Personal Development and Beyond – Embracing the Shadow
The world of personal development and beyond is a great adventure but it is not simply the journey into an experience of having everything you wish. This might be the wish of your ego but it is rarely the call of your soul. The soul is not some ‘thing’ that is improved upon or something to be perfected. You can improve on something but you cannot improve on the nothing that lives as the eternal potential to be and is everything. Does this mean we are to do nothing? The answer to this question is the answer to many spiritual questions. The answer, “Yes and No.” Real personal development and beyond requires practice, commitment and discipline. You are practicing, not so that you can be improved, but that you can be revealed. You are a revelation. You don’t make that revelation happen. What real personal development is doing is creating space for that which is beyond and that which is impersonal. Nothing is lost in this process except the idea the you are someone living separate from the whole of Creation.
One of the issues that one meets along the personal development and beyond journey is the issue of the shadow. This is a term given by the soul friend Carl Jung, the Swiss psychiatrist, to those aspects of ourselves that we disown. Most everyone has a shadow. This writer certainly does and meets with its power on regular occasions. This is frightening and if it does not scare you or make you feel uncomfortable then it really is not the shadow self. My shadow issues centre around violence, emotional abuse, neglect and alcohol. All of these are aspects of my personal shadow. Because I am graced the knowing of what it is to be at-one-ment, it does not mean I live as one who always feels whole. There have been and will always continue to be wisdom teachers who are, what Jim Marion in “Death of the Mythic God calls, “cognitively enlightened” but not emotionally enlightened. In making this statement I am not in any way claiming to be enlightened.
I have, for the most of my life, walked this world with a sorrow that is unsaid. I was taught that it was OK to be happy. In fact that was the one thing that was insisted upon. So I buried all the sorrow I felt inside. It was not by accident that I am drawn to sing and tell the in-depth story of the Irish folk Song “She Moved Through the Fair.”
My young love said to me,
My mother won’t mind
And my father won’t slight you
For your lack of kind”
And she stepped away from me
And this she did say:
It will not be long, love,
Till our wedding day”
As she stepped away from me
And she moved through the fair
And fondly I watched her
Move here and move there
And then she turned homeward
With one star awake
Like the swan in the evening
Moves over the lake
The people were saying,
No two e’er were wed
But one had a sorrow
That never was said
And I smiled as she passed
With her goods and her gear,
And that was the last
That I saw of my dear.
Last night she came to me,
My dead love came in
So softly she came
That her feet made no din
As she laid her hand on me
And this she did say
It will not be long, love,
‘Til our wedding day
This song is my song. I am both the young lovers. I am the one who has the whisper of eternity and comes to tell him that it will not be long till the time that the mortal me will be wedded to this experience of the eternal now. I am also the one who, in the call to personal development and beyond refuses the call to this experience of sacred unity. I am the one who is scarred by dreams of its invitation. I am the one who chooses to avoid the beyond aspect of personal development, I have, however, over a long time, learned that this restistance is something that happens. The more powerful the call to the surrender to the young love that represents the highest potential within you the more the shadow appears.
Personal Development needs Resistance.
What people tend to do when they see the darkness arise within themselves is to run the other way. This is natural to the ego but it is the refusal of the invitation from the soul to grow. It is often through resistance that personal development in alignment with higher consciousness grows in us. The Hindus call this resistance samsara – the world of suffering. One, as a hero, journeying into Love takes this stuff of resistance and uses it to turn the lead of separateness into the gold of at-one-ment. This is the true wisdom of the spiritual teaching
Resist not Evil
If you follow this call to personal development and beyond will your life be more comfortable? Again, the answer is Yes and No. There are several stages along the journey into personal development and beyond. There is a three-fold process at every stage. There is the stage of birthing, the stage of living and stage of dying. Along the journey, what once assisted you in the development of the persona, now becomes a resistance. Does this mean you should despair? Only if you think you can do nothing about it. At a point in the process there is stream entry. This is where you know who you are and that the Universal intelligence that brought you into existence is Love and will not now let you go.
Personal Development is not always Sweetness and Light.
Personal Development and beyond is not a journey into all that is sweetness and light. You are already that. You don’t make yourself sweet and loveable because this is who you are. What you do is practice working to transmute that which is unloved within you into that which is Love. The real work is not done when everything is going incredibly well and when you are patting yourself on the back for all the goals you have set and achieved. When life is going incredibly well you are drinking, metaphorically speaking, from the wellspring of your connection to the One Source. This is living water. What happens when you sup at this wellspring is that you give it away. You have power. You have energy. You have vision. You share. You have faith in this sharing.
If this wellspring arises from the true source of well-being, which is your connection to the Source, then you will be grounded. This does not mean your life situation is not difficult. It means that the ground upon which you have your being in form is known. Does this mean you won’t have shadows appear in your life? No, it does not. The shadow energy within you is very powerful. It is powerful within this writer. I suspect it is the powerful within all writers. Writing is one way in which I invite the seeing of such shadow aspects of myself and the way in which I facilitate the personal development and beyond journey. Storytelling and story writing is also a way in which I have invited the dance of shadow within. This has been a long and noble tradition throughout all world cultures. We see this happening in all great movies, the contemporary way of carrying on this tradition.
In my personal shadow are issues of shame, anger, rage, violence and other lesser invitations. When they have sought to overwhelm me I have looked for, and asked for support in many ways. The hardest part of this process is often overcoming the resistance to saying and admitting, “I cannot do this on my own.” The ego does not like this one little bit. The moving through this resistance of feeling the shame of personal weakness becomes a true experience of personal development. So the sorrow that never was said is often the sorrow held within the dynamic of the family, the community, the nation, the world. When you, as an individual, take it upon yourself to integrate the shadow within yourself you become the proverbial black sheep of the family. This is the meaning of one of the more difficult passages in the Bible where one of the greatest black sheep that ever lived said,
Unless you hate your mother and your father you cannot follow me.”
This statement comes from one of the greatest wisdom teachers who has lived in form as the invitation to the birthright of knowing you are the flow of eternity. What is he saying? Should this teacher of Love have been arrested for inciting hatred? All families have shadows. This includes the family called the nation. It, too, has a shadow. To grow in Love is to move beyond the family script. It is to transcend the conditioning of time and culture to come into the flow of who you are and not what you have been made to be. To do this takes tremendous courage. To do this means to step outside the fold and become what I call an Outsider.
Personal Development places you Outside the norm.
The Outsider is a sort of shaman. They take on the shadow of the family, the community, the nation, the world. The greatest shaman was the wisdom teacher Jesus who took on the world shadow. This process is called Christing and has little to do with what would be called christianity (please note the small ‘c’). For a full explanation of he journey called Christing there is no better read than Putting on the Mind of Christ
To truly engage with personal development and beyond is to know resistance and to develop the way in which you can work with resistance but not deny it. It is to know that personal development is something of a paradox. You are invited to learn and to keep on learning. In this Personal Development and Beyond blog and related website I invite you to lean all sorts of things – poetry, storytelling, songs, geancannach (love talking) – but they are not inviting you to be an improvement on who you are.
In this journey of personal development and beyond be very kind to yourself. As it says in the wonderful poem Desiderata by Max Ehrman:
You are a child of God. You have a right to be here.
You are the creation of the Mother/Father source of Love. It created you for its own joy. Very often it feels like you are very far away from such an idea, let alone such an experience. However, that never changes the truth of your existence.
As it says in A Course in Miracles:
Nothing real can be threatened,
Nothing unreal exists.
Herein lies the peace of God
Personal Development and Beyond has a different Embrace
Remember to be of good cheer. Practice kindness to yourself. You are not alone. All those who have journeyed through the personal development and beyond, which is a kind of death of the ego, are with you and ever will be. What appears dark now is never dark in eternity. You are given a great opportunity to live as a light worker. Only you do not do this by denying the dark. This is an aspect of personal development work that is not widely enough known about. One of the best books written on this subject is by the writer Debbie Ford who writes in Dark Side of the Lightchasers
Embracing The Shadow
The process of embracing our shadow side calls us to uncover the gifts and receive the wisdom hidden within each and every aspect of ourselves, particularly the ones that we are ashamed of or embarrassed by. Rather than viewing our weakness, our smallness, our insecurities or our rage as enemies or as obstacles to moving forward in our lives, this process guides us to embrace our so-called defects as the powerful teachers that they are. The Shadow Process is founded on the understanding that every quality, every emotion and every experience comes bearing great gifts. Once we learn how to uncover these gifts we become the powerful masters of our lives. We develop the ability to transform thoughts, beliefs or situations that once held us back into fuel for our spiritual evolution and the manifestation of our dreams. Embracing our shadow allows us to reclaim the power we once gave away. When we are at peace within ourselves, our self-esteem no longer depends on the approval of others. Our own sense of self-worth is no longer at the mercy of how other people feel about us. When we receive the gifts of our dark side, something truly miraculous occurs. Our wounds are transformed into wisdom and the parts of us we once believed to be our deepest flaws are revealed as our greatest assets.
This is the integrating shadow process that is understood in mythological stories as turning lead into gold. It is the paradoxical experience that what one often most resists is what really takes us into the beyond of personal development. We are no longer seeking to prove that we are someone because of our achievements but we have revealed to us what is truly miraculous within us. This is the knowing that we are not separate from the power of Love that created us for its own joy. This is the paradox of the shadow within the journey of personal development and beyond.
OTHER GREAT CONTENT Here is some other material that will further your personal and spiritual development and your understanding of the various stages of spiritual development.
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STAGES OF PERSONAL GROWTH - This article describes four levels or stages of Personal Growth -- social accomplishment, psychological growth, spiritual progress and transformation.
TIME OUT FOR TRUTH - This spiritual wisdom podcast and website explores the great truths of the ages, and authors like Vernon Howard, J. Krishnmamurti, Gurdjieff and Anthony de Mello.
THE NEXT STAGES IN HUMAN EVOLUTION - We are now entering the twenty-first century and the third millennium. A perceptible feeling hangs in the air that the world is rapidly approaching one of history’s decisive seismic shifts. Changes are looming ahead o
