Your Brightest Self
When you consider your shadow you might think that it contains only the socially shamed 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 called our submerged creative potential 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 wait for you to heal your emotional wounds. Your unique gifts live behind the gate of your emotional pain.
Strong Choices or Weak Choices?
In human history, some people have risen out of childhoods of severe 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 the wounds from your past. Knowing this, you can watch yourself choosing between strength or weakness, love or fear, inspiration or depression.
And, no matter what has happened to you, you can start to build your power by making good choices today. 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 a fear of not fitting into the ego club of consensus dimness. So, it is important to know that you may not find outer approval for your golden character traits. You must find ways to recognize, reclaim and express your magnitude for your own personal delight.
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, unworthy or afraid...and choose again.
The good thing is, the subconscious mind does not know the difference between imagination and reality. So, in your imagination, you do not have to repeat past traumas in your mind in the exact same way that they happened. In your imagination, you do not have to continue to abandon yourself to abusive 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!
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