Has this ever happened to you?
You set a goal to achieve something worthwhile, or you make a commitment to your spiritual practice, or to express your highest potential in some wonderful way, and then…
Suddenly, or incrementally, you notice you’re losing momentum. You begin to get distracted, other life demands get in the way. Or, an obstacle comes into your path that appears insurmountable. Or, fear creeps up and you begin to doubt yourself and your ability (“What was I thinking?”)
It’s a common experience. What is actually happening is that the “shadow self” has slipped into your consciousness and begins to work hard to sabotage your success.
What is the shadow self and how can we be free of its influence in our lives?
The answer is…by reclaiming our Authentic Self. In this post, I will be explaining what the shadow self is and how it works. Then, over the course of the next few days, I will reveal, step-by-step how to reclaim your Authentic self so that you may more easily achieve your goals and ultimately express your highest potential.
As expressions of the Infinite, it is natural for us to be loving, joyous, happy, fulfilled, peaceful, successful, abundant and perfect. So why doesn’t that seem to be our everyday experience? Two passages from the Bible may give us a clue.
“And God said; Let us make man in our image, after our likeness.”
—Genesis 1:26
“God hath made man upright, but they have sought out many inventions.” —Eccl. 7:29
Though stated in Biblical terms, the first statement is scientifically accurate. If there is one Universal Intelligence from which all creation originates, then we cannot possibly be created as anything other than in Its “image and likeness.” And if the qualities of this Universal Intelligence are love, joy, peace, harmony, abundance and perfection, then we must be also.
Therefore, in truth, we are all individualized expressions of pure love, pure joy, complete happiness, limitless peace, harmony, exquisite beauty, magnificence, absolute perfection and unbounded prosperity. This is how we were created and what we are in Truth. Let’s call this our “authentic self.”
Now, here’s the variable: we are given an important gift at inception, and that is freedom of choice. We have the choice to agree with the inherent truth of our being and live our lives from that awareness, or we have the choice to disregard it, ignore it, and push it away. Emerson stated: “…we but half express ourselves and are ashamed of that divine idea which each of us represents.”
Mostly, though, it’s not such a conscious choice. Since most of us are born into families that have forgotten they are the self-expression of the Infinite, they unknowingly pass this misinformation on to us when we are children. We grow up believing that we are separate from our Source, separate from the Love-Intelligence which created us, and inherently inadequate. When we disregard the truth that we are beings created “in the image and likeness” we, by default, “re-create” or “re-invent” ourselves in another image…a distorted image.
We are, in essence, asleep to our inherent magnificence and have “invented” a counterfeit self to replace our authentic self. I call this counterfeit self the “shadow self.” Some refer to it as the ego, the egoic mind, the false self, or the fearful self. It’s all the same thing.
The shadow self was born from a belief that we are separate from our Source, separate from our good and separate from each other. The shadow self incorporates a belief structure which includes the assumption that we are mostly powerless, subject to the winds of fate, a victim of circumstance, alone, afraid and in need of something or someone to make us feel better.
Generation after generation has erroneously assumed that this false self is true human nature. We tend to accept, without question, that the shadow self is who we are for two reasons: a) it is what we were taught from the moment we were born, and b) society constantly reinforces this assumption. This is not the Truth of us, but we believe it is (and therefore, it will be our experience) because until we discover otherwise, it’s all we know.
For most of us, this “shadow self” has become our dominant self today, and our authentic self is only hinted at from time to time. We may catch a glimpse of it when we fall in love with someone, when we witness pure beauty in nature, when we’re in meditation, when we are in selfless service, or during moment of peak experience in work or play.
It can be said that the shadow self has served humankind by allowing us to safely maneuver our way through the confused world which we’ve invented. But the price of “keeping us safe” is that we stay small and never risk expressing our highest potential.
It is time to break free and spread our wings! It is time to awaken from the spell of the shadow self which is killing our dreams and keeping of small.
One thing is for sure…the potential to express our authentic self remains within us at every moment and each of us enters this incarnation with the longing to wake from the ego dream and once again live in the full awareness of our True self.
In the next several days, I will be continuing this discussion of the shadow self and authentic self and post step-by-step processes for reclaiming our authentic self, thereby expressing our highest potential.