Shadow Self, Shadow Work, Shadow Projection, Human Shadow, Healing The Shadow

admin Self-Help, Shadow Work March 15, 2012April 14, 2012feel better, healing, shadow 0 Comment

Own Your Shadow-Self

To Improve Your Life

The shadow-self is a very important aspect of your experience of yourself and life. I am going to explain to you in basic terms the crux of the shadow-self and hopefully you will see clearly why it is such a determining factor of your self-esteem.

You will no doubt notice that you have a self-image. This is undeniable and this self-image is a construction within your mind of how you are. Because it is so obvious and so familiar and seemingly so real we live life as if we really are that way.

Think back to childhood or even imagine yourself growing up and the pressure to conform to particular ways of being was persistent, sometimes explicit, sometimes subtle but always immense. You quickly learned what was acceptable and what was to be never heard or seen in your household and society.

The problem is that these traits which you learned were never to be seen or heard don’t actually go away. How can they? Where would they go? They have nowhere to go and I will talk more about that in depth in other pages. So as they can’t disappear, in order for you to have them appear to have disappeared you shove them out of conscious awareness.

Cue the self-image and its opposite the shadow-self.

So what you end up with is a whole lot of traits and characteristics that are acceptable to Mum, Dad, society, teachers and you in one mental construct called the self-image and everything that is not OK is said to be in your shadow.

Why Is This Important?

This is important for your self-esteem and experience of life because you can try really, really hard to feel better by swapping some of the self-image traits around, making some more prominent, working to improve some and working to have more people see certain traits or whatever.

However, at the end of the day the self-image is just a made up idea. It still has no basis in absolute reality as the conscious being you are. You can swap and change and tinker with the self-image all you like, and some people do for their whole miserable life.

You will never experience self-acceptance, self-love and self-esteem until you finally turn and face all those traits you shut away in the shadow-self, acknowledge them, embrace them, welcome them, make it OK that they are there, see the benefit of them being there, love them and accept them.

Raise Your Self Esteem, Overcoming Low Self Esteem, BoostingSelf Esteem, Help Low Self Esteem, Ways To Improve Self Esteem

admin Self-Esteem March 15, 2012April 14, 2012feel better, raise self-esteem, self-confidence 0 Comment

Raise Your Self Esteem

Once you raise your self esteem, if done thoroughly, you experience life flowing.

A translation by J.H. McDonald of chapter 2 of Tao Te Ching says…

Things come her way and she does not stop them;

Things leave and she lets them go.

She has without possessing,

and acts without expectations.

When her work is done she takes no credit.

Once you begin to transcend the illusion of being an isolated, separate object and feel and know that you are not…

a certain way
separate
completely in control
doing something wrong

then it becomes pointless worrying about…

things that you don’t have
what other people think of you
what you should be doing

If you could pretend right now that everything that you thought to be true about your life and yourself was part of a larger plan to help you do something magnificent at a later time, would that make more sense?

If you could trust the intelligence of what has you aware of yourself, and trust that this power, force, potential, ability, creator call it what you will, is actually who you are in essence, you could let go of trying to work out with your rational mind why things happen, why things don’t happen, why this and why that.

Some people like to feel in control of their lives and they don’t have much internal turmoil. They are probably quite content with their life experience most of the time. If you have much internal turmoil and angst it would indicate to me that there are memories within your nervous system which have not yet been processed and let go of.

Either that or your attitude and beliefs about what life is are so far removed from reality that life is a traumatic experience for you.

What does all this have to do with boosting self esteem? Well, self-esteem is not a thing that you develop like a muscle. You cannot think of self esteem as a thing you have. You cannot develop more of it specifically.

To raise your self-esteem you simply need to know the truth of what self is. There are two selfs. One we write with a small ‘s’ and means the ego or illusion of who you think you are. The big ‘S’ Self means the essential, spiritual, real, authentic you.

The one you were born as, the one who is unique and unknown. Once you turn your attention inwards to the feeling of being aware and curious about who and what that is, you start to get to know the real you, the real Self.

So in order to experience overcoming low self-esteem know the real you, the big ‘S’ Self. The big ‘S’ Self thinks that it is pretty AMAZING. The big ‘S’ Self loves itself and knowing that this is who you are is how you raise your self-esteem.