[DAY 37 OF THE DEEP END PROJECT]
Last night I started my 4th Rerun of Game of Thrones. There are many reasons I love this show – the direction, the actors, the plot, the dialogues — ooooooph the dialogues.
For example, look at this one. Tyrion Lannister, the imp meets Jon Snow, the bastard, for the first time. He keeps addressing him as a bastard and not by his name. Naturally, Jon Snow aka the love of my life is offended and is getting angrier by the minute and making no attempt to conceal it. This is when Tyrion, the smartest man ever lived, gives him advice we can all find useful.
He says “Let me give you some counsel, bastard. Never forget what you are, for surely the world will not. Make it your strength. Then it can never be your weakness. Armor yourself in it, and it will never be used to hurt you”
That’s some great wisdom right there.
I call this Honoring your Shadows. It’s the 4th pillar of my 4-part framework ‘RICH’
R for Reclaiming Yourself
I for Inner Wisdom
C for Co-creation
H – Honoring your Shadows
What are Shadows?
Shadows are those things about yourself that you know and you don’t like it. It may be the fact that you are a people pleaser or no matter how hard you try you cannot set boundaries. Maybe you get jealous very easily or maybe you are an over giver.
Shadows are also things that you perhaps don’t want other people to find about you.
The truth is all of us have shadows. Yes, all of us.
We live with the law of duality, which states that everything is on a continuum and has a complementary opposite within the whole.
To use an old adage, there may be two sides of a coin but there is only one coin. In other words, things that appear as opposites are in fact only two extremes of the same thing.
And think about it, everything that exists in this world is dual in nature.
Masculine and Feminine, are two energies in the same body
Light and Dark, Day and Night; these are the same things on the opposite spectrum.
And, when we can understand that our shadows are part of our dual nature, we can see it not as separate but part of ourselves.
That’s exactly what Tyrion means.
When we keep our shadows in the dark, we always look at them as something outside of us. Something that we have to constantly “work on.”
We always look to others to tell us who we are. We wait for their permission & we get caught up in that loop of approval. As long as you’ll see your shadows as separate from you, you’ll be outer focused instead of inner focused.
However, if you know who you are, both shadows and light, and you claim it as your strength and wear it as armor, then no one can define your worth or bring you down.
No one can threaten or hurt you because they cannot call it out. You’d already know what it is and you would’ve already claimed it.
It’s then you start seeing your shadows part of you rather than outside of you.
For example, all my life I was called lazy.
And everytime someone said it, I got really triggered. It would make me very angry and I’d get upset. I would even try to defend myself and prove that I am not lazy by over working and taking on tasks like dishwashing, cleaning the house, laundry just to prove that I am not lazy. I am talking about the time between the age of 7 to my teens, so it’s not that I was an adult who was responsible for keeping the house clean.
And as a 9 yr old, I didn’t really need to wash all the dishes by hand just to prove how hardworking I was.
The fact is I am a Manifestor in Human Design with a limited amount of energy available to me. I needed and still do, lots of rest.
When I get those spurts of energy, you can’t have me sit down. I am like a duracell then. I can keep going. But when I do need my rest, it’s sustenance for me. That’s how I get my ideas and urges that I can activate other people.
Working all the time is actually going against my true nature and harmful for me and also for people around me.
So am I lazy?
Yes I am.
And I am also hard working when I want to.
I am both.
Two opposite things on the same spectrum
When I accepted my shadow, it didn’t trigger me anymore. No one could hurt me because I proudly own that I am lazy.
When you too can be okay with your shadows and not judge it, you can welcome it in your heart and you will never feel “less than” or triggered
And just like, we cannot have lightness without the dark. We cannot have morning without the night.
You cannot have your light without your shadows.
So let’s get to know our shadows, get comfortable with them and then ask the question “shadow, what’s the light in this?”
A few months ago I was coaching a client who was becoming frustrated with her own clients.
She wasn’t happy with them crossing her boundaries all the time.
“It’s my fault” she said exasperated.
“I can never set boundaries and even when I do, I always break them myself. I am to blame. I am the one who feels the need to reply to their email the second it lands in my inbox. I have to stop whatever I am doing. The other day I left Micky (her toddler) in a poopy diaper just so I could get on a call with them. I felt like a bad mom.”
We did some digging into why she couldn’t keep her boundaries.
It was very clear that this was the cause of her frustration which was bothering her endlessly. It had become a wound that was festering and infecting other areas of her life too.
I asked her some questions to unearth her real shadow. Turned out that she cared too much about what her clients thought about her.
She was a classic people pleaser. I knew the feeling too well because I am a lifelong recovering people pleaser too.
Then I asked her “how has this people pleasing helped you with your clients?”
She immediately replied “I am very attentive to their needs”
“I care about their results deeply. I always give them the right advice even if that meant they had to stop working with her”
“And I am proud of my ethics and integrity. On a sales call, if I think I can’t help them, I’ll tell them straight up.”
“See?” I said to her, “Being a people pleaser doesn’t sound that bad. If you didn’t care about what they think, you probably wouldn’t care about their results so deeply either. You’d take their money and give them shabby service.”
She shook her head “I can never be that person.”
She could now clearly see her shadows in the light and saw how it actually had helped her create a wonderful business for herself and her family and a reputation of someone who was ethical and cared deeply. This was clearly evident as 80% of her business came from referrals.
Now her shadow wasn’t a big, scary monster but a part of herself.
This is what honoring your shadows can look like. When you uncover them, get to know them and bring them close to your heart, you can see how it’s not a bad thing but only another part of you.
If you do not know what your shadows are or you need some help shining a light on them, here’s a guided meditation I recorded for you.
Owning our shadows and honoring them takes us from being fragmented to being whole. A whole life is a full life, a joyful life.
It is a RICH life.