The Secret of the Shadow (11 page)

Close your eyes and breathe into this thought:
At this moment I
have the innate power to change the direction of my life.
Do you feel strong or weak? There is nothing more exciting for us than to know that we have the power to change. We get to choose how we want to view the world. Either we are inspired by the possibility of being the co-creators of every event in our lives or we remain victimized by our shadow beliefs, which drain our power, telling us that we don’t deserve to have it all.

96

r e c l a i m i n g y o u r p o w e r Even if you’ve been living inside the story that life has done it to you, when you can say, “I’m doing it to me,” you will have the power to stop it or do it differently. The voice of power says, “I’m doing it. I created it. I’m responsible for it. I can change it.” The voice of powerlessness says, “I can’t help it. They did it to me. I can’t get out of it.” At each and every moment in your life you have the opportunity to choose which world you live in. This is your opportunity to define your world.

Powerful . . . . . . . . Powerless . . . . . . . . You choose.

97

T h e S e c r e t o f t h e S h a d o w H e a l i n g A c t i o n S t e p s 1. Make a list of all the areas in your life where you are experiencing limitation or frustration or where you are not receiving everything you desire. Now close your eyes, breathe deep into your heart, and give yourself permission to be completely honest. With your eyes still closed, ask yourself the following questions, recording in your journal whatever emerges.

Whom do I blame for the condition of my life?

Whom am I getting back at every time I fall short of manifesting my full potential?

What behaviors, addictions, or self-destructive patterns do I use to prove that I have been wronged or mistreated?

What payoff do I receive for making others responsible for my reality? What do I get to pretend, deny, or avoid?

2. On another piece of paper, make a list of all the excuses you use for why you can’t fulfill your heart’s desires. When you are finished, read your list of excuses out loud. Then close your eyes and go inside. Take some deep breaths and ask yourself the following questions, journaling afterward about any insights you receive.

How many years have I been using these excuses?

What is the need that my excuses fulfill?

If I let go of my excuses, what feelings and experiences would I have access to that are not available to me now?

98

Contemplation

=

“Today I choose to take total

and complete responsibility for my

reality. And I like it.”

99

= Chapter 6 <

The Power of Pr ocess

We will stay in our stories until we extract all the lessons and wisdom we need in order to deliver our unique contribution to the world. It’s important for us to understand that we created our stories—with all their magnificence and all their despair—in order to learn the particular lessons we need most.

Our stories contain all the wisdom we need to become the people we long to be. The lessons for each of us are different. As Deepak Chopra so beautifully says, “We’ve walked through different gardens, we’ve cried at different funerals and we’ve knelt at different graves.” Each of us has had different triumphs and failures, and has different lessons to learn. But Divine guidance has been instrumental in every experience of our lives, showing us ever more clearly who we are and giving us exactly what we need to fulfill our unique purpose. Our life stories have equipped each of us with 101

T h e S e c r e t o f t h e S h a d o w a particular set of skills and a unique blend of wisdom that we are meant to deliver to the world.

To live outside our stories, we must courageously walk through our drama-ridden lives and begin the process of embracing and loving all that we are and all that we are not. We must take the time to examine each and every chapter of our lives, exposing the places where we are still stuck, hurt, or incomplete. We must commit to letting go of our resentments and to stop blaming others for the condition of our lives. We must be willing to take responsibility for our current circumstances and to let go of all the baggage we are still carrying around from our past. We must commit to traveling the path through our personal dramas and to finally making peace with our stories.

S t o p C h a s i n g t h e F e e l - G o o d M o m e n t s Millions of people have spent billions of dollars trying to gain deeper levels of inner peace—to no avail. Others have been able to make some progress in feeling better about their lives, cleaning up their thoughts, their closets, and their relationships. Still others continue to search, trying desperately to find the right answer—

the one that will free them from their suffering. But there is no way out. By avoiding our pain, we perpetuate our ongoing dramas and drag our past around with us every day. It is almost impossible to appreciate where we are or what we are doing when the past is right under the surface of our consciousness, stalking our every move, reminding us of our failures and our traumas. To begin the 102

t h e p o w e r o f p r o c e s s process of making peace with our stories, we must make a commitment to letting go of all the behaviors we use to anesthetize our pain. If we look closely at those behaviors and are willing to tell the truth, we will probably see that most of the ways we numb ourselves don’t work very well anyway. In order for us to heal, we must stop chasing what I call the “feel-good moments.” The following process offers you a way out of the never-ending cycle of discontent. It’s not the easy road. I don’t believe there
is
an easy road. But I promise you that the direct road to lasting peace and contentment is much easier to travel than the winding road of continually searching, trying, and failing.

Living a life where we feel that deep at our core there is something wrong with us—that we’re not good enough or that we don’t matter—is a hell that is difficult to endure. So is living a life in which our dreams are always one step ahead of us. The hopelessness, the discontent, and the seemingly endless pit of emotional pain kill our spirits and separate us from our most extraordinary selves. Nothing is worse for the human spirit. Nothing can take away our life force more than the belief that we are deficient or flawed, or that at some fundamental level we are unfixable.

E m b r a c i n g I t A l l

The process of making peace with our stories requires us to identify,
understand, accept, and embrace everything in our past that has caused
us pain.
The process is the same whether we are trying to heal a painful incident, integrate a shadow belief, or come to terms with 103

T h e S e c r e t o f t h e S h a d o w an unwanted aspect of ourselves. Whether we suffer from depression, ill health, discontent, a sense of unworthiness, arrogance, or low self-esteem, the road to healing is the same. We process growing up with an angry mother in the same way we process being sexually abused by a cousin. We process the disappointment of losing a job in the same way we process anger at the person who breaks our heart. One might be more painful, one might leave deeper scars, but the path to healing remains the same. As we make the inner journey of embracing our story and all its ingredients, we begin to see the life that lies ahead of us, a life that will give us the gift of our eternal selves. Our traumas and failures, once they are understood and processed, will take us deep inside and return us to our Divine essence.

F i n d i n g t h e G i f t I n s i d e t h e P a i n The issues that remain just beneath the surface of our consciousness are the lumps in our batter. These unhealed wounds are what prevent us from stepping outside the limitations of who we think we are. They are also the glue that holds our story in place. These lumps might seem inconsequential, but often they are linked to much deeper issues. For example, when I was in my early twenties I really wanted to be athletic. I admired people who played tennis, went skiing, and participated in other sporting events. Many of my friends and family members were great athletes, but I had the shadow belief that I was too skinny and weak to participate. Then I became interested in a man named Kevin, a professional tennis 104

t h e p o w e r o f p r o c e s s player. While we were talking one day, Kevin asked me why I didn’t play tennis like my brother and sister. Immediately I launched into my story about how I was never encouraged to play tennis because I didn’t have the right kind of body. I was told I wasn’t strong enough or coordinated enough and that it would be more difficult for me because I was left-handed. With a quizzical look on his face, Kevin asked me how old I was when I was told these things. I tried to remember when I first heard those words. I saw an image of myself as a ten-year-old girl who felt awkward in her body. I could still feel the familiar sense of inadequacy and the shame of not fitting in. Fighting back the tears of this emotional wound, I shared with Kevin all the times I sat on the sidelines believing there was something physically wrong with me. Those painful memories had haunted me for years, keeping me from ever trying new sports or even playing volleyball at the beach.

Kevin listened attentively and then, with a flirtatious gleam in his eye, said, “It doesn’t look like there’s anything wrong with you now. Why don’t we go out and hit some balls?” My first impulse was to say no, but after a few days of encouragement I went out with him and hit my first tennis ball. To my great surprise, it came naturally. I committed to taking tennis lessons and have been playing tennis ever since.

By confronting this lump in my batter, this emotional wound that told me I was uncoordinated and defective, I broke through the limitations of that story. This one incident triggered a thousand other memories of times when I felt too thin and fragile. It allowed me to view all the times when I wished I had been shorter, fatter, and stronger. Confronting this unhealed emotional wound 105

T h e S e c r e t o f t h e S h a d o w unraveled all the pain I experienced as a young woman who felt like a skinny little beanpole. I even cried through the pain of what I considered the most humiliating experience of my life: I was at my seventh-grade dance, wearing a burgundy velvet dress that my Aunt Laura had made me, when Todd Halpren, a popular boy at my school, picked me up and put me on the stage as the band’s vocalist sang out: “Who’s that girl with the skinny legs?” I was overwhelmed with shame and never wanted to set foot in that school again.

My skinniness was my deepest horror. I even tried to hide it by wearing two pairs of shorts or two pairs of pants. I spent hours in front of the mirror, trying unsuccessfully to make my body look different. The truth be told, all throughout my adolescence I thought of myself as Olive Oyle with big hair. And yes, I did wear my hair big for many years, thinking it would trick others into believing I was bigger than I was. For years I tortured myself, believing that if only I had a different body I would fit in and be okay. As I now processed this lump, I discovered that all of my pain did indeed come bearing gifts. Because I had to be creative in finding clothing styles that would suit my small frame, I learned all about fashion, style, and color. From the time I was thirteen I was working in women’s retail stores selling clothes and helping women create styles that brought out the best in their bodies. I was great at what I did because I was sensitive to how painful it is to have a body that doesn’t live up to one’s wishes.

The unfolding of all my emotional traumas allowed me to develop a new relationship with my body. Instead of resenting it for being thin and weak, I was able to embrace the grace and 106

t h e p o w e r o f p r o c e s s agility of my long, lean bones. This ingredient in my recipe has continued to serve me throughout my adult life. It served me when I worked as a media trainer and as an image consultant.

Even today in my coaching programs, where I train people to lead seminars and to be in front of people, one of the gifts I bring is supporting people in returning to their natural style so that their looks don’t get in the way of their message.

We create a story around every incident in our lives. These stories set our internal boundaries, which dictate what we can and cannot do. We need to take note that each of these little dramas, each lump in our batter, weaves its way into the bigger stories of our lives. I would never have guessed that my feelings of inadequacy around playing sports were just the tip of an iceberg and that they would lead me to discover and heal a deeper issue about my body. Embracing the pain of my past allowed me to transcend the limitations of my story and gave me access to more joy in my life.

W h e r e A r e Y o u r L u m p s ?

Our emotional wounds prevent us from taking the leap outside our stories, because the pain acts like an invisible fence that traps us inside. We have thousands of different experiences in our lifetimes, but only certain ones remain in our consciousness, replaying themselves over and over again. These are the lumps in our batter that are sometimes visible, other times hidden. Either way, we need to search them out and integrate them.

107

T h e S e c r e t o f t h e S h a d o w Take a moment right now and close your eyes. Take a deep breath and ask yourself, “What incident or event from my past is still causing me pain, anger, or regret?” Something will arise, and when it does you will have just uncovered one of the lumps in your batter.

It may have happened two days ago or twenty-two years ago. It doesn’t matter. If you want to be free to use your story instead of your story using you, you need to integrate all aspects of your drama.

The lumps in our batter are nothing more than the unprocessed events of our past. Once we uncover and accept what each lump consists of, we can begin to integrate all the ingredients in our recipe. Integration spontaneously occurs when we discover the gifts of our past. Hidden inside the darkness of our most painful times are the lessons we need to learn. Integration requires us to view our lives as teaching tools and to honor all that has happened to us. Once we can see our past and everything in it as our teacher and our guide, we will know that we have deeply integrated all the ingredients in our recipe. We will no longer waste our time wondering why certain things have happened to us, and we will no longer resist our stories. Integration equals freedom. We will finally be able to stop—stop trying to fix, change, or make better the story of us. Instead we will have taken an important step on the journey outside our story.