted to know what it was like to stand, tall and wide as an oak tree, face to face with everything I’d run from my whole life.

I wanted to know what would happen next.

And that’s when the light turned off.

But now I know, it didn’t turn off…it changed direction.

It lit up the inside, rather than the outside. I thought I would die, not emitting light to the external world.

And in a way, I did. I turned inside out.

And little by little, I started seeing that light emitting from me again.

May we all know what it’s like to be the lighthouse and to be the ship in dark, stormy waters. Remembering that we’re all in this together, even when we’re alone.