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The Shadow in You Really Needs a Hug

By on August 8, 2016
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Written by Colette Baron-Reid

Dearest fellow traveler,

We’re all moving from what we once knew as familiar and relatively certain to new vistas that for most of us are unclear, and unrecognizable. Even if we think we know what we’re committed to, or hoping to discover, because we can’t fully make out the value of the new, or the shape of it, how to know it and to integrate it, our shadow side can kick up quite the storm.

When we’re scared, or angry, the kind of angry that comes with fearing deep down in the murky shadows that there really isn’t enough and we will be forced to go to the garden to eat worms singing “nobody loves me lalalalall and, we think we won’t get our needs met. This story or any other number of stories we tell ourselves about scarcity and hopelessness, about being invisible, not counting, feeling diminished and exhausted comes from a part of us that wakes up and steals our vision and replaces it with goggles of distortion.

It happens when we get triggered. And it happens when we get things we don’t expect. We all can go there, go into the dark forest of our psyches where our goblins hide whispering their pain. That’s where our dragons hide too, malnourished by mixed messages and inconsistent thoughts and feelings, forced into cramped quarters burping and farting and accidentally setting things on fire, or for attention doing it on purpose.

This my friends is not a call for a forest burn, a goblin hunt or to slay any dragons. No – this is a true call for compassion and love and a genuine personal inventory to determine the source of the voices and their echoes, the stirring of old ideas, and the irritation within when our personal power is denied by something within us that needs our attention and care.

This is when Love is the only answer.

I had an experience this week when I had to walk my talk in a way that was hard for me. I wish I wasn’t so sensitive but when I find myself in a situation where I am confronted by someone’s disappointment my inner world doesn’t always remain steady.

IN fact I can go right back to the quivering child whose Dad yelled at her for getting a B instead of straight A’s when the report card arrived. I know intellectually I’m not there but my emotions, frozen in those moments, wake up a sleeping homeless creature within me and it hurts. She hurts, she feels like she will never be enough, will always be punished, and then I go temporarily blind. Spiritual amnesia and narcolepsy sets in and I react, recoil, and lose my footing.

But not for long!

The best part of all this is that I know this is what happens to us when we’re thrown into uncharted waters together.

Some of us will wade steadily into the water feeling playful and others will see the potential of sharks and old wrecks of haunted pirate ships below the surface up ahead. We’re all in the same water but not having the same experience.

IT’s my job to walk my talk especially now in these times of uncertainty. Maybe a better version of this is “stumble my talk”. NO matter how anxious I was, no matter how personally hurt I was in some moments, I kept loving myself and allowing others to be loved.

I wanted to Love more than I wanted to react.

What would Love do when people are airing their grievances in ways that hurt? What would Love do to really hear what the other person is saying, looking past the details and into the essence?

What would Love do to help the scared little kid, and the dragon that needed to come out and stretch its wings?

OOPS you singed me! Oops mine singed you!

Sorry he doesn’t get out much! (O we really need to change that!)

We Love, we make amends, we don’t dwell on the words, we just keep holding space for a solution and then we love some more.

Our shadow selves need a hug not judgment or punishment, or dismissal or anything like that.

Love is the only answer.

It works!

So how was your week? Have you had an experience where things temporarily went haywire then came out better than you could imagine? How have you applied Love to the shadow?

Big love to you always and forever!!

Colette

 

Collette Baron-ReidColette Baron-Reid is an intuitive counsellor and founder of the Master Intuitive Coach Institute. Her book, “Weight Loss For People Who Feel Too Much”  is available on Amazon and in book stores everywhere! colettebaronreid.com

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