In the book Eat, Pray, Love Elizabeth Gilbert writes, "When you're lost in the woods it sometimes takes you awhile to realize that you are lost. For the longest time you can convince yourself that you've just wandered a few feet off the path, that you'll find your way back to the trailhead any moment now. Then night falls again and again, and you still have no idea where you are, and it's time to admit that you have bewildered yourself so far off the path that you don't even know from which direction the sun rises anymore." That is the perfect description of where I feel like we let our shadows take us. So far into the woods trying to hide the parts of us that we deem unacceptable, that we sometimes have to wonder if we will ever find our way out. Oh sure we see the light of day sometimes and think "We've arrived"..."Finally the moment that we have been waiting for." Just to come around one last corner and have our deepest darkest shadow pop out and confront us only to send us running back into the woods. After all the worst parts of ourselves are the ones we fight the hardest to hide.
Debbie Ford tells us the shadow is not a problem to be solved or an enemy to be conquered, but a fertile field to be cultivated. She says our most hated, feared or shamed qualities are the ones that hold the key to living the life of our dreams. That is the concept that keeps most of us lost in the woods. If the only way to the life of our dreams is by walking through a field of our mistakes and our judgements and proclaiming "I am that" (in a completely non judgemental, loving, self forgiving way of course) how many of us stand a chance of finding our way out of the 100 acre woods we wander ? How does one look at their shadow and love it unconditionally as part of us when it appears to be everything that we aspire not to be ?
The secret to the shadow work I am finding is the same as the secret to everything else, it is in the surrender. Finding my way out of the forest and into being who I am is in the moments that I am able to pick up my perceived mistakes, look at them, not see them as right or wrong and just be with the lessons that I learned from them. I have discovered since seeing Debbie Ford's movie, The Shadow Effect, that the reason that all of this letting go is such a struggle is because it's not always in the letting go that we find peace, it's in the integration of each and every aspect of ourselves. It's not about being different, or better, it's simply about being ourselves and embracing the gifts and the wisdom that our shadows bring into our world. At the end of the day if we can love ourselves despite any perceived imperfectons, or things we feel are mistakes, that is when we can arrive out of the forest and at the destination of our dreams.
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