To survive I emulated these attitudes consciously and subconsciously in parts of my internal tribe. Inadvertently and sadly taking up the role of abuser towards myself and others in its wake. Rarely allowing myself to feel or own moments of sensitivity or tenderness, my subconscious numbing and repression being instant and almost total in all but a few situations. Recoiling from, feeling uncomfortable with and irrespectful of those who expressed their sensitivity and tenderness, all the more harshly if they were male. And yet I felt attracted to the more artistic, poetic and creative types who tended to be more on the sensitive side – nothing about trauma and wounding is ever logical in my experience.

Concurrently I incarnated with a strong warrior spirit willing to protect whoever was marginalized or attacked, most often than not the weak, the powerless, and the sensitive and tender. And so this specific internal war was seeded and took a great part of my energy, attention, and capacity to live life in inner peace and full creative expression away. Decades of moving from one perception to the other, feeling good about myself in one and painful shame when the harshness overtook.

I began my work on this in my late teenage years with whatever tools I could find in a world that was still pre-internet and little psychological and neuroscientific research being accessible to ‘normal’ people. I learned to manage the external expressions of the abuser, by sheer willpower, and had to endure many defeats and failures without the soothing balm of self compassion, which heaped more shame to the mountain I already held in the subconscious. In my thirties things thankfully began to take a turn as better tools and practices became available to me and I opened more to ‘esoteric’ tools. This is where my true and most effective work commenced. Everything before could only be compared to putting bandaids on a deep and infected wound. A temporary solution at best but mere useless actionism in the long run.

Fragility

Reclaiming my tenderness and sensitivity only happened once I had learned to differentiate it from the fragility of my wounded parts. In my mind fragility is an expression of the egoic nature, its existence serves to protect the status quo and is counterproductive to true healing and integration. Fragility is what makes us reactive, defensive and stubbornly avoidant to all that would heal its underlying pool of emotions, sensations, memories distorting and festering in the depth of the subconscious expertly hidden from our waking awareness. 

Fragility being a function of the ego is cunning, a shapeshifter and spinner of illusion which manage to enchant us into believing them to be reality. Fragility’s rationalizations and emotive reactivities have an intensity of pull that effortlessly highjacks our awareness into its states of hyper-activation and limited higher brain functioning.

To calm fragility I have to face, feel and integrate trauma and shadows – it is, of course, an ongoing process as we keep experiencing new traumas which express in novel ways and necessitate new and better adapted tools of knowing and healing. 

Trauma and Shadow work

A lot of people speak about trauma and shadow work these days but when I look at them and their words I can often sense with clarity that they only ventured to do the most superficial work on these themselves. Rare is the voice of wisdom and the glint in the eyes of those who went deep into the abyss of trauma and shadow.

I have written and shared some insights into my ongoing trauma and shadow work here, but admittedly only in the lightest way, as to write about it as I experience it is nigh impossible as our language lacks words to aptly describe the depth of despair, excruciating pain and abject sense of disorientation and lostness and all the other hues of sensations and emotions that I have to sit with as I contain my impulse to flee and deny whatever arises. This work is not for the faint at heart, it is definitely not for those lacking in discipline, honesty or the lazy.

Shadow and trauma work necessitate much courage, resilience and willingness to begin them and stick through the challenging moments, but the most precious qualities needed are cultivated in the process when handled right: self compassion, self love, self trust.

Without self compassion and love we cannot gauge in a helpful way how much work is needed, when to take breaks, when to resource ourselves by doing things we love and by taking loving care of our body, mind and spirit like the amazing parents and lovers we never had. Without self trust we will crumble whenever our fragility speaks in the language of fear and catastrophizing instead of trudging on the seemingly endless path of self work. And in my case I will add that I needed my inner light and spirit, the aspect at the core of my being, which has always led and gently pushed me towards healing and integration and picked me up whenever I was down on my knees.

In shadow and trauma work I learned to feel and engage with my sensitivity and tenderness in wholly new ways.

Sensitivity and Tenderness

When sensitivity and tenderness are released from the repression of our wounded patterns we might easily feel overwhelmed by them and with the old judgements still echoing in our minds we might feel like stepping back or distracting ourselves in order not to feel them. And we might even feel shame-anxiety or the shame that was induced into us when we showed ourselves in tenderness. 

It is key how we respond in these mystical moments of new beginnings. We are learning emotional intelligence and competence here. It takes time, effort, compassion and a playful attitude to navigate this with grace. This is where our trust in ourselves deepens: In daring to experience how much we can stretch, how much more than our mind believes we can actually take and what happens when we mindfully move past the boundaries of our thinking. 

It is uncomfortable to be sensitive or tender, things get under our skin much more than they ever did in our previous armored iterations of self, therefore we will have to learn ways of dealing with sensations and emotions as they arise and keep tinkering away until we find our stride. It helps to train the mind to look out for the gifts of these states: What are we experiencing, learning and accessing through being sensitive and tender? Where do we need to set new boundaries now that we are becoming softer and more receptive to energies and life? 

I have found, with an infinite sense of awe and wonder, how much strength and resilience I derive from reconnecting with and making ample spaces for sensitivity and tenderness. Once I had my critical selves come around and welcome them, external comments or dis-ease could not get to me as much anymore. I am more sensitive, I feel more of the violence and harshness that has been normalized and embedded in human relating and communicating. And yet it is by far easier to balance and integrate any harm encountered in a state of tenderness and sensitivity than it ever was to do so from states of fragility. 

In other words it is SAFER to be in open, sensitive and receptive states than it ever could be to be armored, protected and therefore in fragility. Read that again and ponder it!

Yes, it may seem that people can hurt me more easily than they could hurt previous iterations of myself. But to an awakened and self-knowing observer, who has done quite a bit of deeper trauma and shadow work, it is clear that the cost of armoring and hyper-activations are much higher and self-destructive than open-hearted living could ever incur. 

Living in our trauma and without integration of shadow has deeply destructive costs to our mental and physical health down to changes of our DNA and limits our capacity of making a good life for us in all other aspects of life. That is why I often silently shake my head at those who are health fanatics, experts on nutrition, body work, health hacks, etc. but deeply avoidant of anything that would take them deeper into trauma and shadow work. And though working on your psyche and subconscious unlocks positive effects for your physical health, merely focusing on the body only has a lightening but not a consistently healing effect on our psyche and subconscious. 

The only adjuvants or partial alternatives to doing self work I have observed are conscious and shamanic plant medicine treatments and highly charged and focused energy healing work, which both take a level of mastery most energy healers unfortunately cannot access due to their own states of fragmentation and lacking spiritual mastery.

From my current vantage point I am observing on the global plane humanity experimenting with fragility and clashes of fragilities.

My hope is that we are becoming aware of the immense costs of egoic games of protection, victimhood, abuse and dominance and that we heal and transcend them in our race consciousness. Ending the need for endless replays of hurtful and destructive patterns and opening the pathway to higher and new ways of engaging with each other, with animals, plants, and our beloved mother planet.

I see the opportunity for us as a collective to learn and evolve past fragility and learn to live with sensitivity and tenderness instead. Deeply empowered by the gifts of tenderness and enriched by the dimensions of life, joy and fulfillment it unlocks for us.

This is the dream, hope, and vision I hold at my core.

Art “Neuroses in Blossom” by Shikeith Cathey 

The post On Fragility, Tenderness and Sensitivity appeared first on Venuskind.

In the past 5 years I have shared a little on the disruptions, betrayals and ending of friendships that were very dear and precious to me. Yet I did so only haltingly and while keeping the depth of pain, disappointment and devastation I have felt mostly contained to myself. Not out of fear of burdening you or making myself ‘too’ vulnerable but out of a sense of sacredness of those feelings. They were mine to feel and hold in their entirety and to share them with another necessitated, in my healing phase, a deep degree of intimacy and trust with another as well as the knowing they can and know how to hold this space with me as I was feeling and processing.

Now I feel I have come to the end of said cycle of learning and can more holistically and openly share my experience and process as I stand in a space of enough integration and transformation that I can communicate it in a way that makes this a sharing of medicine and not of distortion or affirmation of imbalance. As I progress on my path I am learning the importance not only of the intention behind my words but also their form and accompanying energy and to hold myself more accountable in being mindful of all three.

Looking back from where I stand now I understand how these 3 friendships ended in a way that opened a gateway to my three core woundings and original trauma triggers:

The first outright abandoned me in a rare and precarious moment I turned to him for help. 

The second crossed boundaries, triggered inadvertently my childhood sexual abuse and manipulations and denied me an opportunity to talk about it and ground myself through reconnecting, co-regulation and save our friendship which was very precious to me. 

The third neglected our relationship, took my being there for her for granted, without any willingness and capacity for reciprocity and distanced herself from intimacy and sharing in a time of extraordinary challenges and hardships in my life.

It is hard to convey in words the depth of abject pain I felt at the betrayal and abandonment, the disorientation, the distrust in my relational system and capacity to choose and cultivate friendships… the regression into the wounded child I was, feeling the vastness of despair, disconnection and loneliness and the need to hold my raging protectors in all their anger, resentment and vengeful feelings. All of which lasted for years.

It is fascinating how I was guided to respond to all three in a unique way and how that staid the same or shifted in unexpected ways. 

The first one I dismissed out of my life without any further communication or attempts at repairing because I sensed the impossibility of it and my total unwillingness to accept that in any of my relationships. If he crossed my path now I would be polite but I would not be open to a reconciliation. Maybe if he led with an embodied apology which expressed in all of his words and actions. And even then, he would have to re-earn my respect and trust which I willfully would not make easy for him.

The second one I unfriended after a period of trying to see them in person and process together what happened and repair the sudden disruption. It was his unwillingness to show up that made me choose to unfriend him although I still loved him deeply and ending the friendship hurt me like little in my life ever managed to hurt me.

The third I didn’t unfriend, I chose to divest my energy and engagement to equal hers and reframe our connection as an acquaintanceship, which is its own kind of ending a friendship in my universe. Though she wanted to repair and work on the friendship, after having gone dark for a long time, I was no longer interested and willing to invest more of my energy. In the grieving process of observing the changes in our connection in the period of her silence I realized a fundamental imbalance in our connection and its inherent limitations. I understood we could not travel into new lands of friendship and connection that were calling me and emerging in my other friendships and connections. And here a rather ruthless aspect of me emerged to insist my energy kept being invested in what was blossoming and not in what has become a part of the past. 

In the past years of tending to my core woundings, confronting my trauma and its distortions to my perceptions and most of all to my relational system I had to get very clear, honest and intentional with how I define relationships, how I am willing to show up and invest in them, where I am unavailable or outright unwilling to engage and where I am willing to extend myself even if it is challenging and painful. These have been years of reclusion and hermiting, pulling back from almost all real life social engagements apart from a select few that made me come out of my shell with their love and persistence. Years of deep contemplative inquiry, shadow work, self love and internal consolidation, while holding my remaining inner circle with as much love and care I could muster.

Now I look back with gratitude and see the immense gift these endings have been, each in its own way was a portal into healing the most armored and tender woundings of my past, initiations into a major part of the integration and healing I needed to bring to my being. The anger and resentment I felt have been transmuted into a changed inner landscape and wonderfully forged, nurtured and cultivated close friendships on whom I know I can rely and lean  and who have been my light in the darkest passages of this journey. The disappointment has been balanced with compassion for their humanity and storylines of trauma and wounding. All that is left in my wounded child and protectors is compassion, love, gratitude for them and a clarity on my needs, wants, desires and boundaries for friendships.

And with that a fundamental shift in my relational system has come about that fills me with amazement and awe as I observe its unfolding and blossoming. 

For most of my life my system could only conceptualize, feel and allow people to be in my life if the connection aligned with my wishes and expectations and if we had a huge falling out it was impossible to repair or reconnect. Now there is a spaciousness in me which can accept and adapt to the shifts of relationships and allow for others to weave in and out of my life within my internal framework of sovereignty and self love. Which means that I need not create strict boundaries and walls to keep people out or in, I trust myself to respond adequately or repair where I stumbled and allow others to do the same as long. I no longer lose sight of my sovereignty, wellbeing and self love in my friendships.

Another gift of this painful cycle is my ability to fully surrender to the leadership of my higher self or soul. A surrender and total trust which allowed me to fully be present and open-hearted with the second friend when he crossed my path a couple of weeks ago. This synchronistic event allowed me to experience the healing of residuals of the above mentioned themes of this cycle with full consciousness in the slow and measured pace of my soul, body and heart. To witness the grace of liberation of past pain and limitations is beyond words. All I verbalize is that I feel a depth of humility and awe for the becoming I am gifting myself, for the blessings I now can fully appreciate in unison of all parts of my being, for the excitement of the possibilities that are opening up and a warm welcome and receptivity for what wants to be born from this.

I have no idea if the reconnection is a process of closure before parting, or if it is the beginning of a new friendship, which may be based on a more conscious and heartful foundation, or whatever else it could be. All I know is that I have grown and get to taste the beauty of freedom and wholeness in sweeter ways than I have ever tasted them in this incarnation. For this I give thanks with all of my being!

So my loves if your friendships break, if people fall away, love yourself into wholeness and sidestep best you can any temptations to frame them as toxic, unworthy or similar. 

See it is our dearest soul kin who will volunteer to teach us our most painful and lessons, not out of negativity but their souls generosity and love toward ours. They avail themselves to enter the field of trauma and take the karma upon themselves of hurting us for our consciousness and soul expansion. I bow to these souls in gratitude and in the knowing of the costly gift they have given me, even if their human expression is unconscious and not capable to show up in the love of their soul essence or if my human decides they no longer have a place in my life.

May our human family evolve into a state where we can co-create our lessons without utilizing pain as the messenger and pathway of learning. And may we be gentle with each other and hone our skills of healing self and our relationships until we get there.

And may we hold the ones who stand by us in loyalty and love with the gentlest and most nurturing embrace and keep showing up for them in all the ways they need. I bow to my beloveds who carried me through this time of pain and healing with their love, presence, compassion, humor, being and radiance. 

The post Friendships, Betrayal, Abandonment, Neglect & Healing into Wholeness appeared first on Venuskind.

At my core I hold a hypersensitive, loving, gentle and guileless little girl believing firmly in the goodness of humanity. These very qualities singled me out and attracted many forms of subtle, overt and pathologically cruel abuse and heaped shame on all of these traits beyond anything I could bear. To the hurt and confused younger versions of my self it felt at as if life was teaching me to drop these aspects of self and so I developed a seemingly powerful outer persona that numbed the sensitive in me to a degree my mind could handle, learning and expressing the ways of unlove like a new language I had to gain fluency in, practicing delighting in harshness and derision of others, cultivating a cold unfeeling capacity for ruthlessness and hyper-vigilant distrust.

In my healing journey of reclaiming said little girl a new layer of shame began to be heaped on all the traits and behaviors I adopted in my survival and moving on from the fear-inducing past. As I reclaimed what lay at my beginning, external voices, once again, shamed the parts of me who helped me survive. Another layer of burden and drama to work through thanks to the ‘good girl’ and ‘love and light’ bias I surrounded myself with in this phase of my life. A growing unease and restlessness kept me looking for the next step of my journey because this felt equally unhealthy and unbalanced as the phase of survival did before.

Enter shadow work and mystical studies to blow dualities and more importantly preferences to smithereens in my mind, then in my emotions and now successively in my body. Nothing about this chapter of healing was and is exactly easy or painless, and yet the pain was ‘just’ the pain of having to let go of lies and misperceptions that had endeared themselves to me and to welcome the unknown in their place. 

And the deeper and more visceral pain of facing the accumulated shame, the pain of titrating in and out of it until I could hold more of it and for longer periods without giving in to the habit of fleeing it, read compensatory avoidant behavior. It took some time to make my peace with a reality in which I can feel shame, around certain things, and can be lovable and beloved to myself and others. To not judge shame or only perceive its corrosive effects and to see equally its natural and helpful manifestations and functions. To end dualities held in the depth of my subconscious, non-verbal conditionings and belief systems.

The Unknown – the ultimate fear fed by the orthodoxy of beliefs, the illusion of knowing what I haven’t experienced, researched, explored or deeply contemplated myself and the fear of ego death. Who would have thought that the unknown has always been my best friend, a space of blissfulness veiled by the nonsensical lies of my conditioning?

I like to think of the Unknown as another word for the Field – the Dark Mother of all that is in form, sound, geometry and light. The first step of the One becoming the many and the last in going from the illusion of separation back into oneness. I like to gender the Unknown as a HER: mystical, nurturing, creative, playful, surprising and loving from a non-dual perception and manifesting vantage point. 

When I allowed my mind to explore many a rabbit hole or alternative narrative about reality (which some like to label as conspiracy theory in their varying levels of cognitive dissonance), she sat by my side and watched me get drawn into dark and light narratives, snagging here getting entangled there, struggling to grasp the reality of multidimensional concurrent realities feeling my human captivated by some and their strange effects on my biology. When it got intense she would tap on my shoulder and let me gaze deep into her luminous darkness as she smiled at my slow disentanglement and transformation. 

I owe her my freedom from energy sucking entanglements and the clarity that arose with blinding light from the depth of her darkness and I delight in the laughter we shared about my slowness and blindness to fact that fear of the unknown was what allowed for entanglement and entrapment in limiting narratives about life. 

She taught me to dance through and across narratives, to dip my feet, to swim and dive deep into them without losing my perspective or anchored vantage point of not knowing. To entertain ideas which align or contradict with no attachment but with all the more joy and creative playfulness. To be free from the egoic need for certainty, absolute truisms and setting myself apart from others by virtue of illusions of absolute knowing. 

She reminded me to enjoy this ‘soul playground’ and helped me develop new skills of engaging and interacting with it from spaciousness and with bliss.

I bow to the plentiful gifts of embracing the unknown, of letting the dark mother hold me and inspire me through changes and evolutions, to her gifts of expansion to my consciousness and to her mysteries that shall remain untouched by me in this timeline. 

In gratitude to all that is unfolding as I dance with my fellow travelers across timelines, dimensions, incarnations, narratives, system and cultures with lightness, ease and grace!

Art: “Ms. Universe” by Jessi Jumanji

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My (small) self has come a long way in my healing journey utilizing therapy as much as self work in order to achieve inner peace and wellbeing. I am grateful for what I did eventually achieve and learn along the way. Yet I also had to concede that psychology had its limits, that deeper set distortions as well as the unconscious patterns necessitated the tools of spirituality. And as the years progressed intuition guided me to more and more powerful modalities, tools and perception changes. Making me often wonder where I could be today if said tools would have been available to me in my mid or late twenties and leaving me feeling grateful that younger generations will be able to heal faster and better for it.

For the past year I have been in a sublime internal dance of love, care and surrender which deepened my primary relationship with my own being. I observe the way my Self is teaching and healing my self whenever she surrenders and makes space for her to take the lead. Life has slowed down to a crawl internally as the Self illuminates and helps the self figure out the patterns and futilities of patterns to inspire the self to experiment with novel responses and derive joy from this newfound playfulness and ease. There are moments that trigger thoughts and feelings of “I can’t do this!” or “This is too much!” and my Self simply smiles and asks “Are you sure this is not your fear or trauma speaking? Do you know who I am? Do you know what I am?” And my whole being relaxes, leans into the knowing of the Self as the illusions of smallness and fragility fade into historic memories.

Coached by the Self into more balance and inner peace more consciousness and wisdom keeps coming into my knowing. The inner Guru is making every breath and every moment a teaching opportunity which leaves me feeling contemplative and appreciative of the vastness and complexity of life. An inner radiance arises from this dance of love and wisdom, a light that renders my being unshakable yet deeply compassionate.

As I was in deep meditative writing today I realized how things that once would have triggered all sorts of trauma and shadow responses simply make me laugh within. And I think to myself well met old friend, thank you for alerting me to the quality of my frequency which invited you into my experience. Then I recalibrate, rebalance internally while not paying the external event or trigger no mind. I have finally understood what the eastern masters mean when they say “There is nothing to do” when my Self showed me the ineffectivity and waste of energy of the constant toiling and activism of the self. I no longer feel the need to respond or sort things out externally unless intuition clearly nudges me to. Otherwise I am practicing my default of sorting things out in the subtle and energetic realms by sorting out my vibrational state. At first I felt like all kinds of drama and pain might ensue if I did not follow the desires of the self to engage, respond, act upon what had happened. But I chose to trust my Self and practice self composure and containment even if my emotions were in a turmoil and it was rewarded with less and less turmoil and a calming down of the hyper-reactive triggers I used to have. 

I have been living in the experience and knowing of my wholeness for years now but this experience is adding a whole new layer of feeling safe, content and powerful to my inner state of being. Where once co-dependency made me feel existential fears of abandonment and losing another, I feel spacious and complete enough to speak my truth, be myself and dare to lose another. Not from a rebellious or avoidant energy, as part of my trauma let me respond in certain circumstances but from a deep feeling of being whole, loved, cared for, abundant and part of a magnificent universe of love. 

Another realization that made me laugh and shake my head is this:

I used to think that self-realization was about experiencing and knowing one’s Self. Now I see that it can only be the beginning, as self-realization, if it is not a sudden and sustained state of enlightenment, necessitates the self to surrender and hand over the rains to the Self while aligning itself with her and serving her. 

This is where I find true freedom, a freedom which is based on universal truths and truths of Self leadership. And this is also part of the vast magic of love, which I have only begun to explore.

I bow in gratitude and awe to Life, my greatest and most benevolent Guru!

Photography by Venuskind

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The Heroine’s Journey begins with an Initial Separation from feminine values, seeking recognition and success in a patriarchal culture, experiencing spiritual death, and turning inward to reclaim the power and spirit of the sacred feminine. The final stages involve an acknowledgement of the union and power of one’s dual nature for the benefit of all humankind (Murdock, 1990, pp. 4-11). Drawing upon cultural myths, Murdock illustrates an alternative journey model to that of patriarchal hegemony. It has become a template for novelists and screenwriters, shining a light on twentieth-century feminist literature.

The Heroine’s Journey is based on the experience of fathers’ daughters who have idealised, identified with, and allied themselves closely with their fathers or the dominant masculine culture. This comes at the cost of devaluing their personal mothers and denigrating values of the female culture. This occurs for both men and women if not on a personal level, then certainly on a collective level. If the feminine is seen as negative, powerless or manipulative the child may reject those qualities she associates with the feminine, including positive qualities such as nurturing, intuition, emotional expressiveness, creativity and spirituality. On a cultural level, the Separation from the Feminine results from a reaction to images of the feminine presented by the media that are impossible to identify with or because of a lack of feminine imagery in religion.

Gods and goddesses are often seen as diverse ways of being in the world and the ancient goddess Athena symbolises the second stage of the Heroine’s Journey. This Greek goddess of civilization sprang full grown from the head of her father, Zeus. Her mother Metis had been swallowed whole by Zeus, thus depriving Athena of a relationship with her mother. This stage involves an Identification with the Masculine, but not one’s inner personal masculinity. Rather, it is the outer patriarchal masculine whose driving force is power. An individual in a patriarchal society is driven to seek control over themselves and others in an inhuman desire for perfection.

The young girl may see men and the male world as adult and becomes identified with her inner masculine voice, whether that is the voice of her father, god the father, the professional establishment, or the church. Unfortunately, masculine consciousness often tries to help the feminine to speak; it jumps in, interrupts, and takes over, not waiting for her body to know its truth.

The next stage, like the hero’s journey, is the Road of Trials where the focus is on the tasks necessary for ego development. In the outer world, the heroine goes through the same hoops as the hero to achieve success. Everything is geared to climbing the academic or corporate ladder, achieving prestige, position and financial equity, and feeling powerful in the world.

However, in the inner world, her task involves overcoming the myths of dependency, female inferiority or deficit thinking, and romantic love. Many females have been encouraged to be dependent, to disregard their needs for another’s love, to protect another from their success and autonomy.

We live in a society dominated by a masculine perspective where the feminine is perceived as less than the masculine. The Mother Tongue, the language of experience and body knowing is not seen as valid as the Father tongue, the language of analysis. In some families, cultures and religions, being born in a female body is second rate; the female child has therefore failed from the beginning and is marked psychologically as inferior solely because of her gender. In this century the foremost moral issue, from third world countries to the leading world powers, is the abuse and oppression of women and girls around the globe.

The myth of romantic love is that the other will complete her life whether the other is a husband, lover, son, ideology, political party or spiritual sect. The attitude here is that the “other” will actualise her destiny. This stage is symbolised by the myth of Eros and Psyche.

The first part of the heroine’s journey is propelled by the mind and the second part is in response to the heart. The heroine has been working on the developmental tasks necessary to be an adult, to individuate from her parents, and to establish her identity in the outer world. However, even though she has achieved her hard-earned goals, she may experience a sense of Spiritual Aridity. Her river of creativity has dried up and she begins to ask, “What have I lost in this heroic quest?” She has achieved everything she set out to do, but it has come at great sacrifice to her soul. Her relationship with her inner world is estranged. She feels oppressed but doesn’t understand the source of her victimisation.

At this stage, she is afraid to look into the depths of herself and clings instead to past patterns of behavior, old relationships, and a familiar life style. There’s a fear of saying “no” and holding the tension of not knowing what’s next. In Leaving My Father’s House, Jungian analyst Marion Woodman (1992) writes, “It takes a strong ego to hold the darkness, wait, hold the tension, waiting for we know not what. But if we can hold long enough, a tiny light is conceived in the dark unconscious, and if we can wait and hold, in its own time it will be born in its full radiance. The ego then has to be loving enough to receive the gift and nourish it with the best food that new life may eventually transform the whole personality” (p. 115).

At this point, the heroine is faced with a Descent or dark night of the soul, a time of major de-structuring and dismemberment. A descent brings sadness, grief, a feeling of being unfocused and undirected. What usually throws a person into a descent is leaving home, separating from one’s parents, the death of a child, lover or spouse, the loss of identity with a particular role, a serious physical or mental illness, an addiction, the midlife transition, divorce, ageing, or loss of community. The descent may take weeks, month, years, and cannot be rushed because the heroine is reclaiming not only parts of herself, but also the lost soul of the culture. The task here is to reclaim the discarded parts of the self that were split off in the original separation from the feminine – parts that have been ignored, devalued, and repressed, words and feelings swallowed in her quest for success.

Dismemberment and renewal is a key feature of the ancient Sumerian myth of Inanna and Ereshkigal. Inanna, the Queen of the Great Above, journeys to the Underworld to be with her sister Ereshkigal, the Queen of the Great Below. Ereshkigal’s consort has died and Inanna traverses seven thresholds and seven gates to be with her sister in her grief. At each gate she divests herself of symbols of her power. When she reaches the Underworld, Ereshkigal fixes her with the eye of death and hangs her on a peg to rot. Inanna sacrifices herself for the earth’s need for life and renewal. Her death and subsequent return to life predates Jesus Christ’s crucifixion and resurrection by three thousand years.

At this stage in the heroine’s journey, a woman seeks to reclaim a connection with the sacred feminine to better understand her own psyche. She may become involved in research about ancient goddess figures such as Inanna, Ereshkigal, Demeter, Persephone, Kali, or the Marian mysteries. There is an Urgent Yearning to reconnect with the Feminine and to heal the mother/daughter split that occurred with the initial rejection of the feminine. This may or may not involve a healing with one’s personal mother or daughter, but it usually involves grieving the separation from the feminine and reclaiming a connection to body wisdom, intuition and creativity.

The next stage involves Healing the Unrelated or Wounded Aspects of her Masculine Nature as the heroine takes back her negative projections on the men in her life. This involves identifying the parts of herself that have ignored her health and feelings, refused to accept her limits, told her to tough it out, and never let her rest. It also involves becoming aware of the positive aspects of her masculine nature that supports her desire to bring her images into fruition, helps her to speak her truth and own her authority.

The final stage of The Heroine’s Journey is the Sacred Marriage of the Masculine and Feminine, the hieros gamos. A woman remembers her true nature and accepts herself as she is, integrating both aspects of her nature. It is a moment of recognition, a kind of remembering of that which somewhere at the bottom she has always known. The current problems are not solved, the conflicts remain, but one’s suffering, as long as she does not evade it, will lead to a new life. In developing a new feminine consciousness, she has to have an equally strong masculine consciousness to get her voice out into the world. The union of masculine and feminine involves recognising wounds, blessing them, and letting them go.

The heroine must become a spiritual warrior. This demands that she learn the delicate art of balance and have the patience for the slow, subtle integration of the feminine and masculine aspects of her nature. She first hungers to lose her feminine self and merge with the masculine, and once she has done this, she begins to realise this is neither the answer nor the objective. She must not discard nor give up what she has learned throughout her heroic quest, but view her hard-earned skills and successes not so much as the goal but as one part of the entire journey. This focus on integration and the resulting awareness of interdependence is necessary for each of us at this time as we work together to preserve the health and balance of life on earth.

~ Maureen Murdock

Photography: Reflections by Tom Hussey

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“Own your shadow and you will own your life.”                    ~ Aletheia Luna

A couple of weeks back I asked my aspects (higher self) and Source to allow the majority of insights and processing of the integration of my shadow to be done in the dream lab. Not as a cheeky egoic way of avoiding the work, which I am more than glad to do. Whatever leads to freedom and peace is worth its efforts and pain to me. No my thoughts where that in the dream lab my subconscious, conscious and higher mind are all present and actively engaging each other and therefore that would be the most potent arena for change.

The first nights came with a deluge of imagery and intense feelings of frustration which led to my lucid dreamer waking or changing the dream repeatedly which didn’t get me anywhere with the inner work I am focused on. But then I was intuitively guided to get my black obsidian crystals and place them under my pillow… and everything shifted. My obsidian guided dreams have been a joy, especially now with the current full moon energy.

Every night I have at least 2 different subjects that are being reflected and integrated. Dreams putting me in scenarios that trigger shadow responses and allow me to experiment with the most aligned way of perceiving, framing and responding to them until it feels right. Showing me where my reactivity blinded me to much more peaceful and easy responses and leading to lots of laughter and gratitude upon waking as the train of insights and knowing keeps anchoring itself in my conscious awareness.

For many days in a row my first words uttered loudly have been “Thank you!” with a smile or giggle as things which would have taken weeks and months to work out are illuminated, resolved and released with one small but powerful dream. With every night and lessons learned I feel a little bit lighter and more content in my being. I am so glad I chose to explore the magical capacities of my being by following my intuition. And pleased that I can do it on my own and what is more with much entertainment, humor and ease. Who would have known that shadow work could take this form once the pain, shame and guilt have been acknowledged? 

It is yet another amazing gift of this year to be able to do a part of my self work in my dreams!

Dreams are a safe, magical and playful space for learning and communication between different parts of my Self even across timelines and dimensions. What a blessing to be able to tap into these vast resources for knowing, healing, integration and pure joy!

I welcome the blessings and gifts of my path with gratitude.

Photography “Inbetween” of Dreamworld series by Lotta van Droom

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I will end this lecture by telling you that the fear is not real. It is truly an illusion, but you must go through it by feeling it. Through the gateway of feeling your weakness lies your strength; through the gateway of feeling your pain lies your pleasure and joy; through the gateway of feeling your fear lies your security and safety; through the gateway of feeling your loneliness lies your capacity to have fulfillment, love and companionship; through the gateway of feeling your hate lies your capacity to love; through the gateway of feeling your hopelessness lies true and justified hope; through the gateway of accepting the lacks of your childhood lies your fulfillment now. When you experience all these feelings and states, it is essential that you do not delude yourself into believing they are caused by anything you experience or fail to experience now. Whatever the now brings forth is only the result of the past which still resides in your system.

Through these gateways you will find true life. All the many temptations that beckon you to follow paths which imply that it is possible to find the spiritual reality of yourself without going through these gateways are wishful thinking. There is no way around what has accumulated in you and has poisoned your whole system- your spiritual, your psychological, and often also your physical system. This poison can be eliminated only by feeling wha you hoped you could avoid feeling. Then a new energy influx comes in ever greater measure. Many of you have experienced to some degree what I am saying here, and therein lies your growth. But you all have to go further in this regard. The self-punishment for hatred and spite, for cruelty and greed, for selfishness and one-sided demands upon others must be released so you can go into the terror of your fear, your shame, your pain. When you stop fighting this, you will become real, open, and truly alive.

~ Eva Pierrakos

Photography: Rakotzkybrücke, Germany via Isle of Skye

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There is a need to look at their diametral opposite and see where and why it, or the traits associated with it, may lie repressed and rejected in us. Persisting past the defenses and smoke screens of the ego we can uncover how these traits are expressed through us in unconscious ways. 

Observing it more we realize how we hide a vicious circle of repression, expression and self punishment from our awareness when we are obsessively attaching to an identification or label. Confronting these patterns, reflecting on the truthfulness of their underlying beliefs and judgements will slowly diminish them and release the energy blocked and stagnated in their upkeep.

Being attached to an image, identification, or label is an expression of a old wound keeping a stranglehold on our inner child, thereby severely limiting our life experience by creating repetitive cycles of, painful experiences and undercutting our ability of manifesting the life we wish for. 

I sincerely hope you hear me when I tell you, positive identifications and labels hurt us as much as the negative do. No label or identification truly serves us!  Go back and read the previous sentence again and let it sink in.

The light of inquiry, meditation and knowing brings change and allows the shadow parts of us to painfully and yet joyously come back to life and add their wisdom and tools to our engagement with life. Bringing us closer to wholeness and balance.

I realize the stories of when and how I picked them is mostly irrelevant or of a cursory importance in my shadow work. What is important, though, is the gentle integration of what I once learned to reject and deny by dropping my judgements and welcoming these aspects as members of my inner tribe of selves with love, compassion and most importantly with humor. This is the path of the heart warrior who brings love and peace to himself and therefore to all.

When I write about embracing all of our feelings, traits and selves I do not mean that we drop kindness or consideration and become insensitive hurtful egotists. What i am talking about is that we let go of splitting our natural feelings, sensations and thoughts into welcome and unwelcome and stop repressing in favor of living with acceptance, curiosity and openness to all of our experience within and without. 

I realize more and more the need to free ourselves from internalized corsets of acceptable expressions and behaviors to be who we came to be and to have more compassionate and joyful relationships with self and others. 

Photography: Unknown

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“Shadow work is the path of the heart warrior.” ~ Carl Jung

I have spent large parts of the past years witnessing my shadow aspects as closely as I could while living my mundane life. You could say my awareness was permanently split in external and internal awareness for the duration of their arising and raging. Which was often.

There is an eerie duality of drives when facing the things you have painstakingly avoided all your life, as you are feeling pulled back and forth between wanting to run and getting the the core of an issue. My best practice for this kind of work has been to get close, feel and sense it until it gets too intense and then disengage, allowing for a break and calming down of my physical reactions to the mix of emotions and thoughts and then gently dive into it again when I am ready. This dance of Titration has been a wonderful tool in trauma as well as shadow work.

On a superficial rational level I understood and fully accepted that I have shadow aspects but on closer inspection of this “acceptance” I could sense the self-delusion and denial underneath it. Feeling into it I asked which aspects of myself do I shun, turn away from, judge or cannot bear to feel or acknowledge? Asking again and again and keeping my awareness focused on the edges where the shadows flitted past my mental grasp. In time and with persistence more of a shadow became visible and tangible, the more I could relax and meet it with open curiosity it would show itself more and speak to me.

There are shadow aspects I have known for many years, of course, yet the truly complex ones were those I kept denying by not allowing myself to even be aware of their existence let alone their part in my experience. The ego will do anything and everything to keep up the illusion of our idealized self image and deny there are shadow parts to us beyond the few we allow ourselves to acknowledge. Making ourselves face these and do this thoroughly without flinching away from their petty and hateful details is one of the most painful parts of inner work  have yet done. This pain can feel overwhelming if we haven’t built up our self love and self compassion, and even with both of these to anchor us it is an excruciating and crushing experience. 

“Since the nature of the idealized self-image is self-aggrandizing, it separates you from others. Since its nature is separateness, it isolates you and makes you, and those you deal with, lonely. Since its nature is falsity and pretense, it alienates you from yourself, from life, and from others. All of that s bound to bring you pain, hurt, frustration, unfulfillment.” ~ Eva Pierrakos

I observed the way these parts colored my perceptions and analyzed the stories they keep enacting and telling. Listening to what remains unsaid, discerning what drives them and how they create repetitive and unfulfilling outcomes. It was challenging to let them play out their scripts because of a fear in me of being overtaken by them and the fear of the consequences it might have. Yet every time I found a way of allowing space for them to act out their script internally I received helpful insights into what has been hidden from my mind and awareness for so long. Meditating on said insights, the rationalizations of their attitudes and actions and processing the pain of owning them and their effects unlocked a new way of seeing and knowing them.

And though this vantage point of perceiving them without a shred of judgement or any idea of them as being lower or unworthy is comparatively new to my being, I have already tasted some of the fruits and rewards of it. Which, as so often, makes me wish I had had the courage to do this work earlier. 

I embrace these attributes, patterns, behaviors as part of myself, I no longer allow myself to judge me for thinking or feeling this way or to deny their existence to myself.

Facing these parts of myself was hard as it shattered the illusion of my internal self perception by making it painfully clear how far I fall short of my ideals and internal self image. Acknowledging this, sitting with feelings of pain, unworthiness and unlovability triggered by embracing it, holding it all with loving awareness until the distortions of my past faded to make way for a more realistic and whole self image. 

To be clear, embracing my shadow aspects, not as some latent or hidden aspects of my being (not really me) but as intrinsic parts of my being, of equal value and validity as the traits I valued and identified myself with to their exclusion has been profoundly freeing. If only I had known how good it feels to simply accept everything  within me with awareness and the peace it brings to do away with any label or judgement and separation of good/ bad or positive/negative within my internal dialogs and subconscious.

“To confront a person with his shadow is to show him his own light. Once one has experienced a few times what it is like to stand judgingly between the opposites, one begins to understand what is meant by the self. Anyone who perceives his shadow and his light simultaneously sees himself from two sides and thus gets in the middle.”~ Carl Jung, Good and Evil in Analytical Psychology

I am beginning to practice perceiving myself in my light and shadow simultaneously, mentally and emotionally. I sense that making this a feeling and sensing practice will help my integration to ground in my body and therefore into my subconscious. It is a slow process because I am new at it, stumble and fumble my way through it… a work in progress. As in all of my self work I am committed to working on resolving internal dissonances so they no longer need to manifest externally creating unnecessary pain for myself and others.

What I sense more clearly is I have reached an important milestone in my shadow work as well as trauma healing this year. A level of cumulative change which allowed for a domino effect of internal shifts in emotive and mental perceptions, a lessening of distortions and rise in internal harmony.

2018 – I honestly cannot thank you enough for your precious gifts of insights and transformations to my being!

Photography: “I’m not there” by Pol Úbeda Hervàs

The post Shadow Work appeared first on Venuskind.

“The shadow goes by many familiar names: the disowned self, the lower self, the dark twin or brother in bible and myth, the double, repressed self, alter ego, id. When we come face-to-face with our darker side, we use metaphors to describe these shadow encounters: meeting our demons, wrestling with the devil, descent to the underworld, dark night of the soul, midlife crisis.” 
~ Connie Zweig, Meeting the Shadow

Ending denial and avoidance of our shadow enhances our health and releases a vast reservoir of our energy which had been invested in suppressing the shadow and distracting ourselves from its existence. Knowing our shadow furthermore clears our perception from the distortions and delusions that arose from our painstaking avoidance of what we subconsciously denied. Shadow work is an indispensable tool of integration and emotional maturation.

“When I talk or write about shadow work I mean the practice and work of making the shadow conscious, confronting and getting to know what we unconsciously keep hidden from ourselves.”
~ Carl Jung

Photography: Black Fever by Flemming Leitorp

The post Definition of Shadow Work appeared first on Venuskind.

Titration includes two things:

1
Titration is the act of slowing down your response, be it emotional or physiological, to a VERY VERY slow pace. You become the director of the pacing of your processing, making it extremely slow, in effect opening up more space for the settling and integration of numerous activation/arousal responses and all associated information coming at you at once. Titration is the skill set that involves managing the speed of processing.

2
Titration is the act of taking only a tiny piece of your response to deal with – a VERY tiny piece – and leaving the rest for another time. You become the director of how much you process at one time. Titration is, therefore, also the skill set that involves managing the amount of content to be processed.

..

Titration / Slowing and Portioning tells the nervous system: “You now have all the time you need to process what happened.”

Slowing and Portioning tells the innermost deeply held emotions: “You now have the time to come out one at a time rather than all at once. I have slowed down enough now for you to go through your natural processing.”

Slowing and Portioning tells the states of shock and paralysis and helplessness: “I will no longer shock you with introducing anything – be it good or bad – too soon when you are not ready yet. I won’t stack shock onto shock anymore. I am here to allow you to unravel tiny bit by tiny bit. I am protecting you because I am competently managing the speed of integration. I promise not to let anyone or anything override your internally generated and essential process of re-integration.”

Slowing and Portioning tells the mind: “The emotions are important. Stop and listen and wait. Listen longer. Make space, make room, make time for the emotions. The body is important. Stop and listen and wait. Listen longer. Make space, make room, make time for the body.”

~ The Art of Healing Trauma, see the whole post here 

Photography: Black by Kenji Aoki

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