The Secret of the Shadow (3 page)

E m b r a c i n g Y o u r S t o r y Our stories have a Divine purpose. They are a real and necessary part of our personal evolutions. Until we understand the importance of our stories, we will stay trapped in the vicious cycle of trying to fix parts of ourselves that aren’t broken. Hidden within our personal dramas is important information, pearls of wisdom for us to extract that hold the key to fulfilling our unique contributions to the world. Our stories contain the exact ingredients we need to become the people we always longed to be. Inside each of our stories is a Divine recipe for a most extraordinary life.

The first step in uncovering your recipe is to realize that you 16

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created your story not only to protect yourself but, unknowingly, to gather the wisdom and experiences that are necessary for you to realize your life’s purpose. You created your story in order to learn the lessons it had to teach. You are like a master chef. You have spent your life in the kitchen, cooking up pain, joy, triumph, and failure in order to gather the ingredients necessary to manifest your most extraordinary self. But your story—with all its drama and all its unprocessed pain—conceals this recipe.

Most of us get so distracted by the drama of our stories that we no longer remember that we have a Divine purpose here. We are so committed to the pain of our personal histories and to making others wrong that we don’t even realize that all of our pain has a purpose. This bears repeating: All of our pain has a purpose! It is here to teach us, guide us, and give us the wisdom we need to deliver our gifts to the world. Most of us use our traumas and our wounds to beat ourselves up, to stay stuck, and to keep ourselves small. But when our pain and disappointment are examined and used as learning tools, they impart sacred life lessons that can be taught to us only in this way.

You are here to contribute your own unique flavor and serve the world in a way that only you can. One of my son’s kindergarten teachers, Mrs. Knight, demonstrated this principle to her class. On the first day of school, Mrs. Knight handed all the children who walked into class a piece of a jigsaw puzzle with a number on the back. As she called up each student by his or her number, each brought their piece of the puzzle and Mrs. Knight placed it in the correct position of the cardboard frame that held the puzzle together. There were twenty children and twenty pieces of the 17

T h e S e c r e t o f t h e S h a d o w puzzle. When Mrs. Knight finally called number twenty you could see the entire picture on the puzzle except for one missing piece, which prevented all of us from seeing the beauty of the entire picture. The little boy who had received piece number nineteen was missing from class that day, and in order for the entire picture to be revealed, the class needed his contribution. Thus Mrs.

Knight beautifully illustrated to the children how important each of them was to completing the whole.

I sat there with tears in my eyes thinking about how each and every one of us represents a vital contribution to the whole of humanity. Each of us has an important piece to contribute to the picture of life. When we are stuck in the past, hating our lives, our stories, and ourselves, it is impossible to claim our piece of the puzzle and put it in its destined place. Until we make peace with our stories, it’s impossible for us to extract the ingredients we need to express our Divine selves. All of our drama—each of our experiences, the parts of ourselves that we love and the parts that we hate—is what makes our piece unique. Some of us got the middle piece of the puzzle, some the end, while others got the big round piece. There is no other piece of the puzzle just like yours. None.

There are similar ones, but nothing like yours. Your unique contribution lies dormant, waiting for you to collect all the experiences you need to fulfill your piece of the puzzle. Every day you call forth experiences perfectly suited to gathering the wisdom required to produce your unique recipe, your piece of the puzzle.

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T h e P r o c e s s

The Secret of the Shadow
will guide you to see that “the story of you” does not begin to define who you truly are. It’s a small part of you that keeps you trapped in repetitive patterns and limits the amount of love, inner peace, and success you can receive. In order for you to see your whole self and to view your true magnificence, you must step outside your story. Stepping out of our stories allows us to let down the perfectly constructed walls that surround our open hearts. In order to live outside our stories, we must heal our wounds and make peace with our past. We must uncover the pain and embrace the flaws and inadequacies that come with our humanity. Until we come to terms with who we are and why we are here, and understand the tremendous lessons that life is teaching us, we will remain trapped inside the smallness of our own personal dramas.

In order to transcend your story, you must be willing to experience the daily struggle of your personal existence. For only when you can be with your life exactly as it is do you have the choice to change its direction. To live a life outside the confines of your story, you will first learn to clearly define all the ways you keep yourself separate, encapsulated in your story. You will develop the willingness to come to terms with all the ways you avoid acknowledging and accepting with love the nothingness that lies within you. You will learn all the ways you try to define yourself so that no one will mistake you for someone else, the ways you seek to fill up your identity so you won’t have to feel the deep void, the emptiness, that lies beneath your wanting.

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T h e S e c r e t o f t h e S h a d o w This book will show you how to use your story, to get value from all your traumas and shortcomings, to gain wisdom from your wounds. It will give you the process by which to extract your unique recipe and unleash the secret that lies hidden in the shadow of your story. Now is the time to explore how you can use your story to enrich your life and the lives of others. That’s why you have it. But you will only be able to use it when you are ready to step outside the story called “You.”

In the chapters that follow we’ll identify all the endless ways we’ve chased fulfillment and happiness. Whenever we are blindly chasing something, we must stop to question why we are doing this; here is where we will find important clues. Whether we’re chasing love, attention, respect, or worldly success, we must be willing to see that all our chasing is an attempt to fill some emptiness or lack that resides deep within our beings. We must acknowledge how our strategies to find fulfillment have failed.

Then we can come face-to-face with all the ways we have violated ourselves, all the places we have sold our souls while trying to make ourselves and our stories better.

The Secret of the Shadow
is about discovering your true essence.

It will serve as a guide that will lead you back home—where, deep within, you know you belong. Standing in the presence of your true essence, unencumbered by your story, you will know yourself as the totality of the Universe—both the nothingness of your smallest self and the fullness of your humanity. Stepping outside your story, you will discover that the “you” you have always desired to be does not live inside your story. Once outside, you will 20

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see that the life of your dreams, and the fulfillment of your deepest desires, are waiting for you. Here you will feel compelled to share with the world the secret that has been hidden in the shadow of your story. Then you will know what it is like to stand in the glory of your most magnificent self.

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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. Begin by buying a beautiful journal, and title it, “The Great and Mysterious Story of Me.” Commit to using this journal as a place to record the feelings, thoughts, and insights that arise as you do the exercises outlined in this book. As you do these exercises, try not to edit or censor yourself; instead, allow yourself to freely express whatever is on your mind or in your heart.

2. Choose a time when you can be alone, and make yourself comfortable. Create a space that is free from distractions, and have your journal nearby. Close your eyes, and as you do, take a few slow, deep breaths, feeling yourself go deeper inside with each breath. Allow yourself to relax completely, to fall still, and devote the next few minutes to your spiritual growth and self-discovery.

Take another slow, deep breath, and allow your awareness to rest gently in the area of your heart. As you breathe, feel yourself connecting with your inner being—the essential aspect of you that has been with you every moment of your life.

Imagine that you are watching a movie of your life. See yourself on the day you were born; notice the faces of those who cared for you as an infant. Picture yourself in your early years, learning to walk and talk. Recall the years you spent in school, seeing the faces and hearing the voices of those who touched you—for better or for worse—during your formative years. Allow this movie to keep playing on the screen of your consciousness, and let yourself feel and remember your loves, losses, disappointments, challenges, and achievements. Trust that whatever is coming to your mind is 22

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perfect. Breathe deeply as you reflect on the many experiences you have had in the time you have been on this earth.

Consider that each of these experiences, and every one of your life’s events, has unfolded in harmony with a Divine plan. Open up to the possibility that every person, event, and incident has been drawn into your life in order to awaken you to your own inner wisdom. Reflect on the idea that you have been born with a unique contribution to make and that every experience of your life has in some way been training you to deliver your special gift to the world. Take another deep breath, and when you are ready, slowly open your eyes and spend a few minutes journaling about whatever thoughts or feelings are present within you.

3. Each chapter of this book will include a contemplation—an idea to be savored, pondered, and taken in slowly. Take your time—a week, or even two—and reflect deeply on the words in each chapter’s contemplation.

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Contemplation

=

“My life has

a Divine plan.”

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= Chapter 2 <

Your Unique Recipe

In your life you have tasted the sweetness of love, the sour disappointment of loss, the bitterness that remains after too many heartbreaks. Every one of these experiences is part of your unique recipe. You wouldn’t be you without them. These experiences, when integrated and understood, will give you everything you need—every bit of wisdom, insight, and strength—to live your ultimate dream.

The Universe in all its perfection conspires to give us exactly what we need to fulfill our recipe. It gives us all the happiness, all the unhappiness, the wanting, the fulfillment, the addiction, the aspirations, the trauma, the divorce. Think about the unique circumstances each of us was born into. Some of us were born African American, others Caucasian, Hispanic, Asian, or multira-cial. Some of us were smothered, while others were neglected; 25

T h e S e c r e t o f t h e S h a d o w some of us were beaten, and some were coddled. Some of us were given everything, while others had nothing. We may think we got a bad lot in life, but we got the precise lot we needed to complete our recipe. Every experience of our life has contributed a distinct and essential ingredient to the recipe called “you.”

Imagine that God is a master chef whose desire is to create millions of different desserts in order to please and delight his children. In his wisdom he knows that many different ingredients are necessary to make such a feast. He knows that a cake made only with sugar will not satisfy. So he gave us all the ingredients we would need to become the most delicious dessert we could be.

Every experience of loss and gain, pleasure and pain, contributed an essential ingredient. Each of these ingredients is filled with wisdom, and exists to teach us, guide us, and deliver vital information that will support us in becoming the person we most desire to be.

T h e R e c i p e C a l l e d D e b b i e F o r d Inside the painful, dramatic story of me I found the perfect recipe to create the Debbie I longed to be. My list of ingredients began with being the youngest of three children, with a brother and sister who were not exactly excited to meet me. Mixed into my recipe was a desperate need to be liked and accepted, and an extremely sensitive emotional system. Add to that a noisy internal dialogue that constantly battered me, letting me know how unwanted and unlovable I was. Stir in thirteen years of drug abuse so I could learn the depths of my own darkness and develop 26

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a profound relationship with powerlessness. Blend in a little self-loathing and a massive dose of neurosis. Mix in a large amount of self-determination so I would be driven to devote five years of my life to searching for the answers to some of life’s most difficult questions. Add in twenty-five years’ experience in making everything and everyone wrong—God wrong, the Universe wrong, my parents wrong—so that I would know with certainty that I had the power to make myself miserable for the rest of my life.

Finally, add a pinch of arrogance and a belief that I knew it all and you have the perfect recipe to motivate me to find the answers to how I could love and accept all parts of myself.

It took me many years to see that my mission to “fix” myself was an endless and thankless task, a bottomless pit leading me nowhere.

I truly believed I would feel better once I got rid of the parts of my recipe I didn’t like. But struggling unsuccessfully against the unwanted parts of me led me to discover that I didn’t need to get rid of anything. Instead, I needed to integrate and embrace everything.

I realized that in order to be the “me” I always desired, I would need every ingredient that had gone into my batter. I would need every experience of weakness and strength, fear and courage, success and failure. As long as I kept trying to stick my hand in the batter and rip out certain unwanted ingredients—my trauma, my weakness, my self-doubt—I would remain an uncooked lump of potential. But if I integrated all my ingredients, mixed them up, and appreciated the unique contribution they made, I would finally be able to recognize that I had all the makings of the perfect me. I had spent years trying to become someone other than myself, so the realization that all I had to do was
stop
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