The Secret of the Shadow (4 page)

T h e S e c r e t o f t h e S h a d o w I wasn’t was totally enlightening. I came to understand that in order to make the perfect cake you sometimes need a little salt, and that when you overcompensate for your batter’s bitterness by adding heaps of sugar, your cake becomes indigestible.

Each of us comes into this world with a particular mission, as if a recipe for our highest fulfillment were written within our souls. This recipe is different for each of us; there are no two recipes that are exactly the same. To discover the recipe called you, you must distinguish what lies within your batter.

My recipe required me to wait thirty-eight years to find the perfect man to spend my life with. Then it called for me to give birth to my most favorite person in the entire Universe only to watch my marriage fall apart in front of me. The next ingredient was an unexpected divorce that kicked up all the trauma and pain from my own parents’ divorce. The overwhelming fear that I couldn’t make it on my own added some nice flavor so that I could muster up the courage and the strength to write my first book,
The
Dark Side of the Light Chasers
. All those traumas—those ingredients—gave me the willingness and wisdom to dig down deep into my soul and produce that book.

In a million years I would never have guessed that all my pain and darkness, all my selfishness and my never-ending desire to make a difference in the world, were being carefully blended together so that I would be able to step into the highest version of myself. But the perfect recipe for my life was waiting to be discovered. I learned to trust in the powers that be and came to the hum-bling realization that no one really knows what experiences we need in order that we may give our greatest gift.

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In doing what was necessary to heal my issues with my ex-husband, I was unknowingly gathering wisdom and essential ingredients to add to my recipe. Preparing to write my second book,
Spiritual Divorce,
forced me to grow and expand and take responsibility for my reality, no matter what my ex-husband—or anyone else, for that matter—was doing. It forced me to take the high road and ask, “How am I going to grow from this? How can I use this to make me my most Divine self?” Of course I had other options: I could have hated my pain; I could have felt sorry for myself because I had a lot of pain. Instead I chose to look for the gold, the jewels, and say, “Aah, why would I need this? What can I extract from this situation? What can I now contribute that I couldn’t have if I had never had this experience?” I have lived the perfect life to do the work I do.

Because I couldn’t support others in healing their pain and creating the life of their dreams if I hadn’t first done this for myself.

A D i v i n e B u f f e t

Imagine flipping through your favorite cookbook and seeing several recipes for
passionate, fulfilled, abundant, extraordinary human
beings.
Intrigued, you quickly turn to the indicated pages to learn what ingredients would make up such masterpieces, and on the first page you see:

Mix together fourteen traumas, four heartbreaks, a mother who loved too much, a father who was emotionally unavailable, and one cheating husband. Blend in the 29

T h e S e c r e t o f t h e S h a d o w opportunity to be a single mother with two children. Add four extra doses of selfishness, a shadow belief that says,

“I’m not good enough,” and an ego that screams, “I’m going to prove to everyone that I
am
good enough,” and
voilà!
You have forty-two-year-old Lynda, a perfectly satisfied chief financial officer of a $17 million company!

Or try this one:

Combine divorced parents with twin brothers who badger you on a daily basis. Mix in four years of a bad marriage and one very successful business, six years of depression, and one immune deficiency disease. Add a noisy internal dialogue to remind you that there is definitely something wrong with you. Garnish with a deep inner knowing that things will work out if you suffer long enough. Add a passionate love of music and the arts, bake at high intensity for forty-three years, and
presto!
You have Jeffrey, a song-writer and producer of a children’s TV show that teaches kids how to be kind to each other.

Or how about a taste of :

Start with two parents with high expectations and a need to control your every move. Add a heaping dose of inadequacy, twelve years of striving to be the perfect student, sixteen amazing victories, and sixteen experiences of deep emptiness. Add two suicide attempts and four opportuni-30

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ties to be brought to your knees. Sprinkle in a love for math and science and a knack for empathizing with people’s problems. Add an unshakable faith in God and stir in one serving of self-realization. Chill for thirty-two years. Meet Pam, a pediatric psychologist with a holistic approach.

It’s fairly easy to see how your positive attributes contribute to your unique recipe. You can probably appreciate how your talents, your natural abilities, and your childhood dreams have added to your life and to the person you’ve become. But the traumatic events in your life—the experiences that left wounds within you—

are an equally important part of the mix that will help you become all that you can be. Every insecurity, every fear, every tragedy, every obsession, broken relationship, and shameful incident holds clues that are leading you toward your most magnificent self.

Blend them together and they will propel you into the unique contribution that you are. If you embrace all the ingredients in your recipe and allow them to be part of your batter, what will come out of the oven is the person your soul longs to be.

U s i n g Y o u r I n g r e d i e n t s Most of us suffer endlessly from the painful and unwanted parts of our recipe, but there are some extraordinary people who choose to use their pain to contribute to the world. The death of a child is one of the worst ingredients anyone could imagine having in their 31

T h e S e c r e t o f t h e S h a d o w recipe, but what if it was in the Divine plan for you to use that experience to save the lives of thousands of other children? John Walsh, the host of
America’s Most Wanted,
did just that. After his six-year-old son, Adam, was murdered, John became an advocate for victims’ rights and brought awareness to a subject that had for years been buried in the dark. Unwilling to allow his child to die in vain, John turned his anger into action and established a national program to incarcerate tens of thousands of criminals and sex offenders. John Walsh could just as easily have chosen to wallow in his grief for years, but instead he chose to use it to make a contribution to the world.

Identified as one of the most severely abused children in the state of California, Dave Pelzer was brutally beaten and starved by his emotionally unstable and alcoholic mother. Through his courage, strength, and forgiveness, Dave turned his wounds into wisdom and wrote a gripping account of his life’s story, which touched the lives of millions. His book,
A Child Called “It,”
was a
New York Times
best-seller for three years and was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. While few would consciously choose severe physical and emotional abuse as part of their life’s recipe, we have to thank God that Dave chose to use his experience to make a profound difference in the lives of others.

When she was just nineteen months old, Helen Keller was rendered blind and deaf after suffering a nearly fatal fever. Rising above the ignorance of her time and her own frustration, Helen became determined to interact with the world using her remain-ing three senses. She became a skilled and passionate communica-tor and the author of thirteen books. Lecturing around the world 32

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in support of the handicapped and the underprivileged, she almost single-handedly destroyed age-old myths about blindness.

Imagine what the world would have missed if Helen Keller had made the choice to immerse herself in self-pity, rejecting the ingredients in her unique recipe.

Viktor Frankl was imprisoned in Auschwitz for five years.

After his mother, father, and pregnant wife were all killed by the Nazis, Frankl clung to what he called “the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances.”

Embracing the devastating ingredient of these deaths inspired Frankl to write
Man’s Search for Meaning,
a book that has been recognized as among the most influential works of humanistic litera-ture.

We need to be able to look at our entire history—including our traumas, handicaps, failures, and life circumstances—and say,

“Thank you, God, for giving me that.” Because these experiences were tailor-made to support us in delivering our unique contribution.

Just think about it. Why did some events wound you so deeply when they didn’t matter at all to the rest of your family? Consider that you needed the wisdom that that incident had to offer. Maybe that pain held a huge lesson that you would have missed if it hadn’t been so severe. Maybe you needed to be born with a devastating handicap so you could prove the indestructibility of your spirit.

Maybe you needed to survive the devastating loss of your child so you could save thousands of others. Maybe you needed to bottom out on drugs, alcohol, or self-loathing before you could muster up the courage to take responsibility for your life. All of our traumas 33

T h e S e c r e t o f t h e S h a d o w and emotional issues exist in order to support us in the unfolding of our highest selves. Many of our most important ingredients are hidden under a veil of pain. This pain is encoded with vital information and wisdom that we need to assemble our unique gifts.

There is nobody who can teach what you can teach. There is nobody who can offer your unique perspective. Until you see the perfection of all your ingredients, you will constantly be trying to change, fix, and heal your story rather than using it for the Divine purpose for which it was intended.

T h e P a i n o f H at i n g Y o u r R e c i p e Most of us spend the majority of our lives judging the ingredients in our recipe—making what’s inside us wrong. We say, “I have too many eggs” or “There’s not enough sugar” or “If only I had more spice . . .” In other words, we reject some aspects of ourselves while we embrace others. For as long as she can remember, my girlfriend Shirley was told that she had a big mouth. She used to get into trouble at school for talking too much and felt like an outsider in her circle of friends because it wasn’t cool to have so many opinions. Even her family was embarrassed by her outspokenness and cautioned her on more than one occasion to tone it down a bit.

Shirley spent the first twenty-plus years of her life hating this ingredient in her recipe and tried unsuccessfully many times to get rid of it.

One day, while attending her favorite sociology class in college, Shirley was passionately speaking out as usual. After the 34

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class, her professor took Shirley aside and said, “You talk so much!

Have you ever considered pursuing a career in radio? You could get paid to talk all day long!” Suddenly a light flashed in Shirley’s mind and she saw a huge gift in this ingredient that she had always considered to be a curse. Shirley went on to create an award-winning radio show, and today she enjoys a rewarding career as an outspoken and well-loved radio talk-show host.

It is not an easy task to see the perfection of your wounds and inadequacies, but there are no accidents. You—and I mean all of you—are Divine. You might not be expressing the Divine in your current form, but I assure you that once you transform your emotional wounds you will see their perfection. Take horse manure, for example. If you went for a walk in the country and found a pile of manure on your path, you would probably cringe and back away. But to a master gardener interested in growing the biggest and best roses or adding vibrant color to a crunchy bell pepper, that same pile of manure would look like pure gold. What most of us call poop the gardener calls pure potential, because he recognizes it as just the ingredient he needs to nourish his garden.

Hating any part of our recipe guarantees that we will attract painful experiences into our lives. Like attracts like. Our unprocessed pain and self-loathing will call forth people and events that will reflect back to us how we feel about ourselves. Whether in the form of accidents, abusive relationships, financial ruin, or bad jobs, we will constantly find ways to beat ourselves up, because we carry a deep-seated belief that who we are is wrong or that what has happened to us is wrong. When we are unable to see the Divinity of our recipe we are doomed to a life of anger, disappointment, wanting, 35

T h e S e c r e t o f t h e S h a d o w and longing. Our traumas, wounds, disappointments, and pain have come bearing gifts, but until they are integrated they will remain unprocessed lumps in our batter. When we extract the wisdom from these experiences, we find the unique ingredients for our recipe. We have all the qualities, the capabilities, the wisdom, the perfection, the imperfection, and the wherewithal that it takes to bring forth and give the gift that only we possess.

In metaphorical terms this process is about gathering, sifting, mixing, and blending the ingredients we already have in order to make the best dessert imaginable. In Universal terms it’s about embracing and integrating each piece that has contributed to making us who we are today so that we can deliver our unique creation to the world. Accepting ourselves at the deepest level and offering our unique recipe to the Universe is the greatest feast of the human spirit.

Our dramas are an indestructible part of who we are. No matter what we do or how hard we try, we cannot get rid of them. The only choice we have to make is whether we are going to use them or they are going to use us. I’ve chosen to use my dramatic life story to write books, to contribute to others, and to earn a living. Maybe that was the master plan for me: suffer endlessly for twenty-six years and then learn from my past, heal the pain, and turn around and help others learn to transcend their suffering. Today I feel grateful for my pain, knowing that I could never teach what I teach without it. I thank God for the trash and trauma of my past; otherwise, half the pages of my books would be empty.