Embrace Your Light and Your Shadow

The Secret of Life Wellness by Inna Segal

"Our shadow side consists of aspects of ourselves that we are least familiar with--aspects that we bury, resist, and suppress. This is where we try to mask all our insecurities, fears, disappointments, and failures, as well as our potential greatness, influence, beauty, integrity, and uniqueness. We yearn to be accepted and acceptable. Often, our greatest fear is to be labeled as different, weird, or unusual. Thus, we try to detach ourselves from our deepest apprehension, that somehow we are unwanted, worthless, false, unlovable, shameful, guilty, or damaged.

"In order to escape from looking within and discovering our perceived darkness, we attempt to cover up, trying our hardest to either please others or to resist them. We also project unconscious aspects of ourselves onto others. This can include positive and negative characteristics or personality traits that we disown.

"We might want to understand that our shadow aspects are the keepers of our greatest power. Much of our authenticity, potential, greatness, creativity, success, passion, and contribution in life are concealed within our own self-imposed barricades.

"Since many of us are encouraged to strive for perfection, we lose sight that our true beauty, lovability, growth, and evolution arise from embracing and loving our imperfections, idiosyncrasies, and individuality.

"Our ability to fully love and accept ourselves and others is greatly hindered by our need to hide and deny our limiting patterns, emotions, and behaviors. Instead of allowing our highest aspects to lead, being comfortable with ourselves and showing others who we truly are, we hand over control of our lives to our fear, resentment, rejection, hurt, anger, and neediness, without the awareness that we are doing so. Few of us realize that our neediness can hold the gift of love and the desire to help others, just as anger can offer up passion and our selfishness can make us stop, rest, and take care of our needs.

"It's amazing how many of us are terrified to discover that we might be powerful, ingenious, and extraordinary as we are of finding out we are average, weak, or full. Our shadow aspects become dominant when we refuse to have empathy for our own and other people's challenges.

"The shadow can be viewed as painful, unprocessed parts of ourselves that have the potential to hinder many aspects of our lives at the most appropriate moments, or when we are least prepared. As our shadow aspects are often controlled by our subconscious mind, it is easy for them to permeate our daily life and wreak chaos without us being aware of how this is occurring.

"Our self-sabotage can manifest in subtle and potent ways when we arrive to places late, miss opportunities, become involved with questionable characters, misread things people say, destroy potentially empowering relationships, and so forth.

"When you disown your shadow, you embark on a journey of fear, guilt, anger, and separation. You stop listening to, or trusting, the combined wisdom of your mind, body, heart, and soul and begin the process of internal confusion and conflict.

"If you choose to solely follow your feelings, you can turn into an overemotional, needy, insecure, doubtful indecisive, and dependent person. If you allow the mind to rule, you can become judgmental, controlling, and overly analytical. You are likely to make decisions based on logic and what you know without taking feelings, intuition, and wisdom into consideration. If your spiritual aspects are given all the power, you can become impractical, dreamy, and unrealistic, lost in mystical fantasies and desires of being saved. The idea is to create a healthy, balanced relationship between your heart, mind, and spirit.

"As long as the mind, emotions, and soul feel split and lack the ability to communicate with each other, you will feel doubtful and unsure about what actions to take, how to connect to others, and how to live in harmony with yourself. Your shadow aspects can push you toward healing by motivating you to ask questions and embrace more of who you are.

"In order for you to become self-empowered, you need to move from living outside yourself to connecting to your body, intuition, and inner life. This requires bringing light to those shadow aspects that are entrenched in limiting patterns and helping them to mature.

"For example, you may be repressing the fact that you are not emotionally and energetically compatible with your partner. If you were honest, you would confront your partner and work together on changing your relationship, or you would choose to leave the relationship. This would require courage, trust, candor, and a lot of personal growth. However, if you were to keep suppressing the fact that your relationship is not working, because you are afraid of being alone, you might become negative and aggressive, lie, cheat, or cause destruction in your life, creating dis-ease just to be safe.

"A huge part of your healing journey is to confront your shadow aspect, take back your power--your life force energy--and expand your freedom and the choices available to you."