Not choosing to do for themselves what they would do for others, if only temporary as their consistency is equally weakened by the tyranny of the shadow of self sabotage.
Not wanting to reflect on why they act this way, not wanting to put in a little effort in shifting out of this pain.
Not wanting to give up on the ‘rewards’ of complaining to others about all their drama, pains, and aches.

Defiantly parading their self abandonment and painfully obvious self destruction, eating, drinking, doing all the things they know are bad for them. While telling others to live healthy, expressing knowledge about what would serve their health as well, which they will pretend to not know about when confronted with their choices.

“Well, we don’t know what kind of food is truly good for us, one scientist says x is good for you another says its bad…”
“Don’t I deserve to have some joy in life?”
“What is it to you what I eat/drink/do? This is my life after all!”

Avoiding any treatment or change to lifestyle that could bring healing or betterment, but making a production of turning disjointedly and unskillfully to home or folk remedies they have heard something about somewhere. Not even investing in knowing how and when to apply these remedies.
It is asking too much of them to research their ailments, try to understand the workings of their body or psyche, though they have the capacity and time for it. But they will generously pour vast amounts of time and energy is researching or engaging with meaningless stuff or into their favored form of distraction and avoidance.

Why on earth can’t I stop ‘caring’ or rather engaging?
Why can’t I accept their self-destructivity as a given reality and redirect my attention elsewhere?
Why haven’t I learned after watching them do this for years, even decades?

How much of the anger this triggers is anger at them, how much of it is anger at myself, at the parts that act like them and at the parts that cannot let go?
Which part of this anger is healthy and which part could be self-harming?

What in me needs integration to free me from this old shadow dance?
What does it take to reclaim detachment to this distortion in my perceptive field?

Who is it that seethes with anger at this experience?
It is not I is it?

I know this is my issue – of my creation. It has nothing to do with them, or their choices.

The perceptive lens needs cleaning and correction:

I am not this body.
I am not this mind.

I AM

Photography by Pukilin via Flickr

The post Self Destructivity appeared first on Venuskind.

“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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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

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