As part of the healing path we need to start owning and healing these places within ourselves – owning and accepting the light and the dark. To deny our shadows, our ‘dark’ parts that we think others won’t accept, is to deny our true essence. It’s all part of our amazing make-up. So start owning your ‘shitty’ parts as well as the good ones, and try to stop putting your stuff onto other people.
This is how we find balance: owning and accepting all parts of ourselves, happy in the dark and the light, embracing both sides. And embracing them both in ourselves and in others. But, most importantly, it starts with ourselves.
See if you can play with loving those parts of yourself that you consider to be ‘bad’. You might consider this to be your temper, or your need to please people all of the time. It could be lots of things. Hold these parts in your mind. Cradle them. And realize that they are probably wounded parts of yourself from childhood and that, actually, they just need love. Your love.
Look in the mirror
In order to get to the light, to a place of more peace, amazing relationships, abundance and a flow of beautiful life force, we have to face ourselves fully. There is no way around this, there are no shortcuts. If we want to know the light and express our truest selves we have to face our darkness and our shadow.
Ancient Chinese philosopher Confucius once said, ‘The inability of man to just sit with himself, alone, is cause for most of the world’s problems.’ To really know ourselves, by facing ourselves and acknowledging everything we are, is an incredibly powerful thing – far more powerful, in fact, than most of the so-called people of power in the world today.
Picture for a moment a person you know who seems to radiate light all the time – someone who seems ‘in the flow’ with life, ‘lucky’ and always positive. That is a person who has faced themselves and all their demons and made friends with everything inside of them. This is what is being asked of humanity at this time. Each one of us is being called to wake up and truly know ourselves. And that involves a ‘facing’ of the self.
Can we collectively face our shadows? Can we ‘go there’? Can you go there? Will you go there?
Looking at the parts we don’t like about ourselves and learning to accept them is a good start. But please make a special effort to stop beating yourself up when you do this. Seriously! Stop giving yourself a hard time. Your dark sides are just as welcome as your light sides. Try loving ALL of you.
You are beautiful
Who are you? No, no… Who are you, REALLY?
Who we are, without the layers, defences, multiple personalities and masks that we ‘put on’ to get by in the world is someone much purer, more natural and innocent. An important and huge part of the spiritual journey is the ability to detach from the self: to step back from the ego and all its many layers and false guises, peeling them back to find the ‘purer’ self, your true self, the real essence of you. The you who lies under the ‘layers’ you put on as your brave face to the world. And one of the rewards of travelling the spiritual path is that we get to strip back all our false layers, see that they’re no longer needed and get back to our natural state – our purity, our innocence, our divinity, our beauty.
We are all very beautiful creatures under our layers. Most, if not all, of us have grown up being taught to apologize for who we are because the people guiding us – parents, teachers, friends – didn’t know their own beauty. So I ask you this: are you simply your layers, your masks and pretences, or is there more? What is under the masks?
Most likely you’ll find under there a hurt and somewhat bewildered little child – your inner child, who has quite likely been conditioned to feel guilty for being anything other than conventionally ‘normal’ and well-behaved. If we grow up carrying this hurt inner child around with us, we then feel we need to present other versions of ourselves to other people in order to be accepted. (Facebook is not helping this!)
Our job as awakening people on a spiritual path is to ‘peel the onion’, to start removing one by one the false layers we have gathered in our lives since childhood, healing and feeling each layer as we go and dropping those layers, with compassion, into the compost bin. With each layer we strip off we uncover more and more of our true nature and our light.
Part of this process is to address our need to feel we must apologize for being who we really are. So, I would like to ask you to drop the apology. Right here. Right now.
Stand in front of a mirror and say to yourself, ‘I will no longer apologize for being who I am. For being me. I am good, I am beautiful, I am most certainly not bad and I hereby let go of any programming from society and my upbringing that has taught me this. I drop it for good – be gone!’
Now look into the mirror – what do you see? Look into your eyes, look deeply into them. What’s there? What’s looking back at you? See the child there inside you – beautiful, no? See how innocent and pure they are. Can you see your own goodness? Your own beauty? It’s there. Acknowledge it, love it, celebrate it and be happy.
CHAPTER 3
INNER WORK
In order to really engage with the world around us, to be fully and powerfully present and to live a life of simplicity – we need to ground ourselves, in a solid, rooted, unswayable connection to the Earth. Grounding, in essence, is about living connected to the earth – physically, mentally, spiritually, emotionally, energetically.
Many of us these days are getting a little lost in the technology. The danger of this is that we can become disconnected from the Earth. The internet is an amazing thing, however too much of it can unground us. Big time. It can take us away from the feelings and guidance of our bodies and put us too much in our heads, which, lets face it, isn’t the most helpful of places, especially if we get stuck on repeat in a loop of anxiety, fear or anger. With all the technology flying around us it can be difficult to stay centred, calm, even sane. The best thing we can do to remedy this is to ground ourselves.
Think of a thousand-year-old oak tree that has stood solid with a big, busy city growing up around it. It is there, fully in its power – solid, healthy and strong. Well, that could be YOU! Think of yourself as the tree, if you learn how to ground yourself and connect with the Earth, then nothing can sway you. There could be chaos, war and 5G static bouncing all around you while you remain calm and centred – a rooted person standing strong in the midst of it all. Sound good? It IS!
The best thing you can do to ground yourself is to start healing your past traumas. Our ‘traumas’ are mostly the emotional and psychic wounds we have received while growing up as children – this is what blocks us from being fully in our bodies. They are wounds to our spirit. The pain can feel too much, we might not have learned how to deal with it, so we can ‘check-out’ and leave our bodies to disconnect from the feelings. There are also wounds that can occur as adults too; we need to start on the healing to get into what’s happening within.
This is a super-important aspect of grounding ourselves; once we’ve started healing our trauma we feel more comfortable in our bodies, and therefore more able to connect to the Earth.
Are you ready to start healing your wounds? If so, seek out a good healer. There are so many options, ranging from hypnotherapists, psychotherapists, counsellors, shamanic practitioners and plant medicine healers. Find someone who you trust, someone with repute, and start healing that painful stuff inside you. Dive deep, find your blocks, and clear them from your body so that you can really occupy yourself with a ferocious and awesome power. Sort out what’s inside and your spirit will land more fully in your body.