Gateways to Shadow Work
As we move toward change and complete our own personal ascension into the Soul and Spirit that we are, understanding the nature of the ‘work’ that must be done to make that leap, we must come to terms with the unknowns, the ‘shadows’ that live in our personal unconscious. These are parts of the self that are seen only briefly with full emotional output, as a projection toward others, judgments, emotional angst, incomplete parts of our own darkness, all of which reveals itself only in the periphery of our reflection toward self. If these shadows are not seen for what they are, they move into a more global and collective shadow which is then manifested by larger areas of the population. How many of you have watched the news, seen hate crimes, terrorists, destruction and wondered how this could happen? It happens when we no longer are compassionate, spiritual beings, understanding the nature of things we repress and living them out responsibly.
“We carry our past with us, to wit, the primitive and inferior man with his desires and emotions, and it is only with an enormous effort that we can detach ourselves from this burden. If it comes to a neurosis, we invariably have to deal with a considerably intensified shadow. And if such a person wants to be cured it is necessary to find a way in which his conscious personality and his shadow can live together.” Carl Jung: CW:11, p. 12
The old beliefs, the old lies, the old rigidity reeks havoc on our bodies. By taking inventory on these bodily manifestations, we might be able to build a new and more open body for our soul’s infusion into self. We come to this planet through an intense energy of light vibration and as we incarnate and get closer to the earth, the magnetic field gets dense; the thought forms manifest. Lo and behold! we land on this earth in physical form, taking on, within our bodies all the beliefs and grounded interactions that are on this planet; all the paradigms, the belief systems, the families, the personalities, the governmental and cultural structures, the place which houses our bodies…we take all of it into our body ..and then we begin processing this persona in this life. Our body holds all of what we are and what we are to become, and reveals itself by our own relationship to it. This body awareness is essential in understanding the nature of things we need to change as we enter the Gateways of 2012.
We are always in a state of learning, feeling, sensing, intuiting, that which our body is telling us. What is your body telling you? In our work with others, therapeutically, we develop dialogues within the body, which, eventually will be exemplified on this site, but until then, let’s look at the psychological processes by which we learn more about our shadows as they are reflected in our bodies, the buried periphery in our personal unconscious.
We are going to go over some general meanings regarding body armor and body shadow energy. The SHADOW is that part of you which is reflected in your relationships, projections, high energy involvements, and seems to always slip past your energy boundaries into your body when not processed. The body creates the actual MIRROR of your body as a temple of worship so that you have to pay attention and maintain some vigilant disciplines about the care and nurturing of your own body. After we go through these general meanings of character armor, much of which I learned through the study of Wilhelm Reich, Fritz Perls, and Alexander Lowen, but mostly just through my psychic intuition, and a alchemical approach to all of the leading psychologies, we will see how relevant this is to the changes that need to be made at a personal and highly intimate level. We manifest in our bodies the following symptoms so that we can learn how to deal with this dense planet and get past the process in order to become more aware and conscious, as well as ‘response able’ to our authenticity.
The head is the part of us that is caught up in logos, thinking, intellect, analyzing and many of us operate totally from our heads trying to make sense of all that comes to us and from us. Even as I am writing this, my head is using up all its oxygenation and I am not focusing on breathing into my head to prevent headaches…too much energy focused in one area for any length of time, will create stagnation in that area, due to no oxygen. Headaches and more head injuries create a need to get out of our minds and into our bodies..
The speech mechanisms in the throat and all around the chest area can create such blocks as laryngitis, polyps, our children who have speech defects because we have not learned to communicate our truths. Yes, even our children manifest our ‘denial of body’. Sometimes the lessons have to be given with a 2 X 4 over the head in the form of our progeny.
Our hearts get blocked, big time, due to our inability to love self, others, without limitation, judgment, and willingness to receive love and nurturance. Many people think that it is a matter of action of loving. I see it as a shutting down to receiving love unconditionally. Our inability to receive touch, care, love….all of this shuts the heart down to a screeching halt. This is reflected in pains on the left side of the body as well as the lack of circulation and mobility at that level.
Our stomachs are loaded with the unexpressed anger; the abandonment of the mother or the unavailability of the mother/nurturance. There is lactose intolerance, because we were fed with attachment and with the toxicity of the mother’s attachment or abandoning, both creating the same polarity. The over mothering is just as abandoning of the child as the mother who leaves her child on the doorstep of the ‘other’.
Our pelvises and sexual chakras are the seat of kundalini, and shock us into action through frustration, through charisma, through magnetic chemistry between us and others. The planet is going through major shifts of sexual energy and how we use it. This energy is pristine and we put thoughts/feelings/emotional dramas on this energy so that we can source our more intense selves. We refuse to own our male/female in an authentic manner. We don’t want to look in the face of our husbands, wives, and lovers, and say… He/She is ME ..we are having a sexual relationship with ourselves, so we manifest all kinds of problems in our genitalia.
We have mentioned a few of the areas that hold our shadows, parts of self that we project on others ‘to hold’ until such time as we can hold the energy as self, consciously and fully, becoming healthy physically so that we can live longer more fulfilled lives.
Becoming fully conscious of our shadows requires other disciplines that are necessary so that we don’t bury ourselves in our own conscious self. Jung once warned:
“If you imagine someone who is brave enough to withdraw all his projections, then you get an individual who is conscious of a pretty thick shadow. Such a man has saddled himself with new problems and conflicts. He has become a serious problem to himself, as he is now unable to say that they do this or that, they are wrong, and they must be fought against. He lives in the “House of the Gathering.” Such a man knows that whatever is wrong in the world is in himself, and if he only learns to deal with his own shadow he has done something real for the world. He has succeeded in shouldering at least an infinitesimal part of the gigantic, unsolved social problems of our day.” Carl Jung, CW11: p. 140.