Offer Gentleness to Each Shadow

I am listening for my own rage, my anger, and my resentments. They sit like a painful boulder in my chest, waiting to be seen, heard, felt, and released.

My porous boundaries have led me here. I will stop agreeing to things that are not in alignment with my intentions. I have allowed myself to be disrespected and used as a teaching tool. I am not here to be a dumping ground for other people’s emotional baggage, or a target to carve out the pain of their wounding.

Today, I dig up the rooted beliefs that still exist that tell me that my value is in saving or fixing other people. These are roots from the past and they do not serve the life I am creating. My actions based on these beliefs only serve to steal my life energy and joy. An empty cup quenches no one and only adds to the suffering in the world.

Today I dream anew. I say no to disrespectful behavior, I say no to negativity, I say no to other people spilling toxic energy on me, and I say no to trying to validate myself to anyone.

I am loved, and I am worthy of a joy-filled vital life. My rage is transmuted to crystal clear boundaries and self-love. I am the embodiment of strength, not victimhood. I have created suffering in my life from the conditioning of unworthiness, a bullshit lie that I no longer accept.

I am worthy of having love, peace, and abundance in my life. I am worthy of having relationships and experiences that reflect my own compassionate heart and desire for peace.

It is not my responsibility to fix other people’s wounds, or their destructive beliefs or behaviors. It is MY responsibility to be truthful and honest with myself about what my soul desires, and the actions and healing that must take place in myself to craft the world of my intentions.

I am grateful for these experiences and lessons that uncover my hidden shadows so that I can nurture and embrace them with love, forgiveness, and understanding.

I am thankful for the gifts brought by the sacred trickster to show me the lessons I still need to learn. I find humor in the experience of being brought back to the beliefs that I thought I weeded out long ago.

These are lessons in humility and grace, in sometimes not knowing what is yet to be known. These are lessons of truth, the untangling and unraveling of untruths that still exist in my life and in myself. Judgement is unnecessary. Truth is simply discernment to see things as they are.

The creation of truth is a conscious seeking out of the untruths that exist within ourselves and our lives, and it can never be found somewhere else. It is the self-honesty of finding congruence between who we say we are, the masks we wear, and who we intimately know ourselves to be.

Shadows appear when we have stepped away from honest and mindful self-observation. Trickery reveals itself when we step into self-denial. Our ally, the objective observer, turns a cold eye to wishful thinking and reveals what is. Our ego is shallow in its observations, only embodied observation allows us to sense the truth.

The moment that I allow myself to step into the truth, the toxic energy of my experience releases itself to be alchemized. Sometimes we take the world personally when it is just revealing ourselves to us.

Offering gentleness to each shadow that arises allows us to see through the eyes of a compassionate heart, the essence of true power. It allows us to live and let live, to choose the thoughts and actions that align with our highest intentions, and to ask ourselves “What would peace do?”. In this space, there is no more need for reactions, as everything is resolved from within. And so it is.