In the previous episode, I highlighted one extremely important point: if you are not aware of something, you cannot decide about it ... If you are not aware of your shadow, you have no control over your emotional response - you are just reacting. You also don't control how you express your emotions. In addition, you unconsciously attract an unstoppable stream of people who externalize your abandoned shadow.
How to turn negative emotions into something positive
When you become aware of your shadow and become its owner again, you begin to have control over it. You move from being him to having him.
When I became aware of my abandoned anger, the upset people ceased to significantly influence me. I also stopped attracting them to myself. I still notice them, but instead of being influenced by them, I feel compassion for them.
It doesn't mean that I like being in their company. It also doesn't mean that I don't notice the damage they sometimes do around me and that I wouldn't react by seeing a person who is not in control of their anger that hurts others.
The difference is in my own emotional state. Angry people do not push me into negative emotions because I have become the owner of my own anger again.
I also stopped expressing my anger in a hidden, dysfunctional way. The anger that was once a huge problem in my life has just become another normal aspect of my life as a human being. I still experience it, but it no longer rules me.
Another element that I want to point out is that all qualities are integral features of all people. However, when you become the owner of your shadow again, what seemed negative matures and transforms into something positive.
Immature, reactive anger turns into a reluctance to tolerate injustice. Narcissistic selfishness matures into true self-love. Each shadow has its mature form and retrieving it allows you to externalize that quality in a mature, positive way.
Our life is a constant game of White and Black
Now that we are familiar with the concept of shadows, I would like to introduce you to the arcana of the game that we teach every new member of our society. I call this game the Game of Black and White, and its guiding principle is that White Always Wins. This game is actually about shadows - so let's take a closer look at it.
To play this game, a person must first learn to divide everything in this world into separate parts and events. We assimilate this knowledge so effectively that, once we learn it, the question never comes to mind: do these things really exist separately or only in our minds?
Your common sense probably tells you that it is obvious that the world is full of separate things and events. You just have to look around.
But let's look at it carefully. It has to do with the Black and White Game, as well as your sense of happiness and inner peace.
At some point in your childhood, your parents started teaching you the names of certain things in this world. This primarily made you discover the existence of such a thing as a "thing" and learn that a thing and its name are the same. However, let us see that this approach is not a correct view of the world - useful in many cases, but not precise - and see if it leads to serious life problems.
Take, for example, a bee and a flower. The flower grows rooted in the ground and the bee hovers around it. Everyone knows that the bee and the flower are two separate "things". But are you sure? You don't meet flowers without the presence of bees, and there are no bees without the presence of flowers. Flowers and lings need a name for themselves. They form a single, interconnected system, what physicists call a "unified field." You cannot have bees in isolation. There are also no flowers that exist in separation. Flowers and bees exist in relation to each other. In this sense, they could be viewed together as one organism.
Moving on, we have the soil from which a flower grows. And in this soil, worms, and bacteria affect the juices that nourish the flower. It is part of the system, like air, consisting of various gases that are essential for the life of both the bee and the flower. Of course, we also need a planet at some distance from a certain star that supplies that planet with sufficient light and heat, which in turn are also essential for life - both for the bee and the flower.
And this star, in turn, is part of a galaxy that belongs to the galaxy system, etc., etc., and so on, and so on. You quickly begin to realize that this initial bee-flower system is essentially everything - that the entire universe is one organic, interconnected system. flowing as one river. Mental dividing the world into separate parts has its merits, but these divisions are only ideas about reality, not reality itself. In fact, everything is interconnected and interdependent.
Thinking of the world as made up of separate things is just that: thinking of it. In fact, as the philosopher Alan Watts used to say, "thing" is a "think" - a unit of thought that corresponds to reality as much as you choose to focus your mind on at that moment.
I am not against the use of divisions. In practice, they are very useful. However, when we forget that all divisions are, in fact, a product of our minds, we get into trouble. And while this may seem insane, I would risk saying that all our problems stem from our illusion that the world is made up of separate things and events. Stay with me and I will explain exactly what I mean.
The author of the article is the late Bill Harris, founder of Centerpointe Research Institute
Headers and underlines in text: Empowerment Coaching
To be continued ...
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