Both And - Life with the Shadow

I am sitting in the Mile Hi City

Visiting my amazing son and his amazing wife

Two young people who make me smile

It is early morning, and loud music is blaring outside their condo

motivating the apparently thousands (seems like millions) of runners

doing a half marathon in the street below

Go Tammy K. (a person I work with in Oregon is one of them).

As I sit here I am thinking about shadows

Not the shadows created by the morning sun

but the shadows that live in my soul

the shadows that we all have

The shadows that exist in every person I know

I talked yesterday about my friend Scott

He was amazing, a giving wonderful man

But he had shadows.  There was a part of himself that was

chaotic and dark and confused

I have my own shadows.  I try to pretend the dark side of my soul isn't there

but it creeps out anyone.  

I turn my back for second, and there it is!

We spend a lot of time denying this part of ourselves

And lot of energy

we create this container

into which we put the less perfect part of ourselves

the part we want to forget

But there is a problem

it is part of ourselves

and if we want to be authentic

and real

and grow

 

We have to accept our whole self

Every part of our self we do not love

Do not acknowledge, will become our enemy (thank you Robert Bly)

We can only cover up for a while

and the

the dark self will leak

those unackowledged thoughts and feelings will erupt

will come out of us

sometimes gushing

flowing

sometimes trickling

but it will emerge

the greed, the lust

the loneliness, the anger

and there we are

unmasked

our self-righteous veneer in disarray 

So the self we must love

the self we must accept

is our whole self

we must claim the shadow

learn to live with it, manage it

work with it

For we are all both/and

both good and bad

weak and strong

righteous and deviant

givers and takers

kind and cruel

we are together, but also totally mixed up

it is how we are

and it is when we accept this 

when we let the light shine

on our whole self

that we can attend to

and forgive

the parts of ourselves we do not like

When courageously face even the parts of us that 

appear to be destructive can be transformed (F. Scardino)

It is amazing how freeing it can be

when there is less to hide

It is time to make friends with our shadow