The topic of shadows of the human subconscious is so large, that it would take me forever to only tackle a few of the main points. So I will be brief in my description today. I'll start by saying that the entirety of the healing processes and the healing field itself revolves around bringing cohesion, unity between the chosen self (the ego) and that which the ego has made its life's purpose to hide, which is the shadow self or the disowned self. Let's begin by summarizing what the ego is in the first place. In short the ego is composed of all the features, traits, belief systems, conditioning etc. that we want to show the world about us. The ego's main job is to keep you safe, to hold you within a familiar paradigm of living so that you continue belonging to your society. Ego is concerned with survival and belonging to a society is a matter of survival. This is ego in short.
What about the shadows? The shadow self is what we want to hide from the world. When we are born, we come into this world whole and with a pristine, immaculate and intact consciousness, with our own individual wants, needs, traits that make us unique. As babies we think we are the world and that the world belongs to us. We do not think of what is outside of us as being outside of us or harmful to us in anyway.. we do not believe that we are not complete beautiful and perfect just as we authentically are. However the family we come into seems to believe otherwise. Why? Because the primary caregivers do not approve of and do their best to mold, fix, punish and train the baby to act and be in a way that is, in their eyes and in the eyes of the society, acceptable. And so the baby doesn't at first understand why it is required to be other than what it naturally is and so it puts up a fight. Say this baby has a joyful, loud personality, but the mom hates that, the mom wants a quiet, compliant baby because she believes that noisy children are a nuisance. The baby does not want to stay still just because mom thinks it's the right way to be. And it starts crying. The mom punishes the baby by yelling at it, withdrawing love etc and the baby, because it is relationally dependent and because it is powerless to feed itself and to take care of its needs by itself, it is a matter of survival that it listens to its mom and becomes what she asks of it.
And so the second the baby unconsciously decides to do that and rejects the aspect of him/her that is rejected by the mom, what happens in the consciousness is a split. The aspect of the consciousness that goes into the chosen self (the ego) is being a quiet, nice and compliant baby. It is a chosen trait that the baby wants to show because it was deemed as appropriate and desirable by the mother and therefore by identifying with this trait it is the means through which the baby gets love and can survive. Whereas the joyful aspect of its consciousness, because it was rejected by its mom and deemed as unacceptable and bad, goes in the subconscious stored as a shadow. And so this baby growing up will identify as a quiet, invisible person that hates bothering people with their problems. But that's not the truth of this person, is it? Shadows are aspects in us that we do not want to admit about ourselves because we were taught by others or we drew the conclusions ourselves that they are harmful for us, to us and are not ok in a society, if one wants to be a member of this society. We lack awareness of these shadows, they are not accessible to us in an easy and immediate manner. The shadows in our subconscious comprise of traumas, wounds that we could not process and deal with, also core beliefs subsequent to these painful events that we weren't able to find a resolution to. I call the shadow self the disowned self because we literally disowned these parts in us. Most of these traits are considered bad, but there are also good traits that go in in the shadows ((like I said its anything that it is not approved of by or caregivers, society and culture we grew up in). But because we live in a universe where law of attraction works incessantly, whatever parts in you you have disowned and are unaware of, the universe will make sure to mirror that back into your life as many times as it is necessary until you become aware of them. So for example if you have an abandonment trauma that you tucked into your subconscious, the fear of being emotionally abandoned will unconsciously rule your entire life. You will choose partners that will eventually neglect you emotionally because the universe is trying hard to make you see thought them the pain in your subconscious that you're refusing to see. The ego, the chosen self will put up a hell of a fight to prevent you from becoming aware because awareness to the ego is a threat to your survival and belonging to the group you're in. These types of adaptations that we resort to when we are children are survival strategies that are life saving responses to the circumstances we found ourselves in. And they were very successful. Surviving by pushing away aspects in us, needs that were unmet by our parents, traumas and other such painful and unresolved issues are not going away just because they are no longer in our immediate awareness. They are splits of our core, we cannot disown them for good and they won't disappear just because we refuse to acknowledge the reality of their existence. And so like I said previously they won't stop showing themselves in situations where we don't expect them to. People mirroring these rejected parts in us are triggering us into resenting them for reminding us something that we strongly intended to forget a long time ago. Healing begins when, in triggered moments, when we feel that anger or pain or sadness rising, to acknowledge it and validate it for what it is. All of our lives we have done the exact opposite which is running away and fast from the pain that a certain person or situation triggered in us. Now it's time to meet and sit with our shadows. They are parts of us and we cannot be complete and whole without them. We need to unconditionally accept them and shed light onto them. The wholeness of our core, the sovereignty being cannot be possible without the acknowledgement, and the love we need to give these aspects in us. They are not bad. They never were. they're not wrong as they are. Nothing about you or about who you are at the core has ever been anything other than perfect. The fact that your parent has made you feel like something was rotten and bad about you fundamentally has always been about their own unprocessed pain that they projected onto you making YOU feel like they were feeling. Their reflection of you, their need of you to be a certain way is all about them. Your responsibility now as an adult is to take the reins of your healing and unlearn the false stories that you have been telling yourself as a result of the disowned aspects in you. Because the fragmentation of your consciousness in those painful moments when you weren't accepted for your authenticity came with core beliefs as a conclusion for that rejection. These core beliefs are stories that have been ingrained in your subconscious like I said, and govern your life95% of the time (that's how much time the subconscious mind is actively working throughout the day). The stories that you learned are so strongly entrenched in your being that your conscious self cannot imagine life without following the steps of these stories, even if it is at a deep unconscious level. Even if it is hurting you in the long run (it's all about the familiar that your ego desperately wants to keep you in, it doesn't matter if its pain, as long as it's familiar, the ego will choose it over unknown pain).Thats why self awareness is so crucially important. Awarenss is all about being present with all the triggers and emotions that come up that are messengers for and of the shadows in the subconscious. All the disowned self desperately wants is to be seen and taken as it is, to be accepted and embraced without anyone attempting to change it. This is why we all want to be seen heard understood and taken as we authentically are, with all our flaws, not despite them. Self awareness gives us the opportunity to begin to heal by noticing the patterns of the stories we tell ourselves and integrate all of the aspects that have been cast off. Sel awarenss is difficult and challenging because it forces us to sit with all of the pain that we never sat with. To see the light of healing one has to first go through their inner darkness. It's a conscious choice that we make, a commitment that we need to abide by if we come to the understanding that we cannot live a half life anymore.
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