ABOUT SHADOWS, SHADOW INTEGRATION & AUTHENTICITY
Every human you meet carries the burden of an untold story of pain. Some of us have more than one story. A story of survival, a story of strength, hope, grappling with what at the time seemed insurmountable.
But we're here to see how we are more than the story of our deepest pain and how our stories are actually our greatest gift. Our most excruciating pain is our greatest guide. Our story is the way back to who we authentically are. The only thing that you need to do is drop anything that is not you and follow your joy. That's why my motto is `Your pain has a story, become the storyteller`.
But that's easier said than done, isn't it?
HOW WE CREATED THESE STORIES
Children are born whole and complete, sovereign, with healthy instincts, they are authentic and in alignment with their highest good as well as in alignment with the entire Universe. Children live out their full potential at all times.
Children don't know right from wrong because children just are. They live from the heart and are convinced the world revolves around them. This fairytale like existence of children comes to a halt the moment they are socialized. What does it mean to be socialized?
It means that we teach children our way, society's, culture's and family's way, regardless of how they feel about it and regardless of their authenticity. We straitened their spaciousness, their expansiveness with the help of rules, guidelines, right vs wrong constructs, fear of failure, reward and punishment methods etc. We "teach" them how to be "civilized".
We rob them of their connection to their inner life force energy.
There would be no problem if we helped/assisted and guided them to be integrated and accepted in society as they are, with their own uniqueness, individuality and authenticity. But what we do in order to help them integrate is to demand of them to strip away, deny, disown, suppress and forget anything about themselves that we, as parents, deem as unacceptable about them and their innate world.
We deny their truth, we mold them into what we want them and expect them to be without any regard for their own uniqueness. So children start telling themselves stories about why this happens - that they're not good enough, lovable enough as they are.
They add their own meaning to the things that happened to them and that were out of their control.
Meanings that children assign create stories & these stories are accompanied by strong emotions and feelings that children attach to these stories, which make them more powerful.
But because parents dismiss, negate the display of emotions in their children and never teach them how to regulate in a healthy way (hence how to alter the meanings and the stories created), the children's consciousness splits between the aspect that creates and holds the painful story and the emotions inherent (the unaccepted aspect) and another aspect that protects them from feeling the pain of those stories, the aspect that is accepted by society and that goes into the ego.
The aspect that is unacceptable as it is is being pushed into the darkness of the subconscious, where the conscious mind won't have an easy access to. So if let's say the father of a child leaves the family.
The child starts to believe that their father abandoned them because of them, because they're bad, they're not lovable & this conviction/mental story is implicitly enhanced by a range of feelings and emotions, such as grief, fear, emptiness etc.
The vulnerable aspect that feels abandoned & holds the painful story will end up suppressed in the subconscious, while an aspect that is strong, independent will be shown to the world because that will make the child accepted in society.
Technically, we unknowingly teach our children how to live a life full of lies that they believe in anytime we invalidate & dismiss their emotions and the mental stories these emotions are glued to.
This is how traumas and wounds are created. And this is how shadows are created.
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THESE STORIES MAKE YOU LIVE AN INAUTHENTIC LIFE AND THAT'S MORE DAMAGING THAN YOU THINK
After a lifetime of believing the stories we kept telling ourselves with every mishap and tragedy that occurred, it is only understandable why we still hold on to them as adults: they kept us safe from experiencing further pain.
But just because they kept us safe in childhood it doesn't mean they're helping us now, as adults.
On the contrary.
Some of us have so deeply identified with the aspects in us that kept us safe, that almost everything we do, on a daily basis, is to run farther and farther away from our wounds in our subconscious and at the same time from what is true about us. We do it through addictions, distractions and all sorts of coping mechanisms that are extremely detrimental to us in the long run.
That means that we push the parts in us that are painful and that hold these stories, we resist them and even hate them. But just because we don't want to look at them, it doesn't mean they're not there.
They very much are. Because the less conscious you are, the more your subconscious makes decisions for you.
That means you're at the mercy of your dysfunctional patterns, your pain, your core beliefs and every other ingredient that makes up your subconscious story.
And because your ego (conscious mind) has made it its life's purpose to deter you from facing your shadows, if you're not a person dedicated to self awareness and self exploration, most of your life is built far outside your own authenticity, aliveness, wholeness and unconditional acceptance of self.
Your personality is mostly inauthentic because it is made up of adaptive and defense strategies that ensured your belonging in the world.
Your ego made sure to keep you surviving by presenting to the world what has to be acceptable and lovable. And this, to the detriment of the sides in you that carry heavy emotions and painful stories.
You allowed your subconscious stories and pain to rule and govern your life and didn’t even know you were doing it. You resisted your pain and so you lived from your pain, not your heart.
This is not authenticity. This is survival.
Now I'm not saying that all that you do is fake or pretense. But you will never truly know if this is the case or not unless you integrate the parts in you that you have long ago shun away in your subconscious as shadows.
So, until you integrate your shadows, love what you believe is unlovable in you and face your emotions, you cannot call yourself authentic
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​WHY IS IT IMPORTANT TO EMBODY YOUR AUTHENTIC SELF
Your authentic self (which is your wholeness, your united individuality) has never actually been damaged by whatever happened to you in your life. It’s the meanings you assigned to events and circumstances that skewed your perception of yourself to the degree that you no longer know who you are and what is true about you. Down the healing path, you will soon learn that actual fragmentation is an illusion because you cannot escape or truly get rid of what is intrinsic to you. But the unhealed you doesn't know that and he/she is in a perpetual survival state, which is opposite to and contradicts authenticity. Survival is ruinous because it excludes personal truth from all areas of life. Survival is strategic in that it makes sure you are not showing up authentic in the world, in a survival state you also engage in situations, relationships, careers, you adopt beliefs, mindsets and perspectives that are NOT beneficial to your true self and do not foster growth or transparency or unabridged expression of your own truth.
If you are not authentic, your life doesn't belong to you. It belongs to your coping and defense mechanisms which you call personality.
If you're not authentic, you will never be happy, you will never truly love, be present, enjoy what you do and enjoy yourself. Not authentically and not in the long run, anyway.
Why? Because the life you live is lived through the mask of who you want to be perceived. It's your mask that the people in your life love and its the mask that loves them back.
No wonder then why you feel that void inside you – the world does not know the truth of you and hence, the world does not love you for you. They love the story you told them about you. And that story is simply not true.
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WHAT DOES TO EMBODY YOUR AUTHENTICITY MEAN?
Authenticity or your true self is not an abstract concept. It is not a cognitive, intellectualized belief/self image. Your true self does not live in your intellect. It lives in your body. Your embodied truth is a very real, tangible experience of who you are. You experience it in your tissues. The truer you are to yourself, the more resting place there is in your body. The less true you are to yourself, the tighter & more painful your body feels.
It is your body that owns ,holds and carries all your wisdom, truth, intuition, all the secrets to your well-being & healing, but also all your grief, sorrow and fire.
Not your conscious mind. Your conscious mind is extremely powerful as it can act as the gateway to your truth, but the keeper of the truth is your body because your body is your unconscious mind.
It is your body that housed and kept safe who you denied to be all this time. Your body believed in you in all these times that you haven't.
That's why unearthing, integrating and celebrating your uniqueness cannot be done outside of the body's direct involvement in your becoming of who you were meant to be.
Your authenticity should feel like an exhale in your body and anything that you may be holding on to will be pointed out by your body in the form of sensations such as tightness, buzzing, pressure, even illnesses or symptoms of any kind. Dis-eases happen within the context of inauthenticity and as a result of a visceral disowning of a certain truth about you. What is addressed, processed and embraced will be exalted in the form of an inner stillness that settles in the tissues of your body. You coming back home to you is you coming back in your body. You feel it in your body when you live your truth.
This is what EMBODIED AUTHENTICITY is.
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SO WHAT TO DO ABOUT IT?
The way you have learned to live (or better said cope with life) can be unlearned and undone. You need to heal emotionally and integrate your stories and process your unprocessed emotions.
In order to heal, you need to allow yourself to be honest and start seeing the story/stories that you have been telling yourself all of your life about who you are, but most importantly, you need to allow yourself to feel the emotions you avoid and have avoided to feel.
This is you coming home to yourself.
Because you can only live once you give yourself permission to embrace the entirety of you, not simply what is considered lovable, acceptable and what people want to see in you.
You created them in a time where you had nothing else to keep you safe, nothing else to maybe justify and explain the horrible things that you may have gone through as a child.
And so you did the best that you could with what you had available at that moment in order to survive. But now it's time to take a step back and look at them for what they are, stories or a story, your story imbued with grief, neglect, fear, doubt, a story that you weren't.
That is why my motto urges you to become the storyteller of your pain. It's only by telling your story, by finally speaking about what has been unspoken of until now, by becoming the bearer of your own unabridged, uncut and raw self and the emotions that bubble to the surface along with it, by bringing your pain and your grief to the light, by becoming aware of them as they are, that you can embrace the truth of you.
And that truth is that nothing was ever wrong with you to begin with. In your darkest hour, all you did was try to survive. And who could blame you for that?
And so I created these 2 types of coaching packages for anyone who is yearning for a safe and nonjudgmental space to be themselves and bring to light what has been buried for too long.
I invite you to come with me in this healing journey to share, vent, open up or to tell your stories, to connect and meet yourself for the first time. Your healing will bring you back to yourself.
I made these packages accessible financially for anyone who is struggling and feels they cannot afford an expensive coaching program.
Thank you for being here and thank you for being brave enough to finally become the storyteller of your pain.
Are you willing to dive deep into self awareness and uncover what has stayed hidden for too long so that you can finally start to live from your heart and not from your pain?
