NMR ISSUE 42

Astrological Forecast 42
Bass, Grasshopper & Lion
Editorial 42
Esoteric Symbology of the Tarot
Ghigau's Song
Goddess Manifest
Loving's Call
Mirra, Lady of the Pool
On Confronting Our Dark Side
Ritual for Creative and Spiritual Fertility
Ritual for the Waters of Life
Spring Activities
The God of the Witches
The Unknown Founder of the Golden Dawn
Unicorn with Flower Wreath in Candlewicking
Working with Your Shadow, I
Your Soul's Growth

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Working with Your Shadow, I

An Imperative on the Spiritual Path

Lazaris

Whether your metaphysics is but weeks or months old, or whether is years or decades old, each of you is always beginning and is always continuing to work with the Shadow Self. Such work is never done.

And our time together, we are going to take that never-done Shadow Work to new dimensions and to new depths. And it is a pleasure, and a joy, and an honor? Yes, an honor? To be a part, to participate, in what you are about.

It is the Shadow and the Shadow Work that holds so often the clues to your resistance—the resistance that is far deeper than your intellect, logic, and reason can understand. So often you've asked, Why do I resist receiving? You've asked, and you've answered sometimes very cogently and very powerfully. But the answers were never quite enough, because there are reasons that you resist that go far beyond your intellect and far beyond your logic and reason.

It is the Shadow that holds the clues. The Shadow also holds the secrets of change, change that can affect you on a cellular, on a (human) racial level—change that can affect your very DNA. The Shadow also holds the treasures, the treasures that allow you not only to be a person who knows how to receive, but also which allow you to be a person whose nature, whose instinct, is to receive.

With a foundation of understanding and awareness, you also can come to know the immensity and the intensity of your own Shadow, of your Shadow and to begin to harness, to direct, and to use that Shadow to create a reality more magical than before, to create a reality filled with more wondrous successes than before.

When you really make peace with your Shadow, your life, your reality, can be filled to overflowing with all kinds of magic, all kinds of miracles. You know that when you make peace, when you really make peace, the very process of creating can become so rich and so ripe—sometimes richer and riper than the creation itself. Surely the creation itself does produce grand treasures of achievement, accomplishment, and success. But the process of creating can offer and produce grand treasures of realness, of a real self, of your spirituality.

When you can make peace with your Shadow self, the tangled briar of obstacles and limitations can begin to die, and you can be free. You can be free to transform yourself and the world around you. You can be free to begin to transcend your fears and shames, failures and pain.

And beyond the peace with your Shadow, you can begin to make peace with your Self. And then truly your life can be filled with all kinds of magic, all kinds of miracles, rich and ripe, dripping with magic and miracles. And your life can be filled and overflowing with rewarding friendships and intimate relationships, with meaningful work and with fulfilling successes. You can discover the uniqueness of your own worth and your own value. You can discover the uniqueness of your strengths, of your power, and of your talents. Oh yes, and indeed you can come to know your Soul. You can come to know your Spirit, and your relationship with God/Goddess/All That Is can be alive and vibrant with life and embracing love. And your spirituality can come alive—oh yes, it can.

Sure{laughter} Sounds great. It sounds more than great. It sounds wonderful, OK? Oh, that it would be true. Oh, if it could be true for me.

These words at one time used to build resonance, strength, and power. Now you use them to ridicule and criticize yourself and to remind yourself that there's something wrong—still very wrong—with you. Words. Words that at one time brought possibility now, for far too many, bring only pain. And you get to a point where you feel: I don't want to hear about making peace and having overflowing magic and miracles. I don't want to hear about creative processes more exciting than the creation itself. I don't want to hear about tangles and briars and limitations. I don't want to hear about transcending and transforming. Because there's too much longing. There's too much ridicule and criticism, too much pain.

Yet you can't really walk away. You can't really turn away. The fault is not in the words. Perhaps it is in the limited meaning and the misunderstanding of the words, but it's not in the words. But the fault is not in you, either. No, the fault is not in you, either. The fault lies in the misconceptions and misunderstandings of what the Shadow is.

What Is the Shadow?

The Shadow is made up of all the stuff that you have denied, that you discount, that you defend yourself against, that you distract yourself from—all the aspects of you that you pretend don't exist—or (if they do exist) are no big deal. The Shadow is made up of all the stuff you learned to resist, and that you refused to accept.

As a little kid you learned: You shouldn't be so selfish, you shouldn't be so greedy. You should do this, you shouldn't do that, and you shouldn't do this other. You shouldn't question so much, you shouldn't, you shouldn't, you shouldn't. And as a good little boy or a good little girl trying to become idealized. Trying to win favor—trying to survive{laughter}you did what you were told. And you shoved your selfishness and your greed and your self-centeredness behind you, pretending it didn't exist. In what hand? What are you talking about? Well, it doesn't matter. You discounted and you defended: I am not, I am not, I am not.

But you didn't just stuff the dark stuff, the ugly stuff, the stuff that society says is bad and wrong and sinful and terrible and immoral and all that. You also denied the good stuff because of the messages that you got: Don't be so curious, don't be so inquisitive, don't be so honest, don't be so in touch with your feelings, don't be so creative, don't daydream like that, don't be that inventive, don't ask questions. And you got all of those messages not just from mothers and fathers and siblings and extended family, but also from a society of television, a society of education, from a society of religion.

And all of these things—dark and light—got shoved behind you into what is called the Shadow.

Your Shadow contains all the stuff that your adaptive child elbowed out of the way in its attempt to survive, in its attempt to find security, in its attempt to belong and to have some sense of self—called esteem. It is all that your panicked adolescent scattered in order to become idealized, in order not only to belong and to have a sense of esteem, but also to be accepted and to be approved of, to gain praise, if not from the family, then from peers.

All that the Child elbowed out in its adaptiveness, all that the panicked adolescent scattered in its need for absolutes, make up and become part of your Shadow. And this you know, this you understand at least theoretically. What those parts are, sometimes you have forgotten, but nonetheless you understand the concept.

Indeed, your Shadow is also made up of all your aggression. As little girls particularly, but also as boys, you weren't supposed to be aggressive at all or that aggressive, respectively. And you weren't supposed to be ambitious, because ambition is bad and wrong. You know what ambitious people are like. And so you shouldn't have any of that.

All your weakness and lack of reliability, your lack of preparedness, was all shoved behind you, because it didn't conform with this idealized self that you were supposed to be to make them proud, to make them happy, to make them decide to let you live another day, another week, another month or year. All your insecurities were shoved away, denied, re-dressed as something else.

The Shadow is also made up of your lack of character and lack of morality, and also of your pride, and of your hostility. Hostility is more than anger, more than hurt. Hostility is an anger that wants to hurt, often produced by an anger that did hurt. Your pride, your hostility, and avarice—that hunger, that thirst, that greed that can never be sated—are also part of your Shadow.

It is also all that you have refused to be responsible for yet.

It is so amazing, so ironic, so poignantly sad, that there are so many that get angry at the very idea that reality is a choice. They get very angry, some of them even violently angry, at the very idea that you have any choice at all. No, it can't be. I refuse to accept it.

But yet when it comes to responsibility, they want to reserve the right to make choice. {laughter} I'm not going to be responsible for that, or I will. I'll choose, I'll decide whether I will or will not be responsible for this. And it is so ironic that those who make a passion out of denying choice will demand it when it comes to responsibility. There I do have choice, and I choose not to be responsible.

In fact, reality is filled with a myriad of choices. Almost everything is a choice. Almost. But among the millions of choices you make every minute of your life, responsibility is not one of them. You don't get to choose whether you're going to be responsible. You get decide when, but not if.

Everybody will take responsibility for their impact, for their creation. No matter how long they may deny it—no matter how long they may pretend—it is only a matter of when. Some of you have learned to take responsibility quickly, with integrity, almost spontaneously. Others seem to deny and say, No, I'm not going to be responsible. I'm not going to be responsible. I refuse to be responsible. But in time—it might be 5 years, 10 years, 20 years, you will be. Perhaps it will manifest itself as some sort of illness, some sort of disease, and then they will be responsible.

The choice isn't whether you will be, but when you will be. And all the stuff that you want to postpone, all the stuff of responsibility that you want to delay and say, I'll do it another day, another year, another decade, all goes into the Shadow. It never gets lost. There's no space. Where are you going to put it? Where are you going to throw it away? Only into yourself.

Maybe you hide it in your joints or in your organs—or maybe you hide it in the people around you in your reality. Perhaps you hide your hostility in your spouse or in your parents or in your boss. But eventually, you will come around to face it and be responsible. But until you do, it is contained within your Shadow.

Now these are the four components of the Shadow:
what you have been taught and conditioned to deny
what the adaptive child elbows away
what the panicked adolescent scattered
those aspects from your aggression to your avarice, and all that you will not be responsible for

With most of academia, this is as far as it goes: this black bag or this darkness or this ugliness that you won't admit is you.

But, you see, your Shadow is more than that. And the truly frightening aspects of your Shadow are not the dark aspects. The truly frightening aspects are the light side of you. The Light Shadow, the Golden Shadow (whatever color you call it) is made up also of your power (that you pretend you don't have) and of your motivation, so beautiful, so pure, filled with the love and intimacy that seem corny, square, backward and stupid in your very fast-paced, high-tech world.

The Light Shadow contains the strength that embarrasses you and makes you frightened that you might be arrogant. It holds the fact of your true reliability that you fear might imprison you with duty and obligation.

And the Light Shadow contains all your true security—not in the stuff, but in the realness of self. It contains your true spiritual character—and personal character as well—that again is an embarrassment to so many in this very hip world of yours where being filled with character and morality is seen to be stupid, naive, ignorant, backward, and square.

The Light Shadow also holds your real value and your worth—the love, the intimacy and the caring you're capable of. And it contains your spirituality, which is, like avarice, a hunger and thirst not for things, but for God/Goddess/All That Is. Avarice and spirituality, ironically, are very close to one another, the sides of a coin of thirst and hunger.

And the real depth and the real meaning of spirituality is also contained within your Shadow. Your Shadow contains all the true agendas that are often hidden by your surreptitious and hidden agendas. Your Shadow contains your ability to be free of the past, to be, with dignity, self-determined. It contains your full capacity not just to be loved, but to love. It contains your ability to have emotional dominion, to create a future, to be powerful, truly powerful—your ability to change reality not just for yourself, but also for those you care about and for the world that so relies upon you. All that, which is hidden behind your hidden agendas, is also part of your Shadow.

And finally, whether you're male or female, your Shadow contains all the feminine that you have denied in yourself: the imagination, the creativity, the wonder, the feelings, the perception, the conception that you deny in yourself.

And it contains all the masculine that as men and as women you have castrated, rendered impotent in yourself. It doesn't go away. It is there in the Shadow Self. All the feminine that you deny, and all the masculine that has been castrated.

That is what your Shadow is made up of. But it is important to understand: That is not your Shadow. That is what it is made up of.

The Shadow itself is more elusive. It is more elusive because it comes with many disguises. It wears many different masks. Within the consensus reality those masks and those disguises are often dark and frightening. Many have seen your Shadow as the monster, the horrific giant monster, oozing with anger and pain and horror. Others of you have seen it as a Dream Stealer, the one that begins purposely to steal the dreams that need to be stolen, but then, out of hand, steals all your dreams, and the creativity and imagination as well.

Others of you have seen it as the Objector—that part of you that, no matter what, objects to anything that you would do differently than you have done before.

Many of you have seen it as the Judge that is a continuous, onward dialog of judgments.

Others have seen it, perhaps, as the betrayer. Maybe you've seen it as the unforgiving, unrelenting you. Or perhaps the Denied Self, the faces of self that you have denied.

But the Shadow is not only dark. There is also the Light Shadow who comes to you as the Monumental One, or as the Dream Weaver, or as the Protector. It comes not as Judge, but as the Compassionate One. It comes not as Betrayer, but as the Benefactor. And it can come to you not as the Denied Self, but as the Whole Self.

But even these various descriptions are but masks. These various descriptions are but disguises of the Shadow. The true Shadow self is, for so many, still illusive. Many of you have known the faces and disguises of the Shadow. You've worked with its faces and disguises, but you have never worked with the Shadow itself. You have never come to face it without its mask, without its disguise.

And that is a result of the misunderstandings, of what is misunderstood of the Shadow, Dark and Light, and there are some very specific misunderstandings that you have:

Setting Straight Some Misunderstandings:
Four Truths about the Shadow

ONE: The Shadow is born when you are. It is there from the moment of birth, and it's there to hold sacred and to protect all the stuff that you are unable to deal with, that you are unable to accept. It is there as a repository to hold what you cannot comprehend, what you cannot cope with, what you cannot deal with.

As an infant, even, there are, for example, levels of shame that as an infant you simply cannot cope with, you cannot deal with. If you were to attempt to, perhaps you'd die. And so the Shadow takes it, and holds it sacred, protects it.

Certain angers, certain hurts, certain fears, certain levels of hostility that as a child you feel the Shadow holds for you. When in adolescence passions are born, a flood of energy that you can't begin to grok, the Shadow comes forth to hold, to embrace, to collect what otherwise would be lost forever. It is as though your arms are filled with bundles and packages—far too many to carry—and things fall out. And you can't even bend over to pick them up. You don't even realize they've fallen out. But your Shadow comes along behind you and meticulously picks up all this stuff that you've dropped.

In a sense, your Shadow picks up your litter, and it picks up the valuable treasures as well. As a child, as an adolescent, even as a young adult, there are too many things to handle. But to lose those things would be truly devastating. And so your Shadow is there to hold these things sacred, and to protect them until you are ready—to hold sacred physical, emotional, mental and etheric aspects of you that you can't deal with.

And then your Shadow very meticulously starts returning the litter that needs to be disposed of properly. But it also begins to return the treasures, the beautiful gifts, the beautiful, wonderful energies that as a child, an adolescent, and as a young adult, you couldn't deal with—even that as an adult you couldn't deal with yet in your level of maturity. It returns them. Whether you think you're ready or not, it returns them—often during the Shadow Time—that time after the Wounding.

It also returns it during the Midlife Crisis. Sometimes the changes come so quickly and demand seems so steep that it interrupts your daily routine to force you to look at what the Shadow is bringing you.

And again in the Late Life crisis, past your 50's, where you come to face yourself, your Shadow shows you what you thought you discarded, what you thought you got rid of, but never did, because it's important to dispose of it—and important to do it properly. The means are all that matters in the disposal.

Your Shadow is not your enemy. It's not there to sabotage you, though it may appear as a Betrayer, a Monster. It is not there to hurt you. It is there to help you, because it holds that which needs to be disposed of, and that which needs to be accepted, in order for you to become real, in order for you to become whole, in order for you to accomplish what you have come in this, and every other, lifetime to be, and to become. It is not your enemy. It is born with you to hold sacred and to protect all the stuff that you cannot deal with, that you cannot accept. It is not your enemy.

TWO: Your Shadow is a being. It is not a space. It is a being, a being that sometimes appears in this or that or the other way, but it is a being. It is an entity, a living force. No, not human in the definition of human as you define it: with head and shoulders and arms and torso and legs. Not a human being as you sense human beings in your image, but it is nonetheless a being. It is an entity. It is not a thing, it is not a space, though it may appear and seem to be. Though analogies may describe it as such, it is nonetheless a being. And it is not a complex, as many of psychological backgrounds want to presume. It is not a complex. It is a living, breathing being that exists, that has always existed, if you will, as a part of you.

Your Shadow is not a Monster—though it appears as such to some: a Dream Stealer, an Objector in its dark masks and disguises. And it appears in its light masks and disguises as well. But it is nonetheless a being. It is not just everything you have denied. It is a being that is holding all the stuff that you denied. It is not just that which the child has elbowed out and the adolescent has scattered. It is the being that holds all that has been elbowed out and scattered. It isn't your aggression. It isn't your ambition. It's the part that holds that energy for you until you're ready to face and deal with your aggression, with your negative ambitions, with your lack of reliability, etc. It keeps all that denied femininity that you have thrown away. It keeps all castrated masculinity. A being that has these things is the Shadow. The being that wears these masks and disguises is the Shadow, that is complicated, but not a complex.

THREE: The Shadow is the enemy of your Negative Ego. Your Negative Ego hates your Shadow, is terrified of your Shadow, and sees your Shadow as its natural enemy. For the Shadow can destroy or master the Negative Ego, and the Negative Ego knows it. It is the Negative Ego, with its yamma-yamma that says: Don't go looking any deeper. You've found your Shadow. That's all it is. Your Shadow's mean, cruel, got it? Cold, distant, cruel, oh, terrible, terrible, cold, distant, cruel. Phony, shallow. Got it. OK, run, get away. That's enough. You don't need to know any more. Now get out of here. You don't need to look any further. You're ugly, terrible, rotten, and disgusting. That's enough! {laughter}

The Negative Ego is a proponent of the idealized self. The Ego is the one who says, Don't be real: be acceptable. Don't excel: be mediocre, fit in, be normal, don't make waves, don't do anything new or different, be accepted. Don't accept yourself, be accepted by others. Never accept yourself, only get other people to do that—by hook or crook, by whatever means you need. Be idealized. Be whatever other people want you to be. Anything but yourself. Anything but real. Call it real if you like, but anything but real.

Your Shadow says, This is what you have to face in order to be real. The Shadow is a proponent and ally of your real self, whereas the ego is the ally of an idealized (not real) self. Your Shadow and your Ego are natural enemies. Your Ego says, Conquer your Shadow. You cannot conquer your Shadow. Your Ego says, Destroy your Shadow. You cannot destroy it. Your Ego says, Battle your Shadow. And you can never win. Whenever you battle your Shadow, you always lose. Whenever you go to conquer or to imprison your Shadow, you always lose. Your ego and Shadow are enemies. And your Shadow is the one that is the ally of your Real Self. Your Shadow is an ally of your Real Self.

Your Shadow stands between you and the idealized you and the real you. It stands between. It is the Energy Between. You've heard that phrase before. Your Spirituality is about discovering the Energy Between. Yes, the Shadow is dark, and you must go into that Darkness, into the pit, into the Abyss. You must cross Chapel Perilous. It is the Energy Between that allows you to transform, to bridge from the old form to the new form, to transform from one form to another through the Shadow self. You never get there through your ego self. You never get to be real by traversing your Ego. Traverse your Shadow and you become real. It stands between and holds all the stuff that you need in order to be real.

See, you need this stuff. You need to dispose of certain things to get real, to be real. And you need to accept certain things to get real, to be real. And the Shadow has all that stuff. It is the ally of your Real Self, and therefore, truly, your ally. And the ego is the enemy of your Real Self, the enemy of the Shadow, and therefore, your enemy.

FOUR: The fourth truth: Your ego always lies. Think about that a moment. Look back over the decades of your life, and you'll realize that your Negative Ego has never once told you the truth. When you're about to make an absolute fool of yourself, it says, Go ahead! Go ahead! {laughter} When you've just done something brilliant, it tells you, You're in your ego. You're being arrogant. You're being self-centered. You're getting all puffed up. Who do you think you are? You're a nobody. You're a nothing. So you did something great once. You won't do it again. Hey, I've got a short cut. If you just make `em feel guilty, manipulate them, intimidate. That's the way you have to go. It'll get you there, I promise. Rich and famous. You'll get rich and famous. {laughter} Don't do this honesty stuff. Takes too long.

You see, you have made alliances already. You just chose the wrong you. You made an alliance with your Negative Ego when you didn't know any better. That's why you need to bust and master your Negative Ego. You need to shift alliances from Ego to Shadow. The Ego always lies. The Shadow always tells the truth.

FIVE: Owning your Shadow is not imprisonment. It is not attempting to contain it. It is not attempting to put it behind you so that it never, ever happens again. Ownership involves harnessing, not containing. It involves freeing it, not imprisoning it. It involves using and directing the energy that your Shadow holds for you. The energy of your anger, the energy of your hate, the energy of your control and manipulation, the energy of your cruelty, the energy of your phoniness, the energy of your hostility. Ownership is vital and alive. It is embracing and bringing it closer, not pushing it further away, not burying it deeper than you've already buried it.

SIX: Making peace with your Shadow doesn't make it go away. It doesn't make it leave you alone. That's call denying it. That's called shoving it deeper down inside of you, and then it will, absolutely, come at you as fate or the way of the world or the nature of humanity. Peace brings your Shadow more conscious. Then somebody else might see it. They already do. You're the last to know. {laughter} Making peace is finding out what your Shadow needs and what it has of yours. That doesn't make it go away. It doesn't happen that way, because it is a part of who you are. It is not a temporary aberration. It is not a temporary twist and distortion. It is part of who you are. That's a very difficult thing to accept, we understand. But when you do, there is unbelievable freedom to take that very energy and to use it productively, constructively, consciously. Peace doesn't push your Shadow deeper. Peace brings your Shadow closer. And that's why so many people don't want to do it. That's frightening. That scares them.

You mean my hostility is going to be closer to the surface?

Yes!

Well, what good is that? {laughter}

Then you can handle it. When you shove it deeper in, then you create situations in your world that come at you like Bosnia and Armenia and Somalia and The Sudan and South Africa and inner cities everywhere—and in the people around that treat you with hostility you think is theirs, when, in fact, it's yours. If you would bring it conscious, knowing that you're capable of that hostility yourself—Oh, I'd hate to think!—knowing that it's yours, then you can handle it. Peace doesn't make it go away. Peace brings it closer.

SEVEN: Your Shadow contains the Lost Depth of Soul. And it contains the Lost Depth of Spirit, of an imagination that imagines itself, of a creativity that creates itself. That's where that stuff is. The Shadow has it. Not as ransom, but as a gift when you're willing to own and make peace and accept. The Shadow is not your enemy. It's not your nemesis. It's not out to hurt you.

Maybe your ego and idealized self feel hurt, but your Shadow is not out to hurt you. It is not your enemy.

These are seven misunderstandings that many of you hold. And each of you holds one or another of them. In order to own your Shadow, you need to know what comprises it. It is also important to understand the truths about the Shadow, and to correct the misunderstandings. Then you have a fighting chance, then you have a legitimate opportunity not just to dance with your Shadow, but to own it, and to make peace.

When you really make peace with your Shadow, your life, your reality, can be filled to overflowing with all kinds of magic, all kinds of miracles. And beyond the peace with your Shadow, you can begin to make peace with your Self. And then truly your life can be filled with all kinds of magic, all kinds of miracles, rich and ripe, dripping with magic and miracles. You can come to know your Spirit, and your relationship with God/Goddess/All That Is can be alive and vibrant with life and embracing love. And your spirituality can come alive—oh yes, it can.

With love and peace. Lazaris

1995 Concept: Synergy & NPN Publishing, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this Article may be reproduced by any mechanical, photographic or electronic process, or in the form of a phonographic recording, nor may it be stored in a retrieval system, transmitted or otherwise copied for public or private use without written permission.

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