Tag: shadow
These are very personal questions: What is spiritual to you? When and where do you feel spiritual? How do these spiritual feelings get blocked or expanded?
We can carry these questions throughout our lives. Spiritual practice aims to refine and deepen our understanding of them.
I will focus on three specific spiritual practices: psychological relationships, meditation, and psychedelic plant medicines, including cannabis.
Spiritual practice is about psychological relationships because if our spiritual practice doesn’t improve our relationships with others, what’s the point?
The practice of psychological relationships with others and with one’s inner life is a personal experience with spiritual meaning. This involves experiences of vulnerability, hurt, and confusion that teach us the depth of human love and kindness.
Spiritual practice is not only personal but also universal and objective. We need to look at our minds as they are, our human instincts as they are, and our relationship with the natural world. We are born, go through all the developmental stages, and then die. Life is both precious and painful. We cannot change most of life, but we can learn to connect with it gracefully, little by little.
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How to Love One’s Self and Working with the Fear of Loving
The act of loving one’s self feels right. It makes sense. It is simple, “love your self”. And, it is very complicated because there are parts of ourselves that we resist acknowledging, let alone loving. Loving one’s self is a continual process of uncovering smarter and kinder ways of relating to our self, to others…
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Hypocrisy, Hope, and Return of The Shadow Personality
Hypocrisy is a curious phenomenon. It is most blatant in our political and spiritual leaders because the consequences of their behavior reach so many people. For many, the betrayal goes unseen. These leaders hold so much hope and trust in their hands. Hypocrisy Definition The practice of claiming to have moral standards or beliefs to…
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How to Make Use of Dark Feelings and Dixon White’s Example
There is an unexpected freedom that arises as we acknowledge the dark parts of ourselves; defensiveness, judgement of others, exaggerated entitlement, and participation with the “isms” racism, sexism, etc. This freedom comes about because it is exhausting and poisonous to defend a belief that is not true. It is poisonous to others and poisonous to…
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The Art of Suffering Emotional Pain
Everyone has emotional pain, some have less, some have more. Emotional pain is something we all share. What we do with it and what it does with us is the art and the work. Therefore, we are able to relate with emotional experiences to benefit our life. We are moving our life toward a conscious…
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The Shadow, page 3
“Curiously, people resist the noble aspects of their shadow more strenuously than they hide the dark sides. To draw the skeletons out of the closet is relatively easy but to own the gold in the shadow is terrifying. It is more disrupting to find out that you have a profound nobility of character than to…
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The Shadow, Page 2
In the previous post, we began looking at the rejected parts of ourselves. The parts that have been put into the “bag” or banished to the “shadow”. Consequently, we may feel like “half a person”, or “something is missing”. As we bring these rejected parts into the light of awareness and value them, we begin…
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The Shadow
“Filling the conscious mind with ideal conceptions is a characteristic of Western theosophy, but not the confrontation with the shadow and the world of darkness. One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious.” C.G. Jung, Collected Works 13: Alchemical Studies. P.335 How to make the “darkness conscious”…
