The Cave of Shadows

“The cave you fear to enter holds the treasure you seek”

- Joseph Campbell

Hello, my friends!

Over the last week, I've been sharing bits from my Pathways in Consciousness course.

I've been offering, bit by bit, my lecture for reclaiming personal power.

This piece continues in that vein, and it is called:

"The Cave of Shadows

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Humans are amazing. And funny.

Like, absurdly funny, and absolutely ridiculous.

All of us, in our own ways.

After more than a decade of coaching, healing, and counseling, I’ve seen it again and again.

We always want to look everywhere else but at what’s really going on.

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This is about the deep stuff, the strong stories and deeply buried emotions.

Our answer will be visible to any onlookers. And we’ll be looking straight at it, and seeing everything else.

You can see this pretty easily in others. Our own blindspots are hard for us to see, but the blind spots of others will tend to stand out to us.

We might say, “you just need to do this.” And, even if we are right, the person doesn’t hear it until they’re ready to hear it.

These inner distortions remain invisible to us until we’re ready to see them.

And that’s usually after we’ve flailed around for a bit, looking anywhere and everywhere else but at the challenge point.

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The places that scare you, the places that you cannot imagine going, many of these places have deep, powerful, and liberating lessons awaiting us within them.

Now, this does not mean to engage with the outer world in unsafe or unwise ways.

What it means is to take time to look within, and view yourself with brutal honesty, without censorship, and with a willingness to own what you see there.

With humility, and courage to enter the shadows within, and make peace with what we find there.

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People can spend years, decades, lives, running from what they truly think and feel.

From what they are afraid of seeing, or accepting, or feeling.

When we do this, it can feel as if the world is assaulting us, like it is unbearable.

But really, we’re doing it to ourselves.

Projecting the feelings onto the screen of the world, playing it out in our lives.

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It takes rare courage to get still, and go within, and allow yourself to see yourself.

It takes rare courage to slow down and let yourself arrive, right here, right now.

All the thoughts and feelings you’ve been running to, or from, or cycling around.

To let them come up and be seen with clarity and consciousness.

We have to go within, to the places that hurt, that scare us, that we would like to deny the existence of altogether.

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What you try not to see in yourself, what you resist and push away, gets stronger in the shadows.

A little bit of disowned psychic energy that is kept in play by the force against it, becoming stronger and more established over time, behaving almost like a separate entity.

When we stop pushing the feeling and story away, when we let it arrive in the body and the awareness, we can reclaim that energy, becoming more whole and more in harmony.

With all things that arise, if we can relax to them and allow them to fully enter our body and awareness, we can transform this energy and respond with full consciousness.

We can heal and transform through awareness and relaxation, dissolving the force by allowing it in and integrating it.

So, for your proper meditation practice, once this week, enter the Cave of Shadows!

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The process is simple.

This is a bit of vision work, so you will want to find a bit of time and space in which you can go deep, uninterrupted for at least a half-hour.

And you will want to sit down with the back in a neutral position, proper posture.

Or lay down, which I prefer and which may be easier if you can remain awake.

Do the feather focus countdown to bring yourself to alpha, and then even slower, almost to the dreamstate of theta.

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And then, when your body is soft and almost feels as if it’s floating, envision yourself in an open space, a place outside in nature with many paths.

And find yourself drawn down one of the paths, walking and seeing all of the details you can of the path.

And you find yourself before a cave.

You know that within the cave lives all of your fears, all of your pain and anger and jealousy and envy. Shame and guilt, everything.

In the cave lives all of the parts of yourself that you wish were not a part of you.

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Most people avoid this cave for their whole lives.

But you are on the path of the inner warrior, learning to face every bit of your inner world with courage.

And this is what you will do here, in your personal underworld, you own unique repository of misaligned and jangly vibrations, limiting stories, and disempowering thoughts.

These things survive in this distorted and misaligned form because they are separated out, imbalanced and acting out of alignment with the being.

And we overcome their constant influence not by making them go away, cutting them off, hiding them, or trying to believe that they are not there.

We shine light, and the shadows disappear.

We embrace, and the separate bits reunite, becoming stronger and more balanced in the process.

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So this is what you will do in this meditation.

For this meditation, we enter the cave of shadows, open to feeling everything, eyes open, sight unbounded.

And we allow all of our pain and fear to assault us.

All the rage and grief and anything that’s there.

We let it all scream and shout, while we get still, and soft within, allowing all to flow through us, relaxing in the face of intensity.

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The shadows are your thoughts and feelings. Your stories and charge.

They cannot hurt you.

But you can make a lifestyle of running from these things without ever getting away. Getting more and more exhausted every day.

So, when assaulted by shadows, relax, and get still.

Observe, and hold space.

No resistance, no tension, no controlling with story.

Process it in the body, just as you have been learning for the last 11 weeks.

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These thoughts and feelings are not True.

They are conditions.

They may offer lessons. Points of clarity in the wake of emotional processing.

But they are simply old and unintegrated bits of information, separate too long and needing to be brought back into the fold.

And every single bit of consciousness we reclaim makes us immensely clearer, more present, more aware, more connected.

That’s what it looks like to cultivate free will.

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So, get still, and let the shadows speak. Hear, and allow it all to pass through you, processing as you go.

See whatever your fears and pain and anger and sadness have to show you.

Disinterested, as if you were visiting a boring museum.

Seeing the same exhibits again and again and again until they have lost their novelty and power.

Seeing, and releasing the charge around these ideas and memories.

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There will always be some things that evoke strong feeling. And this is good!

This is a deeply human experience, and that’s why we’re being human right now. To have a deeply human experience.

At the same time, many things that we are plagued by are no longer of service to us.

We can clear these things, learn more lessons, have more energy, feel better, see clearer, all at once, just by bringing our divided energy together into a single, powerful whole.

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So, once this week, take a deep journey.

Go within and find your cave of shadows.

And spend time within it.

Get still, relax, and allow.

Play it all, see it all, and learn what you can in the wake of the processing.

Practice acceptance for what you find there, and accountability for those things which do not align with your values.

No one is to blame, but we are each responsible for what is in our power.

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When you are willing to see within yourself without flinching, hiding, or dressing things in more acceptable clothing, you gain an incredible strength.

Most people hide from themselves and lie to themselves all the time.

This is how we have been taught, an unconscious way of relating to Self and others by a largely unconscious society.

But everyone feels it when in the presence of one who is at peace with themselves, present, free, and empowered.

This is the birthright of all human beings, something available to us all on the soul’s journey.

And we can come to this point when we stop trying to run from our shadows, and simply run the light."

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I hope you have enjoyed this.

If you have questions or thoughts that you would like to share, I welcome them in the comments.

Or, if you would like, feel free to reach out personally.

Thanks and blessings, beautiful Beings!