SHADOWMED
This is a guided meditation/visualization exercise aimed at helping discover some of the darker aspects of self with light and love.
Carl Jung said that there is gold in our shadow. He tells a story of a man who is tilling behind an ox and the plow breaks in the ground. The man is furious when this happens as his livelihood has just been threatened and he is filled with anger and fear about his future. Once he calms down a little bit, he gets curious as to what it was that broke his plow, so he digs. Once he digs for a while, he finds a trunk and it’s filled with……GOLD. No longer any worry about how he’s going to make ends meet!
The first time I heard this story I was angry and frustrated by it. “If only it were that easy”, I thought. Well, in truth, it kind of is. Many sages and the like talk about the concept of shadow work and how important it is but I tend to disagree. The work is not what is important, what’s important is looking.
We all have hurts and have been affected painfully by the world around us. This was not intentional or anyone’s fault. It is simply part of being a human on earth. Carl Jung’s idea of the shadow is that the things we are hurt by, we tend to repress into our subconscious and ignore. This makes things worse for ourselves as we now have baggage that we haven’t dealt with and follows us around wherever we go. But if we just look, we find a key…..
The gold is in the shadow because the things we have been hurt by are part of our purpose—they are a way to help others overcome what has been difficult for us. It is said that the more problems you solve, the more successful you will be and the more personal, the more universal. We all face struggle and have hard times and it’s ok. When we acknowledge and accept our hurts, we grow, stronger and more powerful than ever which leads to helping others more than ever which leads to a richer and more successful life.
This meditation is for confronting our past hurts, meeting them face to face and staring them down with the power of light, love energy.