Naissus Express

Everyone has a shadow. The shadow is composed of our repressed negative emotional reactions to traumatic events. These repressed emotions include fear, terror, resentment, rage, hatred, grief, depression, and toxic shame. These emotions become elements of our shadow because we have never confronted, processed, and cleared them from our system. These painful feelings don't dissolve once the events that caused them have passed. Instead they are gradually ignored and buried in the body. When these emotions are buried in the body they fall under the control of the subconscious mind.

Two things happen when negative emotions are warehoused in the body and neither is good. First, we lose our conscious connection to these feelings and the events that produced them. While we may dismiss these traumatic emotions they do not dismiss us. Instead they function as powerful magnetic blocks in our psyche that will continue to attract similar wounding experiences into our lives, over and over again. They are free to wreak havoc in our lives because they are no longer regulated by the conscious mind. The famous psychologist, Carl Jung, put it this way. "That which we don't confront within," he wrote, "we will meet as fate." What we ignore eventually becomes the dominant power in our life. The First Secret Law of the Shadow is this: The negative energies in our psyche rule our life until we find them, confront them, and clear them. One of the central tasks of our life is to clear our shadow. If we don't clear our shadow we won't regain our wholeness. Overcoming the shadow is the fulcrum on which all spiritual progress turns. When we avoid facing our shadow we prevent our growth and guarantee the continuation of our unhappiness.
by Alan Mesher