Again, in this section, I will turn to excerpts from a book by Deepak Chopra, The Shadow Effect — Illuminating the Hidden Power of Your True Self, Part I, The Shadow 2010 Harper Collins. The passages are a collation of paragraphs, and sentences gleaned from the book and are in italics. Another great read with lots of in-depth investigation.

The first step in defeating the shadow is to abandon all notions of beating it. The dark side of human nature thrives on war, struggle, and conflict. As soon as you talk about ‘winning,’ you have lost already. You have been dragged into the duality of good and evil. Once that happens, nothing can end duality. Sound has no power to defeat its opposite once and for all.

Whenever any aspect of the self has been split off, labeled as evil, illicit, shameful, guilty, or wrong, the shadow gains power. It doesn’t matter whether the dark side of human nature expresses itself in utmost violence or mild, socially tolerated ways. The essential fact is that a part of the self has been split off.

The shadow loses its power when consciousness stops being divided. There’s nothing to see but oneself in all directions when you are no longer split. There are no hidden compartments, dungeons, torture cells, or mossy rocks to hide under. Consciousness sees itself. That is its most basic function, but, as we will discover, a new self and eventually a new world can be born from this simple function.

When you feel that your world is falling apart, what is falling apart is the self and its confidence that it understands reality. After any significant trauma to the body or mind, it takes time for the fragile ego-personality to recover. It’s all good, ‘Souls don’t break; they bounce.’ It’s about us. When a person has unconscious impulses and drives, they come from the entire history of humankind. According to CG Jung, each of us is linked to a ‘collective unconscious,’ as he called it. The notion that you and I created our separate, isolated selves is an illusion. We tapped into the vast reservoir of all human aspirations, drives, and myths. This shared unconscious is also where the shadow lives.

Beneath the surface, the collective unconscious is roiling with drives, prejudices, frustrated desires, fears, and memories that are part of you because ‘we’ is your identity as much as ‘I.’ The unconscious has a goal, which is to keep us unconscious. The shadow is a shared project. Anyone can have a hand in building it. We resist or shadow and deny its existence because of past indoctrination and the hypnosis of social conditioning.

Unseen and often ignored, the human soul is a place of ambiguity, contradiction, and paradox. And that is as it should be because all experience in life, which is the manifestation of the soul, is the result of contrast. To have expression, you need opposing energies. That is why explicit enemies are also implicit allies. Jung dared to see that we need a dark side to be who we are. The collective unconscious is how humanity evolved by passing on every discovery in invisible form. These are primarily discoveries about the self. The question ‘Who am I’ never has an affixed answer. The self is fluid and constantly changing, meaning you own self and the self you share with everyone else.

It all begins with our beliefs and the thoughts that contribute to them. While the ideas themselves are formed in our hearts, as we have seen, the thoughts that they come from originate in one of the two mysterious realms of our brain: the conscious or subconscious mind. Your subconscious mind has a record of everything that you’ve ever experienced during your lifetime. Not only does it hold a description of the events themselves, and it also keeps a cross-referenced log of how you felt and what you believed about each one. Every thought, every emotion, all the accolades and encouragement you’ve ever received, as well as all the harsh words, criticism, and betrayals. They are stored right there on the hard drive of your subconscious mind. And it’s those experiences that unexpectedly surface in our lives, seemingly at the times we would least like for them to be there.

In our most significant life challenges, we often find that our deeply hidden beliefs are exposed and available for healing. Our ideas about unresolved hurt can create physical effects with the power to damage or even kill us. When our soul hurts, our pain is transmitted into the body as the spiritual quality of the life force we feed into each cell. The hurt that kills us could be even more ancient and go deeper than we’ve imagined. Across cultures and societies, creation stories state that to become individuals in this world, we must ‘break away’ from a greater collective soul family. At the same time, one of the most profound universal fears is just that: being separate and alone.

SHADOW WORK SELF-HEALING MODALITY

Summary of terms:

Thoughts-are logical communication symbols flashed on the screen of experience in mind and have no power or meaning in themselves; they are neutral and arise from the upper three chakras.

Emotions– are the base force impulses of life, moving either love or its opposite vibration as the energy of intention. Emotions are variable energy frequencies residing as qualities in the lower three chakras.

Feelings-are the thoughts and emotions formulated in the heart, providing a charged description of reality in raw active energy vibration. Feelings arise from the middle energy center chakra.

Meaning-the ego/mind picks up on the ‘feeling,’ a thought charged with emotion, claims it, interprets it, and places it as a positionality of reality with meaning and intent. It does so as a mechanical program.

Belief-is the culmination of an actual structure set in place that the ego/mind has consented to be reality. In the case of a limited, narrow sense, the projected fact will reflect the limitations.

Thoughts associated with an emotion share the same vibratory energy distribution. Thoughts, however, are neutral, inert energy symbols that do not possess any meaning. Emotions are energy-charged, either positive or negative, either love-oriented or the opposite. Thoughts coming together with emotions are formulated in the heart, and a feeling arises. When this feeling is interpreted by the ego/mind, it gives the surface meaning, and consequently, a belief structure is adopted. The ego/mind recognizes the belief and validates its truth based on self-awareness the reason can express.

Your mind can only reflect what you say has meaning in the present moment. Giving your thoughts meaning, the substance through feelings activates ideas to have some authority to your reality. The mind is neutral and will only give you the belief that has been relevant in the journey to date. Your mind responds to your attention, focused awareness on the arising of your projected reality from moment to moment.

Giving your attention to any arising thought with emotional intent to re-live the original experience or meaning, the feeling arising given at that time, will activate the memory, be it painful or pleasurable; if sad, then suffering will appear as a result of not seeing through that the thought is just a thought, what happened was in the past. The relevance is that you empower the thought emotion by giving it meaning. Meaning is the mind interpreting the feeling from the heart and not separating the thought from the emotion. The emotion as an energy vibration is valid, tangible on that energy level, and can be worked with by transmuting or changing the energy signature; this is shadow work. Thoughts are just a past identity placed from experience and stored in the subconscious and have no power unless the mind associates it with the parallel emotion and makes a running story out of it, full of labels, meaning, and ultimately belief reality.

The best approach is the direct approach, catch the thought within the first 5 seconds as it has appeared, sense the validity, and decide whether to give it attention or not. You allow it, and you have a choice to shift your awareness that all these thoughts are from a past me that does not exist now. Without attention, the idea will pass and lose any energy grab it might have had. Your thought emotion reality is based on experiential downloads from heritage DNA and life’s conditioning. Once you have disassociated the thought from the emotion, you are ready and available to heal the emotional block stuck in your system. Experiential, emotional reality will arise on the energetic level to find completion. Negative energy is an anomaly, a packet of incoherent energy separation of identity from the true self. That’s all it is, it seems natural as experienced energy, but it’s an illusion in the final reality when Self-realization dawns.

HEALING SEPARATION IDENTITY ON THE EMOTIONAL ENERGETIC LEVEL

The emotions associated with thoughts show how much attention the mind has given to the study and its meaning. Disassociating with the idea and concerning painful emotions call forth the Mind/Body to provide direct and sole attention to the feeling or emotion. This represents the unhealed ‘inner child,’ or ‘shadow work,’ and lets the emotion’s innocence know it’s okay to be fully expressed. Love and compassion energy can be given to the raw emotion without any story behind it.

Love and compassion will transmute the energy of the emotion, and it will dissolve and disappear into the vast nothingness of potential source energy. If there is any lingering thought that had been associated with the feeling will also dissipate, never to rise again. The negative energy bundle locked in the subconsciousness has been reconciled resolved.

Letting the thought story go is the key. Be with the emotion; that incoherent energy bundle behind the emotional feeling wants to be naturally resolved to a state of coherence. The sentiment is happening, no matter how painful or disgusting, that is true, a past energy experience; the rest is just a story.

Steps in Healing  the Shadow:

1. AWARENESS: There is a subtle distinction between thoughts and associated emotions. Separate the thought, ignore it, let it go; it is just a story.
2. FORGIVENESS: Fully respond to the emotion, raw and straightforward as it arises, embraces the vibrations of the emotional energy with acceptance and love, forgiving the origin of the emotion fully, and yourself for harboring this feeling and thinking it is your reality.
3. INTEGRATION: After every healing session, take some time immediately after to sit back and reflect on the energy transformation, grant it space, and say thank you to the old emotional trigger or belief that once occupied your mind. Recognize its past existence as a catalyst necessary to your life’s progression on the spiritual path to self-realization. Sit with this and recognize that more healing will be required on this journey,and accept it as part of your experience and joy moving forward.

“It is only when we dare to face things exactly as they are without any self-deception or illusion, that a light will develop out of events by which the path to success may be recognized.” —I Ching.