The Secret of the Shadow (16 page)

Eat foods that nourish our bodies, and stop eating when our stomachs are full.

Feel gratitude every day for what we have.

Making amends releases us from our past and from our stories.

It guarantees us a life outside the limitations of our stories. It blesses us with the greatest gifts of all: self-respect and self-love.

When we step through the door of forgiveness and begin to treat ourselves and others with love and compassion, a new reality emerges. Choosing forgiveness means making a promise to our-148

m a k i n g p e a c e w i t h y o u r s t o r y selves that we won’t use our past to beat ourselves up and that we will practice extreme care with ourselves. When we can love ourselves when we’re crazy, hateful, jealous, or sad, we are truly free.

All we need to begin is the willingness to forgive ourselves completely. Nobody can make us forgive. Only we can do it, and the time is now.

149

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. Look back over your life, and make a list of the people you have in some way hurt, violated, betrayed, or mistreated. Allow yourself to see the faces of people from your past—past employers, ex-lovers, people you went to school with—and notice the feelings that arise as you think about each of them. On a piece of paper, write the person’s name along with a brief description of the action or nonaction you committed regarding that person that left you feeling bad about yourself. Next, take some slow, deep breaths, close your eyes, and ask yourself, “What could I do to totally balance the scales with this person and restore my own sense of integrity?”

2. Write down all the ways you violate yourself on a daily basis.

Include obvious as well as not-so-obvious violations. Do you break commitments to yourself? Do you engage in relationships or behaviors you know are not in your highest interest? Do you stop yourself from speaking out when you feel the impulse? It may help you to think about each key area of your life—physical body, relationships, finances, home, environment—and ask yourself,

“How do I violate myself in this area?”

3. Design a plan of action to make amends for the violations you have committed against yourself and others. What actions do you need to take in the outer world that will balance your karmic scales?

What do you need to do in order to forgive yourself and return to a state of self-love? Make sure that your plan of action is specific, mea-surable, and objective. What exactly are you going to do, and by when? It might help you to find a buddy—someone you trust—to check in and share with to support you in this process.

150

Contemplation

=

“Magic happens when I restore

my personal integrity.”

151

= Chapter 8 <

Finding Your

Unique Specialt y

Hidden within our stories is a unique specialty that is unlike that of anybody else. This is the priceless reward for all that we have lived, our return to wholeness. Our specialty is our unique recipe, the sum total of our life’s experiences. Each of our traumas, each of our emotional wounds, as well as our joys and talents are here to teach us and guide us to the highest expression of ourselves. As soon as we are able to recognize the usefulness of our stories and extract our specialty out of the dramas we have lived, we will stand in awe of the Universe and its Divine Orchestration. We will see, maybe for the first time, how all the pieces of our lives have worked together to give us a contribution that is unmistakably ours. We will then be able to make sense out of the senseless. We will be able to extract wisdom out of our trauma and pain. We will understand why we were blessed with the specific gifts that only we 153

T h e S e c r e t o f t h e S h a d o w have. With newfound clarity we will be able to see how each event of our lives was perfectly orchestrated to unfold our highest possibilities. We will see the stories of our lives in a new light. Suddenly our parents, our body issues, our fears, our struggles, our wins and losses, our talents, and our triumphs will make sense. We will stand in the certainty that if we hadn’t lived everything we have lived, we would never be able to unveil the wisdom of our Divine gift.

C l a i m i n g Y o u r G i f t

We uncover our specialty when we can look at our lives—all our shadows, our light, our negative conclusions, and all our experiences—and ask ourselves, “Now, why would I have needed that belief or experience? How can this event lead me to discover my unique contribution to the world? What can I now contribute, having gone through what I did? What knowledge and insights do I now possess that I never would have developed if I hadn’t had that experience?” We’ll know that we’ve truly integrated our stories when we can see and use the gifts they have brought us. When we’ve extracted our recipe from the drama of our stories, we will be in the presence of our unique contribution. We will be in a position to share our wisdom with the world, and we will be guided to the best vehicle for that expression. When we extract our specialty we allow the world to benefit from the book of our lives. This requires us to look at our lives through a particular lens and ask ourselves, “If my life so far has been training me to do or be something in particular in the world, what would it be?”

154

f i n d i n g y o u r u n i q u e s p e c i a lt y Most of us are unable to see the specialty that our story has provided for us. Until we make peace with our past and give up blaming others for the condition of our lives, we will remain blind to our unique gifts. But as soon as we embrace both the light and the dark parts of ourselves and take responsibility for all of who we are, we will open up to the gifts that are ours to share. I always ask people who are stuck in their stories, “If you were to write a book, what would its title be?” Here are a few of the award-winning titles our stories have qualified us to write.

How to Use Your Life to Suffer

How to Torment Yourself in 28 Days

How to Experience Your Negative Inner Dialogue to the Fullest
How to Manifest Not Good Enough in Every Area of Your Life
How to Prove to Yourself and Others That You Are Unlovable
How to Push People Away So You’ll Know You’re an Unwanted
Reject

While any of these books might qualify as a good read, I think most of us would prefer a title that expresses our highest selves.

Every experience in our lives has provided us with specific knowledge and wisdom. Everything that has happened to us was Divinely designed to support us in making our unique contribution to the world.

155

T h e S e c r e t o f t h e S h a d o w W h at i s y o u r s t o r y ’ s c o n t r i b u t i o n ?

Now is the time to look at your story in a completely new way and discover the contribution that it holds. Here are a couple of examples: If your mother left you early in your life and your two ex-wives walked out on you, your specialty could be “When Women Leave: How to Stay Empowered on Your Own.” If your drama is filled with needing men to take care of you because you have the shadow belief that you can’t take care of yourself, your specialty might be “Teaching Women to Thrive on Their Own.” If you were abused by your uncle or date-raped in college, your specialty might be “Teaching Teenagers Self-Protection and Good Boundaries.” If you have battled with addiction your entire life and failed, you might be able to share this specialty: “Showing Kids the Depths and Trauma of Addiction.”

In order to discover your specialty, you must be committed to using
everything
you have been through to contribute to someone else’s life. You don’t need to be a college professor or an author to contribute your specialty to the world. You teach by example what you are here to contribute. You may pass it on to your children or share it with your best friend on a hike. You might impart your wisdom at the watercooler at work or at your nephew’s twelfth birthday party. Each of us is given opportunities to contribute all the time. It could be at a relative’s funeral or when an old high school friend contacts us on the Internet. We don’t need to know when or where we will have an opportunity to deliver our gift to the world; we just need to embrace that we indeed have a gift.

Standing in the presence of the special gift that we hold, we will 156

f i n d i n g y o u r u n i q u e s p e c i a lt y experience a deep peace with our stories and be ready for the giant leap out of our personal dramas and into our Divine expression.

O u t g r o w i n g Y o u r S t o r y At some point in my life it became clear to me that my story was getting me nowhere. I was faced with a choice: I could stay inside it, continue doing what I had been doing, hoping things would get better and striving to find a little more joy or happiness; or I could give up all the safety and comfort of the known and embark on an adventure beyond my story. Down deep in my soul I knew I had a higher calling. I ached for the spontaneity of the unknown. I had grown sick and tired of the predictability of my own life. I felt as though I was all used up inside my story. My drama no longer offered me any surprises or joy. I always knew what would go right, what would go wrong, what goals I could attain, and what I would keep just slightly out of my reach. Finally the day came when I bottomed out and was no longer willing to live inside my self-created limitations. That day I began to pray for the courage to no longer know myself, because the self I knew left me feeling discontented and empty inside. I prayed for the unveiling of my highest self. It wasn’t that I minded the self that I had known, but it was a boring saga, and living out each day was like watching a movie I had seen one too many times. In a way I was blessed by having so much inner turmoil, because it accelerated my desire to transcend my story.

While I was going through my divorce it became clear that it was time to transcend yet another of my stories, that it was once again 157

T h e S e c r e t o f t h e S h a d o w time to sink or swim. I had just given birth to my first child and had unknowingly stepped right into the motherhood drama, complete with all its joys, triumphs, worries, and fears. Wow, was this a story!

I worried about how I could live, how I could survive on my own, and how I could afford to create a life for myself and my son.

One day, while I was feeling absolutely suffocated by the limitations of my past, my sister asked me a very powerful question:

“What would you need to do to be blissfully happy, contribute to the world, take care of your son, and create the life of your dreams?” As I contemplated that question, I saw clearly that it was time for me to stop being a student and step into the role of being a teacher. It was time to share the wisdom I had spent years collecting. The one talent I really knew I had was that I could find the gift or the blessing in any negative experience. My pain had taught me to become a master at reinterpreting my life’s experiences and using them to transform my current reality. The pain and trauma of my past had given me a unique specialty: to bring light to darkness and find the blessings in all life’s events. As I assessed my skills and my capabilities I saw that my most valuable possession came from an unlikely source: the pain and struggles of my own past.

Standing at this crossroads, I saw that I could either use the experiences of my life to contribute to others or allow my past and all its limitations to continue to use me. I had to decide which road to take, and that decision had to be backed up with action. I knew that my purpose was to bring light to darkness, to bring healing where there once was pain. When I meditated on how to fulfill this purpose, the message I got was clear: I needed to write. I made the commitment to write every day.

158

f i n d i n g y o u r u n i q u e s p e c i a lt y The process of writing every day, whether I felt like it or not, supported me in living outside my story. Although my commitment was strong, I knew I would need a support structure if I were to continue to live the highest expression of myself. I had to take a stand and make a loud declaration: “This is who I am.” I told everyone I met that I was writing about embracing the shadow.

Not only did I tell friends and family; I went public, sharing my new self with publishers, agents, and spiritual teachers. I had to put myself on the line so there would be immediate consequences if I slipped back into my story. During this period of unveiling my highest self I attracted a whole new group of friends and associ-ates, who had never heard my “poor me” drama. They knew only the story of who I wanted to be. As I made this shift within myself, I found that the world responded to me differently.

Writing a book was something I had always wanted to do, but it had always lived well outside the boundaries of my story. But this was clearly my next step. It was clear to me that I had only two choices. I could continue traveling down my repetitive road to nowhere, collecting more war stories, more scars, and more resignation, or I could make a new choice, go down a different path, and arrive at a place I had never been before. I knew that to accomplish my goal I would need to stay present with my discomfort and my fear of the unknown rather than retreat to the false safety of familiar ground. I made the conscious choice to stop listening to my Shadow Box, which screamed, “You never finish what you start. You’re not smart enough to write a book, and nobody will listen to what you have to say, anyway.” Instead, I made choices that were outside the realm of anything I had done before. One 159

T h e S e c r e t o f t h e S h a d o w day at a time, I took actions that were consistent with the person I desired to be rather than the person I had been.

After a few months of consciously choosing to live outside my story, I could tell immediately when I had slipped back in. I could feel that familiar state of resignation coming over me like a dark cloud, carrying with it all the old feelings of self-doubt, uncertainty, and fear. I knew I had stepped back into the limitations of my drama when I again started listening to that small, scared part of me that begged me to stop striving for anything other than the life I knew. It pleaded with me to play small and stay safe. When I had stepped back inside my story I felt insignificant, bored, and lazy.