WE ALL ARE SHADOW and LIGHT

The more I am triggered and troubled by the collective shadow being projected and and acted on our national stage, the more that points to my need to attend to my own personal shadow aspects.

I must look at how I myself behave toward myself like a an impulsive, acting-out potus, or a cruel border patrol agent. Where am I in scorn and disgust, rejection, judgement, with desires to imprison and punish myself?

Where and how do I deny myself simple necessities and even life pleasures? How do I neglectfully punish myself with less than loving self-care?

Let’s face it, it’s often easier to point the finger and rail and scream and beat our breasts and tear our hair out at the exposure of the collective shadow and how ugly, heinous, abusive, and evil it is. It may well be more challenging to face those same tendencies in ourselves, and as the saying goes, “As within so without, as above so below.”

And so, doing the inner work of facing and shining light on our own personal shadow aspects might be one of the most potent things we can do to support eliminating the painful ongoing enactment of the collective shadow.

A helpful and simple question that can often make us squirm is, “And how am I just like that?”

It’s not everything. It’s not a cure all. But it is a potent decision to accept and shine light on humanity’s shadow and claim the universality of it so that perhaps it DOESN’T need to be acted out so painfully on a national or global scale.

The lie is that we are separate from all of that ugliness. We are not. Let’s just start there.

I love you…