136: The Shadow Effect by Deepak Chopra, Debbie Ford, and Marianne Williamson
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Speaker 1: All of us have shame about things that have happened to us. We've all gone through difficult times. Certain point in life is about saying, I have been through what I've been through. I've succeeded in some ways, perhaps, but I've also failed in some ways. I've been strong at times, but I've also been weak at times. The issue is, what am I going to do with all of that? We address these issues so we can quiet our minds, heal our bodies, and get closer to our hearts desires. All of the work we do on the shadow is to get us to this point where we can forgive.
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Speaker 2: It's embracing authentically who you are and not being ashamed of it. If you want authentic peace of mind, creativity, kindness, compassion, joy, then you've got to understand your shadow and be okay with it. Celebrate it.
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Speaker 1: What if you knew that everything that was happening right now is happening to support you in stepping out of the smallness of your darkest thought into the brilliance of your biggest dream?
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Speaker 2: You can't fight darkness with darkness, but you can switch on the light.
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Speaker 3: If you take this journey, I promise you that you're going to experience more love, more happiness than you've ever had before.
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Speaker 4: 34 year old teacher Mary Kayla Turno was stab in a tour to fair with a twelve year old student. Actor arrested.
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Speaker 5: Calvange Jim Baker was convicted on all fraud and conspiracy counts.
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Speaker 6: Pop star Michael Jackson admitted.
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Speaker 7: Actor at Russia arrested court.
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Speaker 8: Fears ongoing scandal over her children drug use and other tabloid matters is raising questions about her state of mind.
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Speaker 9: Driving under the influence made by.
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Speaker 10: The Irish, Jews, Italians and other evolutionists.
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Speaker 11: Governor Elliot Spitzer of New York Timesville family and the public after starting with decasive exposure.
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Speaker 12: Televangelist Jim Baker was composite responding discovered
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Speaker 13: It's really bizarre to me when someone does something so stupid.
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Speaker 14: 25 years ago, I woke up on a cold marble floor and I had passed out after a night, I should say another night of drugs. But something had shifted. And I knew that if I didn't make a dramatic change in my life that I was going to die. And I called my mother and I said, I need to go back into treatment. And I had already been in treatment three or four times. All these other times I left on day ten. I started to feel great. I'm drug free. I'm not like any of these people. I'm out of here. And I would pack up my little bag, put my little arrogant suit on and march myself out of treatment. And I was free. I was going to make it to the other side. By day six or seven, I'd be on the phone looking for my drugs and end up right back in rehab. So instead of running away this time, I went into the bathroom and I got down on my hands and knees and I started begging. Please relieve me of this pain. Grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change.
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Speaker 14: I cannot change my desire to leave. And in that moment on that floor, something happened to me. Something that was like magic. It was mind blowing to me because all of a sudden, after a few minutes, I knew I could stay one more day. How could I go from terrified and my mind going a million miles a minute to this place of complete peace? I walked out of there on day 28 knowing that there was something that I had to find out about.
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Speaker 15: The shadow is dark. It's secretive. It can be dangerous.
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Speaker 16: Shadow is everything that we don't want other people to see.
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Speaker 17: Things we hide. Things that we lie about, not only to others, but to ourselves.
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Speaker 18: And they are the sort of monsters that come out of the caves in the middle of the night.
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Speaker 19: It is that dark, intrinsic side of us that each and every one of us tries to hide.
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Speaker 20: Because we've been told from such an early age that these are not acceptable components of who we are.
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Speaker 21: To have one aspect of the soul, you have to experience the other aspect of the soul to counterbalance it.
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Speaker 22: Hello, darkness, my old friend. I come to talk to you again. Yeah, they were talking about the shadow.
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Speaker 23: The only time you don't have a shadow is if you're standing in the darkness.
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Speaker 24: The shadow shows up in so many ways. Writing bad checks, drinking too much, cheating on our tax returns, dipping into our expense account of the family trust, eating chocolate cake in the middle of the night after three days of dieting and depriving ourselves, screaming our kids. Or verbally abusing our partners after being the nice guy at work all day. Surfing the internet and visiting porn sites while our wife makes us dinner. Cheating on our husband while he is hard at work trying to provide all the extra pleasures in life for our family. Stealing our coworkers ideas and claiming them as our own. The shadow is made up of the thoughts, emotions, and impulses that we find too painful, embarrassing, or distasteful to accept. So instead of dealing with them, we repress them. Right now, hundreds of millions of people are living in denial of their individual shadow, and all of us are being affected by the collective shadow in more ways than we can imagine.
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Speaker 25: The collective shadow manifests as evil as you are, as terrorism, as social injustice, as radical iniquities in our economic status. You know, right now, we have 50% of the world living on less than $2 a day. 20% of the world living on less than $1 a day. We are totally in denial of the fact this is also a manifestation of our collective shadow.
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Speaker 25: Why? Because people in social institutions, financial institutions, political institutions, corporate institutions, are in total denial of the shadow energy. They don't even understand it, or even what we call evil in the world is the manifestation of our collective shadow turned pathological repressed, enraged, in denial. People who express self righteous morality are usually the ones who have the darkest, deepest shadows. The shadow of the Catholic Church, which pronounces on homosexuality as evil and calls gays sinners while hiding pedophiles in its own clergy. These are all expressions of the shadow.
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Speaker 26: The entire trajectory of human history at this point is like the Titanic. It is headed for an iceberg. It is going in a direction that is unsustainable, and it is going in a direction that is unsurvivable. If not for us, then at least for our children or our grandchildren. And from an archetypal perspective, each and every one of us is the captain. And the temptation is it's too painful. The temptation is to just distract ourselves. The temptation is to pretend it's not happening. Or the temptation is to go into cynicism, or the temptation is to just go into anger and indulge that and not do anything. And each and every one of us are challenged at this point. Don't be the captain who just goes downstairs and goes to sleep.
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Speaker 27: Everything that expands has got to contract. What goes up's got to come down. People are going to be confronted with their shadow all of a sudden. They've been living high, living wonderful. Everything's been exorbitantly, exuding, and now suddenly there's going to be a contractive phase. And if you haven't met yourself, if you haven't done yourself work, if you haven't been on the inside and done some exploration and cleaned up, cleaned your house and detoxed it, you're going to be in trouble.
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Speaker 28: The birth of our shadow occurs when we are very young, before our logical thinking mind is developed enough to filter the messages we receive from parents, caregivers, and the world at large. Even if we had the best of parents, we inevitably got shamed for displaying certain qualities and received the message that something about us was not okay, that something was wrong with us, or that we were bad. "How are you going to eat all those before dinner?" These messages get ingrained in our subconscious like a computer virus, altering our perception of ourselves and wounding our healthy sense of ego. When we suppress any of these qualities, we are living in denial of all of who we are.
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Speaker 29: And of course, it's different based upon our environment. But if you're raised in a family of blue collar workers and you declare that you want to play the piano or you want to become an artist, that artistic quality will be negatively received, and you may end up having to suppress that. On the other hand, if you're race and a family of artists and intellectuals and you declare that you want to start working on construction or you want to be really athletic. That may also be perceived of as negative.
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Speaker 30: We try with all our might to pretend that we are not that which we hate. In fact, proving this is an all important task for the wounded ego. A task which the ego believes is vital to its existence. The wounded ego must hide all that we believe is unacceptable about ourselves. To accomplish this task, it constructs a mask to prove to others that we are not as defective, inferior, worthless, and bad as we might fear we are. None of us likes to admit that we have these flaws and insecurities. So to hide them, we create a persona. At a very young age, we start to wrap ourselves up in a new package that we believe will bring us the love, attention and acceptance that we hunger for. We create personas so that we can belong. Most of us have a public life and a secret life. We work hard to feel good about ourselves, and a moment later we do something to sabotage those good feelings. We wear masks that we believe will take us where we want to go. And these masks take many forms.
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Speaker 30: Which one do you wear? Our masks become our prison beneath the mass that we show the world. Our wounded egos are in pain. The parts of us that were deemed bad and wrong by others and now by ourselves are literally screaming to get out, to be set free, and to be accepted and loved as a valuable part of who we are. When we deny ourselves a safe outlet to express our dark side, it builds up and becomes a powerful force that is capable of destroying our lives as well as the lives of others. This is what I call the beach ball effect.
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Speaker 31: So everything that we reject, we have to keep beneath our consciousness. We try to bury it, so to speak. Know how much energy it takes to put a beach ball underwater? You take your selfish self, you take your angry self, you take your too good self, you're not good enough self. You take all of it and it's like you have 40 beach balls you're trying to manage. And then what happens when you're holding that beach ball underwater? When you're young, you got lots of energy, so you can manage a lot of beach balls. But then when you're not in the midst of possibility, when your defenses are down, when you have your attention on some big prize you're going to win, all of a sudden, boom. Somebody does something. What happens with the beach ball pops up and hits you in the face? What's road rage? Is it anything more than that beach ball coming up? We see it in the media all the time. A filmmaker making deep Christian films all of a sudden gets drunk, shouts anti semitic comments in a drunken rage.
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Speaker 31: Right a radio star makes his living like being a great communicator, all of a sudden makes a comment a racial slur. So all of these beach balls that you are trying to manage, are you successful at it? No, it's all but not anymore.
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Speaker 32: When you don't deal with the shadow, that part comes out and it'll creep up. It'll creep up in workplaces, it can creep up in relationships.
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Speaker 33: The more we try to suppress those societally determined, undesirable quality, the more they find interesting and often mischievous ways to express themselves.
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Speaker 34: And it would be like locking somebody in the basement who wants to get out. So they do things down there to get our attention until we recognize them and let them out.
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Speaker 34: Because those aspects of ourselves that we don't like exit through a kind of detox process. It's got to come out in order to be released.
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Speaker 35: One of my beach balls happened in front of a room full of people. So I'm out of treatment. Five years I've been floating around trying to become the most perfect person. How could I have people want to be my friend? How could I be a little more spiritual? I was on the quest, and I thought I was doing a really beautiful job. And I went to another workshop. We had to get up in front of the room and say what we were committed to in the world. And I thought I was just being wonderful. And everybody was looking at me like, you're all looking at me. And from the back of the room, this woman screams out, you're a bitch. And I thought, well, I know that. How does she know? And I was horrified. I was so humiliated. It was the one word that I didn't want to be called. And she said to me, tell me something good about being a bitch. And I said, there's nothing good. She goes, well, you're a bitch. There's got to be something good about being a bitch. And all I could think of was all the ways that that part of me had hurt me. And at the time I was a retailer, and she said, do you ever get damaged merchandise delivered to your store?
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Speaker 35: And I said all the time she said, Is there ever a time where they don't want to take back the damaged goods? And I said yes. And she said, well, do you ever have to get a little forceful or a little bitchy? And I said, oh, my God, yes. And I was remodeling a house at the time. She said, when you're a couple of weeks late and $20,000 over budget, does it help to be a little bitchy? Would it help you? And all of a sudden, I realized that when I finally said to the contractor, you need to finish my house, he finished my house. And this light went on inside of me that this part of me that I had shamed, that I had hated so much, actually came bearing gifts. She said, either you're going to use it or it's going to use you. And that was a life changing moment for me.
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Speaker 36: When we fully understand the human soul, we find that it's a place of ambiguity, of contradiction, of paradox. All experience is a result of contrast, light and shadow, pleasure and pain, up and down, backwards and forwards. In order to have manifestation, you need opposing energies. You need your enemies to be who you are. The human soul is simultaneously divine and diabolical, sacred and profane, sinner and saint, eastern wisdom, traditions. We have a saying the sinner and saint are merely exchanging notes. So once you understand that, then first thing you realize is to have a shadow is normal. If you had only truth, goodness, harmony on your side in the complete absence of the other, there would be no creative impulse. Let's say you had only the evolutionary creative impulse in the universe. Then the universe would rapidly burn itself into the heat depth of absolute zero. If, on the other hand, you had only the impulse of inertia or destruction or entropy, then the universe would rapidly collapse into a big black hole before you could say Deepak Chopra.
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Speaker 37: We are the microcosm of the macrocosm. This means that every quality that we can see in another exists within us. We possess every human characteristic and emotion. Whether active or dormant, whether conscious or unconscious. There is nothing we can see or conceive of that we are not. We are everything that which we consider good and that which we consider bad. How could we know courage if we have never known fear? How could we know happiness if we never knew sadness? How could we know the light if we didn't know dark? All of life is based on the coexistence of these pairs of opposites. Our shadow is forever hiding from itself. Rather than confront our own darkness, we project these unwanted qualities onto others. When we are projecting, our shadow selves, it sounds like this she's so self centered. He's so full of himself. These people are idiots. What a loser. Afraid of our own unworthiness and simultaneously afraid of our own greatness, we unconsciously transfer these qualities onto another rather than owning them ourselves. Those we project on own pieces of our unclaimed darkness as well as pieces of our unclaimed light. Until we take back all that we have projected away, what we can't be with won't let us be.
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Speaker 37: One of the most frequently asked questions I get is how do you know if you're projecting. If it's your stuff or theirs? I think it was best said by revered philosopher and psychologist Ken Wilver. He says that if a person or thing in our environment informs us if we receive what is happening as information, a point of interest, we probably aren't projecting. On the other hand, if it affects us, we're pointing our fingers, judging if we're plugged in. Chances are that we are a victim of our own projections. Think of someone from your own life who disgusts, annoys or repulses you and think of the qualities about them that you most hate. Now imagine this person standing right in front of you, and I want you to put your hand out, point your finger at them and say, you're an idiot, or you're a knowitall or you're selfish. Now stop where you are, keep your finger pointing at them. And now notice that one finger is pointing at them. And where are the other three fingers? Pointing back at you. This is the phenomenon of projection. Instead of acknowledging the qualities within us that we dislike, we project them onto someone else.
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Speaker 38: We project them onto our mothers, our kids, our friends, or even better, some famous public figure who we have never even met. If I asked each of you what you love about these people, you would each have a different response. The people that you hate also represents some aspect of yourself that you don't own. Notice what you think and feel as you look at each of these people.
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Speaker 6: Whatever we judge or condemn in another is ultimately a disowned or rejected part of ourselves.
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Speaker 40: I was watching the events of 911 on TV with a friend of mine, and after that, we were driving down the street and turned to my friend, and I said, you know, from now on, the Arabs are going to be the new blacks. They're going to get the brunt of a lot of projections that blacks have carried in this culture for a long time. Now, a lot of times, blacks react. We react to those projections, and we project back. And that creates a vicious cycle. And the ego consciousness just responds the way it should, really, because it's designed to respond as a survival mechanism. That's what the ego is all about, to help us survive. But it's mechanical. It's reactive. When an aggressive negative energy is is directed at us. The ego immediately wants to defend and react. Of course, when you react to a projection, you become that projection. And I didn't want to become an angry black man. That doesn't mean that I don't get angry. I certainly can and do get angry, but I express it and let it go.
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Speaker 41: There's an old Sufi story about a philosopher who made an appointment to debate with a Sufi wisdom teacher named Nasrudin. When the philosopher arrived at his appointment, he found Nazrudin away from his home infuriated the philosopher picked up a piece of chalk and wrote stupid oath on Nazrudin's gate. When Nasrudin got home and saw this, he rushed right over to the philosopher's house. I had forgotten that you were to call, and I'm sorry I missed our appointment, he said, but I remembered it the minute I saw that you had written your name on my gate. The great Swiss psychologist Carl Young, who coined the word shadow and shadow work, said, that is the shadow the person we'd rather not be? Rush Limbaugh hated drug addicts, and then it was revealed that he was one himself. Reverend Ted Haggard railed against homosexuals and was later caught in a drug and male prostitute scandal. A powerful example of projection at play is that of the ex governor of New York, Eliot Spitzer. As a public official, Spitzer worked tirelessly to rid the streets of prostitution rings. Ultimately, he wound up getting busted for having a relationship with a callgirl, which ruined his reputation and his political future. If we look at this through the eyes of the shadow, I would suggest that sometime long ago, probably as a young man, he had the impulse to sleep with a hooker. Since this wasn't politically or socially acceptable, he buried this impulse deep inside, only to be brought down by this very unconscious urge.
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Speaker 41: It's fascinating to see that he tried to destroy the temptation in the outer world, because unconsciously he knew that the real danger lurked in his inner world. This is why we want to deal with the shadow. Rather than trying to convince you that you're not all those negative things and encouraging you to think a good thought. Shadow work urges you to get in there and to be with what you are resisting, because what you resist will persist. If you don't deal with your shadow, it will deal with you.
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Speaker 42: The cost of ignoring a destructive pattern is that you're going to self destruct. You will implode rather than explode.
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Speaker 43: My training is as a neurologist, so I've spent well over three decades studying how the nervous system organizes this information. And it's really quite interesting when you look at the fact that really, even though we think of having one brain, we actually have three different brains. We have this very primitive brain, which some people call the reptilian brain. And if you look at a reptile look at a crocodile, it really just has two responses on or off. So if you ever watched a crocodile trying to eat a wheel of beast, it seems to be very quiet and suddenly explodes and then it goes back into its quiet state. So that response is really a very basic survival response. But the mammalian brain, which is sometimes known as the limbic brain has created a modulating effect on that reptilian brain. So the limbic system has brought into this very primitive on off response gradations meaning you can be a little bit on, significantly on, really on. But then on top of that mammalian brain really just for the last couple hundred thousand years we've evolved this human brain which is called the neocortex. Neo meaning new cortex, new covering of the brain. And that actually allows us for the first time in evolutionary history to decide whether or not we want to react at all.
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Speaker 44: If we look at brain scans we can actually see in a traumatized brain this part of the brain kind of shutting down, becoming dark. The part of the brain that is associated with emotions that part you might be familiar with the fight or flight or freeze response, the amygdala which is the fear processing center in this part of the brain really becomes bright. So what happens is trauma changes brain functioning and then that triggers changes in stress hormones in the body which are not a good thing.
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Speaker 45: It's crucial to be able to recognize and express any kind of pain. Without that, it stays with us, it lodges in the body and it causes us to react to live unconsciously.
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Speaker 46: The unresolved issues that people have in their bodies, their emotions has an absolute direct correlation with their physical bodies, their health and their well being, their expression of wellness. Overall, they think that their health is somehow separate from their emotions. They are intimately connected. Obesity, diabetes, heart disease and cancer. They're all the result significantly of chronic unprocessed inflammatory molecules that have their correlates. In the psychologic world of chronic unprocessed emotions and experiences every single one of those conditions is a byproduct of our stress levels. It affects our health intimately. Most people are aware that what they eat and what they drink affects their toxicity levels. What they don't realize is that what they think and the emotions that they've built up over years are really the most toxic. The ways that people have dealt with this traditionally and historically are inadequate. My patients are in overwhelmed. This is not New Age mumbo jumbo. This is actually hard science. The science here now is indisputable that thoughts that emotions affect the organs of the body.
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Speaker 47: We have to be mindful with every single thought that we have every single day. How do we want to create our heaven or our hell? How do we treat one another? Because we are the source of everything within us.
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Speaker 48: There is a poem by Rumi called The Guest House which in many ways describes a human journey.
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Speaker 49: This being human is a guest house. Every morning a new arrival, a joy, a depression, a meanness some momentary awareness comes as an unexpected visitor. Welcome and entertain them all. Even if they are a crowd of sorrows who violently sweep your house empty of its furniture. Still, treat each guest honorably. He may be clearing you out for some new delight. The dark thought, the shame, the malice. Meet them at the door, laughing, and invite them in. Be grateful for whoever come, because each has been sent as a guide from beyond.
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Speaker 50: Repressing our anger may seem like a good solution, but pretty soon we run out of places to hide. Divorce, stress at work, financial trouble or tension within our families provoke the Shadow until finally it erupts. The ancient Vedic text known as the Bhagavad Gita states that man should discover his own reality, not thwart himself, for he has himself as his only friend or as his only enemy. But if he rejects his own reality, the self will war against him. It's easy to love yourself when you wake up feeling strong and worthy and you have enough money in the bank and you feel great. But how do you love yourself when you feel broke or when you've been hurt or abused?
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Speaker 51: And that sets up the conflict, which, as we get older, those wonderful forces that we've locked up in our shadow are rattling the cages. And sometimes if we're distracted, they sneak out and we think that the people around us think, what were we thinking? And the answer is, we weren't thinking.
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Speaker 52: When we're pressed. The Shadow can look like this.
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Speaker 52: We have to resolve the undigested emotions that are buried in our bodies and lodge to stress in our minds. We have to unearth own and embrace the very parts of ourselves that have caused us the most pain. And the moment we do, the light of our awareness will begin the process of transforming them. We think we're alone, we think we're different. We feel isolated or abandoned. And then when we come together, we find out that we all go through traumas. That to be human is to be challenged and that everyone has gone through some trauma. And if we're courageous, we see that there is gold to be mined in every experience.
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Speaker 53: It's very interesting because I don't remember a single day where my mother was not drunk and I had to live through this and I didn't understand it. Very, very confused by all. Why is this happening? Why is this happening? Who are you? Because as she would drink and as she came into that space, I knew I didn't know her and I just wished she was dead. I said, I wish you were dead. Wish you were dead. I wanted the pain out of my life as of my life because you don't belong here, whoever you are this intoxicated person. And as a child looking at this because my father wasn't there either, I had to figure this out. All I did was wish she was dead, right? Well, not until 30, 40 years later after she had passed over. She was many, many years after that. And after getting involved in this work, I realized that that was indeed one of the most incredible blessings of my life. I learned from that situation about compassion and I learned about forgiveness. And that's a pretty big one to have to learn about forgiveness. You know, we see these things as horrific experiences, terrible experiences, dark experiences, when in truth, they're really enlightened experiences because they help us to be who we are. They help us to be compassionate. They help us to be forgiving. They help us look at someone very, very differently.
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Speaker 54: What doesn't kill us makes us stronger.
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Speaker 55: At a certain point in life, it's about saying, I have been through what I've been through. I've succeeded in some ways perhaps, but I've also failed in some ways. I've been strong at times, but I've also been weak at times. I've gotten some things right and other things I've gotten wrong. And some things have gone well for me and some things have been damn an awful. The issue is what am I going to do with all of that? Two people can go through the exact same situation on an external level, but internally they do two completely different things with it. That's why we you know, we read incredible stories about people who went through the Holocaust or people who were victims of genocide, and yet they survived, and yet they go on to live extraordinary life. And then you meet other people who went to a fraction of that in terms of an internal trauma, but they stay stuck in it forever. We begin to ask ourselves, what am I getting from staying stuck there? What am I avoiding from staying stuck there? And what we are avoiding is the greatest challenge of all, and that is to be who we can be. In order to serve the world.
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Speaker 56: I asked a few people to share their own shadow stories. Some of them are complete. Others are ongoing. All of them are portraits of a fearless commitment to transformation. Swee is like that beautiful combination of a miracle that part of her that she deems so worthless and unlovable actually comes bearing the greatest gifts and makes her the shining light that she is today.
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Speaker 57: The pain that I've been carrying throughout my life was the pain of believing that I was abandoned by my parents because I wasn't pure enough. I'm actually mixed in terms of, you know, half Japanese, half Chinese. I was considered mixed and impure enough to be raised in Japan. You know, my parents live in Japan, and they left me with my grandparents in Malaysia, I just felt so abandoned and rejected. My father ended up getting a divorce from my mother. He remarried and had a Japanese woman, but nobody ever told me that when my father came back with his wife that she's not my mother. I felt the immediate rejection that they didn't want me in their lives and that they would rather have two dogs than have me with them. Because I have always discarded my Japanese identity in favor of my Malaysian Chinese identity. I felt like the country has betrayed me, and I used that pain to really put it into my work. I heard a project was in trouble in Japan, and I volunteered to go to Japan to fix this problem because I know that I could do it. That one day I stepped into Tokyo, and I just felt that this is where I need to be to really discover and explore the Japanese half of me.
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Speaker 57: In less than three years, I created a business from 40 million to over $200 million in a country dominated by men. Never heard of a half Japanese, half Chinese woman being a business leader in a big US Telecom world. So I couldn't be the leader I am today without going through the emotions and the pain that I went through my whole life.
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Speaker 58: If we look deeper, we will see that we all have a divine recipe.
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Speaker 58: All of us have shame about things that have happened to us. We've all gone through difficult times. We address these issues so we can quiet our minds, heal our bodies, and get closer to our heart's desires. Hector had to let go of his macho persona to make peace with the one that he loved the most, which was his father.
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Speaker 59: My father was your traditional Mexican man in the sense of working hard, wanting to get ahead, wanting to provide for his family. And as as a young boy, I was looking for his love. I wanted his attention. The challenge was trying to figure out what was wrong with me, because obviously something's wrong with me. If number one, he's not giving me the attention I want as a little boy, not giving me the love, yelling at me, being verbally abusive. Obviously I did something wrong. There's something wrong with me. So I carried that story from that point on for a long time. And I realized he probably wasn't going to do it the way I wanted. He probably wasn't going to tell me what I wanted when I was a little boy. Nikho de guero daloto. I love you, son. I did some personal growth work. I went inside, looked at the shame, the guilt, the pain I went through that I healed that. And I was able to have that forgiveness with my dad and let that go. I wasn't going to tell him I love you for him. I was going to tell him, I love you for me.
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Speaker 59: My dad passed on, and I'm really grateful that I listened to that inner voice that said, go ahead and tell your dad that you love him. Do it for yourself.
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Speaker 60: Dr. Edie Eager is one of the most beautiful, divine women on the planet today, and she survived the worst circumstances, something that most of us can't even ever imagine.
[00:45:25]
Speaker 61: May 22, 1944 when I arrived in Auschwitz, there was chaos. My father was separated from us and my sister and I facing Dr. Langela. I didn't know who he was until later. And he pointed to my mom to go to the left and my sister and I to the right. I asked the inmate, when will I see my mother? And she pointed at the chimney, and fire was coming out of the chimney. And she said, you better talk about your mother in past and she's burning there.
[00:46:00]
Speaker 61: My sister and I helped each other and said, the spirit never dies. The spirit never dies. I remember that so literally. Even today in Auschwitz, we didn't know when we took a shower whether water is going to come out or gas. And then there were others who ran into the world wires. They got electrocuted. And that night Dr. Mangala came to the barracks and wanted to be entertained. And my friends who knew that I was a very talented gymnast. And so they volunteered me. And I ended up dancing for Dr. Mangeren. I closed my eyes and the music was Chaikovsky. And I was dancing in Budapest. The Romeo and Juliet. I completely dissociated and we had choices. I chose to look at the guards, but they were more imprisoned than I was. I remembered they took my blood about twice a week. And I asked, Why are you taking my blood? And the man said, I'm taking your blood to aid the German soldiers so we can win the war. I said to myself, I was a pacifist. I was a Polarina. I bet with my blood, you're never going to win the war. So I created a part in me that I was able to still be in charge of and not allowing anything but happened externally to murder my spirit. I remember I said, If I survive today, then tomorrow I'll be free.
[00:48:00]
Speaker 62: I remember when Marita came to the shadow process and everybody was looking for the negative qualities they needed to embrace. Marita couldn't even say hers. And I kept asking, what is so horrible that you can't even say it? And she said, because of my background. Mine is that I'm a Nazi.
[00:48:20]
Speaker 63: I was born in Germany in 1955, ten years after the war. I found out when I was eleven or twelve what my country had done. This is a subject we never talked about. My grandfather wouldn't tell me about his experience. My mother wants nothing to do with this. I'm not the only German that holds this and lives this and hides this. And I found many ways to sabotage myself from ever tasting power or success. Because Hitler was successful to coming to power, and his power was horribly abused. I didn't interact with any Germans at all. I stayed away from them. And I did not want to interact with any Jewish person because I didn't want to cause any more pain. And I was ashamed.
[00:49:20]
Speaker 64: Samya was willing to shine light on the darkness and willing to take back her own projections for the good of all humanity.
[00:49:30]
Speaker 65: In 2006, when Israel bombed Lebanon. At the time, I was trying to evacuate members of my family and try to bring them over to the US. And there were no news. You needed to figure out how to reach to them. I became so angry again because here is my family and the bombing. One day I was watching TV. I saw girls crying little girls. I saw there were Lebanese girls. And of course, every time I saw Lebanese kids being bombed and everything, I was really, really angry. I was like, yes. Like bomb the best kind of thing. And at the end I realized they were reporting from the Israeli border on the other side of the border. And they looked exactly the same as the Lebanese girl that were killed on the other side of the border. I saw the pain. And that day that day I made a commitment to myself that I will no longer tolerate that kind of cruelty, irrespective of which side of the border it's happening.
[00:50:34]
Speaker 66: Now, I'm not saying that if you and I rise up to become the people that we are capable of being, that we will rid this planet of war in our lifetime, but I believe with all my heart we will achieve enough this lifetime that humanity will go in that direction.
[00:50:52]
Speaker 67: It's embracing authentically who you are and not being ashamed of it. There's nothing to be ashamed of because everybody has a shadow. If somebody doesn't, they must be pathological.
[00:51:08]
Speaker 68: When I'm leading the shadow process, it feels like my own journey has come full circle.
[00:51:14]
Speaker 69: I've been very judgmental over the years. I was having some really dark dreams about you guys. They're all true.
[00:51:26]
Speaker 70: When we embrace our totality, we experience freedom.
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Speaker 71: My heart feels as big as my body. It's no longer like little anymore. It's like it's me.
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Speaker 72: And embrace it with love. Love. Because that's what we're here for. To give and receive love.
[00:51:41]
Speaker 73: Can't even believe that's you Margaret. I figured out who you are. I remember. If I hadn't faced my darkness, I never would have found my light.
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Speaker 74: Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It's our light, not our darkness, that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented and fabulous? But actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small doesn't serve the world.
[00:52:56]
Speaker 75: There's nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won't feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine as children do. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It's not just in some of us, it's in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.
[00:53:32]
Speaker 76: Consider the story of the Golden Buddha. In 1957, a monastery in Thailand was being relocated and a group of monks was put in charge of moving a giant clay Buddha. In the midst of the move, one of the monks noticed a crack in the Buddha. Concerned about damaging the idol, the monks decided to wait a day before continuing with their task. Later on, one of the monks came to check on the giant statue. He shined his flashlight over the entire Buddha and when he reached the crack, he saw something reflected back at him. His curiosity aroused, the monk got a hammer and a chisel and began chipping away at the clay Buddha. As he knocked off piece after piece of clay, the Buddha got brighter and brighter. After hours of work, the monk looked up in amazement to see standing before him a huge solid gold Buddha. Historians believe the Buddha had been covered with clay by Thai monks several hundred years earlier before an attack by the Burmese army. They covered the Buddha to protect it. In the attack, all the monks were killed. So it wasn't until 1957 that the great treasure was discovered.
[00:54:57]
Speaker 76: Like the Buddha, our outer shell protects us from the world. Our real treasure is hidden within. We human beings unconsciously hide our inner gold under a layer of clay. All we need to do to uncover our gold is to have the courage to chip away at our outer shell piece by piece.
[00:55:26]
Speaker 77: You can't fight darkness with darkness, but you can switch on the light.
[00:55:30]
Speaker 76: All of the work we do on the shadow is to get us to this point where we can forgive. To do forgiveness, we put blindfolds on to make it safe for people to share their deepest secrets.
[00:55:56]
Speaker 78: I forgive myself. I forgive myself. I forgive myself for not finishing college. I forgive myself for beating up my sister. I forgive myself. I forgive myself for hating my body, for screaming at my kids, for not loving enough. Or for thinking I must stupid, incompetent asshole. For stealing from my first boss, for being rich, for being beautiful, for drinking. Too much, not speaking out. I forgive not why, but cheating on my diet. I forgive myself. Forgive myself. Forgive myself. I forgive myself for everything. You are forgiven. You are forgiven. You are forgiven. You are completely forgiven.
[00:56:53]
Speaker 79: I think a lot of people are very afraid of their shadow. They don't even want to consider that they have one.
[00:56:58]
Speaker 80: Brent is one of the holiest men that I know. And he is so spiritually evolved because he uses the pain of his past to be the greatest expression of himself today.
[00:51:12]
Speaker 81: This story really began for me when I was nine years old and I was attending a summer camp that was managed by an order of religious men. During that summer, I was molested by one of the religious men. I remember that experience being a beginning of a split for me from myself. It happened a number of other times. During that period of time I was at that camp. I was always afraid that that guy was going to come in in the middle of the night. I even went so far as to to borrow a knife from someone that I kept under the pillow. As a nine year old kid, I remember I just felt like some part of me died at that time. I went on with my life, holding on to that secret, holding on to that shame of not really being connected with myself. The difference between forgiving and condoning forgiving is seeing the true heart of another person. It's beyond all the action. In holding anybody to blame, we limit our own love. People need to know that they can get help, that they don't have to carry their shame alone, that they don't have to live in a secret, and that there are people that are holding the light for them, that are willing to see them as they are through the shadow.
[00:59:00]
Speaker 81: It's the only way to see yourself is to look at the light and the darkness and to embrace it. I use that analogy of being like a drowning person where someone's holding your head underwater, and at some point you realize that you have to be the one that fights your way back to the surface. What happened to me as a child has given me a real depth of compassion, which I'm so grateful for, because it's so clear to me when I work with people how they're suffering, how they're hiding. And it's been the greatest gift of my life, that I'm in a position where I can where I can honor people in that way. I'm just so grateful to be able to connect with people on that most vulnerable level, that deepest level of the soul. I regain my faith because I asked for it.
[01:00:06]
Speaker 82: Forgiveness doesn't happen in your head until it happens in your heart.
[01:00:17]
Speaker 83: My mom was walking downtown Beirut with the young Israelis, and she turns to my dad and her her mother had been killed by the Israelis. She goes, Mustafa, these are young soldiers don't they have a mother? And if she can forgive, who are we not to forgive?
[01:00:37]
Speaker 84: Well, you can't move on if you don't forgive. The train stops if you don't forgive. And mostly you had to forgive yourself for taking whatever happened to you too deep to a deep place, that it shut you down.
[01:00:50]
Speaker 85: The universe will deal with that person's karma. You don't have to worry that if if you, quote, unquote, forgive them, that they're going to somehow live an undeserved, wonderful life.
[01:01:00]
Speaker 86: Each and every one of us needs to work full time on self forgiveness.
[01:01:05]
Speaker 87: Our motivation to forgive is increased when we understand why it's so important. It's not just to make their day better. It's to free you.
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Speaker 88: And forgiveness is the hallway between the past and the future.
[01:01:20]
Speaker 89: The future expression of who we are as a planet, as our country in America, depends on the people that grow up, that become the next presidents, that become the next politicians, economists.
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Speaker 90: We want to make a difference. We want to somehow get it right to feel like we did, or at least we tried to do what we came here to do. That is the gold that is being mined today.
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Speaker 91: But that's because the world is growing. We are entering a new age. That's what's going on. That's why we're talking about this.
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Speaker 92: You are a force of love. You are made from love. And love is the most forceful energy you could ever have. Accept that energy. Accept who you are. Accept your inheritance, if you will.
[01:02:00]
Speaker 93: You're the total being of love, and don't waste a minute of it.
[01:02:04]
Speaker 94: I've come full circle, and this is the external of what was going on inside of me. It's how we are able to perceive everything in life as an opportunity for growth. I got married. I have three children and five grandchildren and one great grandson. And that's the best revenge to Hitler.
[01:02:52]
Speaker 95: So if you want authentic peace of mind, creativity, kindness, compassion, joy, then you've got to understand your shadow and be okay with it. Celebrate.
[01:03:05]
Speaker 96: If shadows could talk, they would tell us that we're as precious as a million pounds of gold. That our brightest light can shine only when we've accepted our darkness that there is wisdom in every wound. That there is. A greater future waiting for us. That we are children of God and have a right to be here. That we were all created equal. That our pain is not personal, but belongs to every man and woman alive. Life is a magical journey of making peace with both our humanity and divinity. They would tell us that we deserve better, that we matter, that we are more than we ever dreamed possible, and that there's light at the end of the tunnel, that there is nobody in the world quite like you. What if you knew in every cell of your body that you were living a divine plan? A plan so important, so vital for the evolution of humankind? What if you knew that everything that was happening right now that doesn't fit your ego ideals is happening to support you in stepping out of the smallness of your darkest thought into the brilliance of your biggest dream?
[01:04:29]
Speaker 4: If you take this journey, I promise you that you're going to experience more love, more happiness than you've ever had before.