What side of your personality do you show?

This is a great article from Deepak Chopra about the shadow side of our personality http://www.chopra.com/agnilight/jul10

The Shadow

The essential nature of the universe is the coexistence of opposites. We cannot be a hero if we don’t also contain a coward inside of us. We cannot be generous if we don’t also possess an inner miser. We cannot be virtuous if we don’t have the capacity for evil. Yet most of us have been conditioned to deny our shadow – those hidden places where we repress our guilt, confusion, and pain.

When we wall off the painful parts of our past, the shame doesn’t just go away, it festers and darkens into our shadow self. It seeks recognition and reintegration by erupting as self-sabotaging thoughts and behavior and even exaggerated dark dreams. We also may end up projecting these denied qualities onto other people in our lives. Have you ever known people who continually attract the “wrong people” into their lives? In reality, they are not attracting that darkness, but they are not willing to acknowledge it in their own lives. This is unfortunate because the shadow also comes with a gift: an opportunity to expand our personal awareness and experience our wholeness.

If we want to find our true self, we must dive into the shadow, recover the parts of ourselves that we have split off, and embrace the paradox of the coexistence of opposites. With loving attention, we can heal our past and harness the power of our fully illumined self. How do we do this? I have found the following steps useful:

Step 1: Stop Projecting.

Projection is an unconscious defense in which we ignore our own weaknesses and project them onto others. For example, we may feel incensed about a celebrity’s indulgent behavior because our shadow contains a hidden desire to engage in excess. Projection can take many forms, including jealousy, paranoia, arrogance, superiority, prejudice, and idealizing others. The instant you catch yourself projecting a hidden feeling, you need to contact that feeling and allow yourself to feel it. This isn’t always easy, so be patient with yourself.

Step 2: Detach and Let Go.

You have already begun this process by acknowledging your feelings. Now you need to release the negativity. The most direct way is to set the intention to be detached, centered, patient, and self-aware.

Step 3: Give up Self-Judgment.

While emotions are commonly categorized as “positive” or “negative,” in reality every emotion is valid in some way or another. But when you add self-judgment, any emotion can be damaging. Instead, begin to cultivate sympathy for whatever emotion arises in your experience. Instead of heaping judgment on yourself for what you are feeling, see if you can offer yourself compassion. Doing so will take the judgment out of your emotions and give yourself permission to be who you are.

Step 4: Rebuild Your Emotional Body.

Like our physical body, our emotional body can become diseased, tired, and flabby when it’s exposed to toxins and unhealthy influences. To keep your emotional body energetic, flexible, and a source of pleasure, it needs proper nourishment. Spend some time tuning into to your emotional body and ask it what it needs. If you have been holding on to emotional pain for some time, you may want to consider attending the Free to Love workshop at the Chopra Center, where you will be guided in a deep process for letting go of accumulated guilt, pain, anger, and repressed feelings that continue to create distress in your life. Learn more about Free to Love here.

As you practice these steps, be aware that even most confident, well-adjusted people will reflexively diminish the significance of their shadow side. This is instinctive self-preservation, because it’s hard to accept that we can have this dark matter in us when we have worked our whole life to build a personality around the ideals of love, compassion, and generosity. Nevertheless, when you can look at this material and accept it as part of you, yet knowing that it is not your true essence, then you begin a deep healing of self-forgiveness and re-integration.

Those painful areas that have been holding anger, resentment, and self-judgment no longer have to be shut away in the basement and can now be healed and brought into harmony with your soul. You will also notice that as the contents of the shadow become fully transparent to the light, you will free up all that energy in you that was locked up in your civil war, and it will now be available for more creative expressions and for a fuller appreciation of life around you.

Love,


Deepak

© Copyright 2010 The Chopra Center at La Costa Resort and Spa