The Secret of the Shadow (5 page)

Look into your recipe, look into your story, and see what you are not accepting and blessing. This is a good place to begin. Until 36

y o u r u n i q u e r e c i p e

you see the necessity of owning
all
of who are, you can’t extract the jewels from every experience of your life and your story will continue to use you. It will continue to clobber you over the head and make you act as though you’re small. But the moment you see the value in the parts you hate as well as those you feel good about, the moment you recognize that painful event as the perfect ingredient to make your recipe complete, you will witness the magic of transformation. You will bless what you formerly saw as a curse. You will watch as the horrid becomes holy.

Remember, you can spend the next forty years trying to take ingredients out of your batter, or you can just stir it and allow all your trauma, victories, heartaches, and joys to blend into the Divine mix called you.

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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. Think back over your life, recalling the experiences that most profoundly shaped who you are today. Make a list of the significant victories, losses, joys, heartbreaks, and disappointments that have made your life distinct.

2. Make a list of the aspects of yourself and your life that you have had difficulty embracing—the parts of your recipe that you have tried to get rid of. Maybe you have long resisted the fact that you are not athletically inclined or the perception that you are less attractive than others. Have you felt cheated or defeated because of a handicap, a loss of love or money, or a trauma that occurred many years ago? Make a list of all the ingredients in your recipe that you believe have no value or have been a thorn in your side.

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Contemplation

=

“Every aspect of me and my life

contributes an essential ingredient
that allows me to fulfill

my Divine purpose.”

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= Chapter 3 <

E xploring the

Great and Mysterious

Story of You

Each of us has a story that is uniquely ours. Like a fingerprint, it distinguishes and separates us from those around us.

Etched within our stories is the accumulation of everything that has left a mark on our lives. Every person, event, circumstance, and situation that has touched us deeply traces itself into our psyche. Whether our lives have been touched by a great parent, a childhood illness, an inspiring teacher, or a neglectful caregiver, each of these experiences remains with us, becoming an integral part of our identity. The conclusions we make about these events, as well as the meanings we assign to them, get ingrained into our psyche, creating the story line for our personal dramas.

I want to make sure you understand that your story is not bad.

In fact, it is probably your most precious commodity. But it is vital for you to know that even though your story is not bad, it is limiting.

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T h e S e c r e t o f t h e S h a d o w Your story encapsulates your existence, limiting it to a small, insignificant part of your humanity rather than allowing you access to your entire self. But as soon as you recognize your story, make peace with it, and extract its vital ingredients, you can step out of the smallness of your lowest thoughts and step into the fulfillment of your greatest dreams.

D i s t i n g u i s h i n g Y o u r S t o r y Our stories contain the collection of feelings, beliefs, and conclusions that we have been accumulating and dragging around our entire lives. Our stories are heavy because they live inside our egos and our egos are almost
always
serious. They are seldom filled with light, love, and the frolicking delight of a child at play. Most often they are focused on the negative. The whole basis for our stories exists in what could have been, should have been, or might have been. Our stories are sprinkled with pain, loss, and regret and frosted over with hope, desire, and fantasy. Our dramas live in the memory of the past and in the fantasy of the future. Every negative thought about the past that enters our minds lives inside our stories, as do all our feelings of loss and hopelessness. Our fantasies about “The day this happens” or “When I finally reach my goal”

live inside our stories. Rarely do our stories show up in the present moment, when we are simply being with what is. Like shadows, our stories follow us around wherever we go, hiding the truth of who we are. They are never far out of sight, but they can only be seen when they are examined in the light of day.

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e x p l o r i n g t h e g r e at a n d m y s t e r i o u s s t o r y o f y o u Recently I led a weekend workshop as part of a seven-month Integrative Coaching Program that I teach. The second night of the workshop we decided to have a pajama party. Sixty of us curled up in our favorite pj’s and prepared for a fun-filled evening of “story time.” I was wearing my favorite Mandarin Chinese pajamas, while others came clad in flannels, nightdresses, and housecoats. Some of the men sported oversize T-shirts and boxer shorts with cute little prints. Since our focus that evening was to be on distinguishing and sharing our individual personal dramas, I wanted to create a light and uplifting atmosphere to offset the seriousness that most of us attach to our stories. We take our stories so seriously, I explained, because we believe they are the truth.

The purpose of our pajama party was to explore and expose both our stories and the shadow beliefs that hold our dramas in place. I asked everyone to close their eyes and try to remember a time when they were small, before the age of five or six, when they felt lost, alone, sad, or scared—a time when something happened that jarred their reality. I asked them to notice whatever event came to mind and explained to them that this incident would, even though they might not understand its significance, hold a clue to the theme of their personal drama.

I shared with the group what came up for me the first time I did this process. The incident that popped into my mind was a scene in front of a house I lived in when I was three. I could see many people running around, looking behind bushes, and talking secretly to one another. I was standing by the side of the house, huddled in a corner next to the wall. Someone had just robbed a store in our neighborhood, and the police thought the man had 43

T h e S e c r e t o f t h e S h a d o w run through our yard. My entire family and many of our neighbors were all excitingly looking for clues to help in capturing this criminal. I stood scared and separate from the crowd. No one seemed to notice me. I felt like I was caught in a world that I had no part in. All I could see through my young three-year-old eyes were a bunch of grown-ups not caring about where I was or what I was doing.

Unknowingly I had made a critical decision that day that would forever alter the way I perceived myself and others. I made this incident mean that no one cared about me. And like any good human, I had to come up with an explanation for
why
no one paid attention to me. I decided it had to be because I wasn’t important enough to deserve their attention—because, after all, if I were important, my family and relatives would have noticed me and would have cared that I was feeling alone and ignored. Of course, I could have chosen any of a number of interpretations, but once I was inside my story I had to choose the most disempowering explanation I could find. It turns out, not surprisingly, that “No one cares about me” is one of my core shadow beliefs and is the central theme in my personal saga. Standing there more than thirty years later, I still remembered feeling completely left out and all alone.

After I shared this story, it became clear to the group what their assignment was for the evening. Everyone then set out on the mission to uncover their life drama, the story that defines who they are and keeps them locked inside the capsule of their individual realities. We split into smaller groups, huddling together in tight little circles, and began.

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e x p l o r i n g t h e g r e at a n d m y s t e r i o u s s t o r y o f y o u Peter, a soft-spoken man in his mid thirties, decided to go first in our group. He sat there, staring blank-faced at us. I asked him to close his eyes and recall an incident from his past. After a couple of moments, Peter began to describe a time when he was six years old. His mother had walked into his room while he was playing with his best friend, John, and, with anger in her voice, had begun to reprimand the boys for leaving their bikes on the front porch.

When Peter didn’t respond to her, she had flown off into a rage and begun screaming, smacking him, and telling him he was good for nothing and that she wished she had never had him. Peter had been traumatized. He sat drenched in his own tears. Peter decided that day that his mother’s words and actions meant that he was bad and didn’t deserve to be alive.

The humiliation from that event still showed on his face twenty-nine years later. It was obvious by the level of Peter’s emotion and the clarity with which he recalled this event that he had touched on one of his core shadow beliefs: “I am good for nothing.” Together with our group Peter began to look for the ways this theme had woven itself into the other events in his life. In a very short time Peter recounted numerous other events about his overbearing, abusive mother and the ways she confirmed his belief that he was in fact “good for nothing.” He shared all the ways he had been dominated by her, how he felt powerless to stand up to her and be a man, and how, as a result, he had never learned to stand up to the women who came into his life.

Peter constantly found himself with women who would remind him that he wasn’t good enough to be with them. Painfully he shared all the ways women had taken advantage of him, and 45

T h e S e c r e t o f t h e S h a d o w how powerless he felt whenever he was in the presence of a woman he loved. Peter shared how he has been trying to prove that he is good for something by going out of his way in his personal relationships, and how he strives to be useful and helpful. But, he added, he always seems to fail. His story constantly confirms that his mother was right and that he is, in fact, “good for nothing.”

= <

Elizabeth, a shy girl and one of the youngest in our group, waited quietly for her turn and spoke only after I had reassured her it was okay. In a soft voice Elizabeth told us that she was an only child and that both her parents were highly educated professionals who always had high expectations of her. To the great disappointment of her parents, Elizabeth never did well in school.

Even the best tutors couldn’t help Elizabeth bring her grades up to par, and when she was seventeen she received the crushing news that she hadn’t been accepted into the college her parents had chosen for her.

Elizabeth made that incident mean “There is something wrong with me,” and this shadow belief became the theme of her life story. She felt like a failure and resigned herself to the fact that her life would never amount to anything. Since she had already decided she wasn’t smart enough to win her parents’ approval, she opted out of going to college and focused all her attention on getting married and starting a family. But after three years of trying to get pregnant, Elizabeth was told by doctors that she couldn’t conceive a child. Again she was faced with the overwhelming feeling that there was “something wrong with her” and that she was a disappointment to her husband and to herself.

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e x p l o r i n g t h e g r e at a n d m y s t e r i o u s s t o r y o f y o u

= <

The stories went on and on. The more of them we heard, the clearer it became that each of us was living according to the shadow beliefs that had become the theme of our stories. We were spending our time creating events and situations that allowed us to act out the themes of our dramas. It didn’t matter how much pain surrounded the stories or what we chose to make the events of our lives mean; one thing was universal: The story was always dramatic, repetitive, and highly personal. The major themes, although slightly different, all wept, “There is something wrong with me. I’m not good enough. My life doesn’t matter.” The common song was “Poor me, poor me, poor me.”

As the night went on, we began to extract the shadow beliefs that infiltrated all our personal stories. Until that night most of the people sitting there had held these beliefs to be the truth rather than what they were: shadow beliefs that had become the main story line of their dramas. I explained that although each of us has many shadow beliefs, one of them will take on the central theme in our personal dramas: thus Peter’s “I am good for nothing” theme, and Elizabeth’s “There is something wrong with me.” Over the last ten years I have led thousands of people through the Shadow Process, a three-day transformational workshop. And in doing so I have discovered that there are three main shadow beliefs shared by virtually every human being. These beliefs are: I’m not good enough.

I don’t matter.

There is something wrong with me.

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T h e S e c r e t o f t h e S h a d o w I have also discovered that there are countless variations on these beliefs. As you read the list of shadow beliefs that follows, see if you can identify the core belief that serves as the theme of your story.

Nobody likes me.

I don’t belong.

Something’s wrong with me.

I’m too stupid.

I’m incompetent.

I’m unwanted.

I’m not enough.

I’m a doormat.

I’m not special.

I’m unworthy.

I’m undeserving.

I don’t matter.

I’m unimportant.

I’m inappropriate.

I’m inadequate.

I’m insignificant.

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e x p l o r i n g t h e g r e at a n d m y s t e r i o u s s t o r y o f y o u I’m useless.

My life doesn’t make a difference.

I’m a nobody.

I’m damaged.

I’m rotten.