What is the Golden Shadow?

Your Brightest Self

When you consider your shadow, you might think that it contains only the ashamed aspects of yourself that you have disowned. You may not have considered that you also disown your brightest light.

Why do so few of us live an empowered life? Psychiatrist Carl Jung referred to our submerged creative potential as the "Golden Shadow." You can discover your golden shadow in your intense admiration of other people. The bright qualities that you admire in others represent the disowned aspects of your unique potential.

The Golden Shadow is your submerged greatness. The Golden Shadow hides your undiscovered gifts. Your gifts await you as you heal your emotional wounds. Your unique gifts live behind the gate of your self-judgment and emotional pain.

Strong Choices or Weak Choices?

In human history, some people have risen out of childhoods of neglect and abuse to become powerful creators, contributors and healers. While others, who may have experienced lesser forms of childhood neglect, go on to make choices to self-destruct in ways that burden all who love them.

As you become increasingly aware and understand how you have dimmed your light, you will see why you have unconsciously chosen to have problems, anxiety, depression, addictions, illnesses, and failures.

Your Golden Shadow comprises a specialized set of disowned strengths that are reclaimed when you make the effort to heal and understand the wounds from your past. Knowing this, you can observe yourself choosing between strength and weakness, love and fear, inspiration and depression.

And, no matter what has happened to you, you can start to build your power by making good choices today to listen to the higher aspects of your nature instead of your fear. Each choice to develop confidence, self-love, inner beauty, creativity, or gratitude builds momentum towards the next positive choice.

Reclaiming Your Magnificent Gifts

"Briefly stated, we feel threatened by another's aliveness and try to damp it down or destroy it as ours was dampened down or destroyed. "Do unto others as that was done unto you."

~ Stephen Wolinsky

Reclaiming your inner light can bring up fears of not fitting into the ego club of consensus dimness. Therefore, it is essential to recognize that you may not receive external approval for your golden character traits. Others might not feel comfortable with or even recognize your higher qualities. You may need to find ways to recognize, reclaim, and express your golden shadow for your personal joy.

Luckily, for creative people, great healing work can be done through the imagination. Just imagine yourself going back to points in time when you chose self-abnegation and weakness because you felt small, unseen, unworthy or afraid...and choose again.

The good thing is that the subconscious mind does not distinguish between imagination and reality. So, in your imagination, you do not have to repeat past traumas and neglect in your mind in the same way that they happened. In your imagination, you do not have to continue to abandon yourself to abusive or neglectful others.

In your imagination, you can do anything! You can stand up, self-advocate, fight back, be a super-heroine, or call in powerful spiritual allies to help you do anything you want to do!

Imagine bringing your brightest spiritual strength into the darkest times from your past until your body believes that a new choice has been made. When the fear that has weakened you no longer rules your body, your golden gifts can shine bright!

With love,

Shelley