Exploring Our Shadow
When you point a finger three point back… I remember first hearing this when I was doing some professional development training and it really resonated….
It’s not them… It’s me…
Or it’s something to do with me…
If I am pointing my finger at someone in a way that is judgemental in any way, then what part of me does it reflect that I have hidden in the shadows?
For if my mirror were completely clear, there would never be judgement at all…
There would be only acceptance and observation…
I had a friend who was full of revenge… He would talk often about the hatred he felt towards those who had bullied him at school and how he would like to wreak revenge…
I didn’t like him talking that way… It disturbed me and I wanted him to stop….
I then went on a course about improving our relationships with ourselves and one another… We were working with reclaiming our lost, hidden and disowned aspects that lay in the shadows…
This wasn’t only the dark aspects that we keep hidden away, this was also about our ‘gold’, the unclaimed gifts and parts of ourself that we are not expressing….
To do this we wrote down three aspects that we felt strong antipathy to, and three aspects or talents that we strongly admired in the people close to us; in our family, our friends and also those in the public eye and qualities of ‘people in general’…
As course participants we then all mingled, pretending that we were meeting at a ‘drinks party…’
We were ‘instructed’ to approach one another and introduce ourselves in this way…
‘Hello my name is Julia…’ We would then choose one of the qualities we strongly admired, or one of the aspects that we despised or felt a strong antipathy to…
For instance I had sited my friend’s frequent reference to revenge…
And so I continued… ‘Hello my name is Julia and I am full of revenge…’
The other course participant responded…
‘Hello Julia, how lovely to meet you, tell me about when you last sought revenge, how did it show itself…?’
It was then an arena to access this hidden aspect within, and to bring it from the shadows… An opportunity to reclaim the part that we hadn’t given permission to express itself, or we had been unaware that it was…!
We often lose, hide away or disown parts of ourself that we found in our childhood were not welcome; we internalised that communicating how we really felt wasn’t safe and so deeming aspects of ourself unacceptable, we discarded them….
Because it wasn’t acceptable to express, we also dislike or strongly admire the part of ourselves we have hidden or disowned, especially when we see it in the mirror, expressed by someone else…!
We are often unaware that we are simply seeing a part of ourselves given the space to air itself in the other…
By bringing everything in the shadows out into the open, it has a chance to transform…
Whatever is kept in the shadows, be it our darkness or our light, can destroy us if it is kept hidden, but it can transform if it is brought forth.
And so to the hidden gold!
All my life I have loved to sing… Not so much the people around me…
This is already demonstrating how lost this part is…!
I have always surrounded myself with musical people… And all of my boyfriends and husbands have either been musicians, or at the very least been passionate about music and been able to play a musical instrument or sing well…
When I was about eight years old I wanted to sing a solo in the school nativity… I practiced after school every day with Mrs Nicholson our singing teacher, and eventually I was able to sing ‘Edelweiss’ unaccompanied….
I was then offered the opportunity to ‘almost’ sing my solo… I sung a duet with Elizabeth Waring, the best singer in the school!
We sang ‘Once in royal David’s City’ together…
I loved it…
My gold out of the shadows!
Over the years it has slipped back there…
So much so that when I introduced myself at our imaginary drinks party on the course…
‘Hello, my name is Julia, and I am a very talented singer…’ I fell about laughing, before anyone else could….!
And in the same way, found accessing revenge within me very hard…
I had deemed it an unacceptable feeling and had buried it deep….
It then came to me that I had sought revenge by striving to be better than, more successful than a person whose actions I had felt damaged and hurt by…
In accessing this aspect and fully owning it, something relaxed and I never reacted again to my friend when he talked about revenge…
I also stopped ‘pushing so hard’ for success…
And after a while my friend stopped mentioning revenge…
Since I met Anadi, who is a very good musician – he plays piano, guitar and sings, and toured with his own band – he has frequently assured me that I have a lovely voice, with an incredible range…
I find I am gradually reclaiming my own lost voice…!
I have been running all of my life – it feels I was born to run. In the running step I experienced freedom and my true expression. I came to see that I needed to ‘get out of the way of myself’ and let my energy flow through the running step; allow it to express itself in the dance and the motion of running. I ran for England and GB for some years. My first international was in 1979, a three mile cross country race; and I continued to run at international level until 1993. Two of my best results were first place in the Dublin City Marathon in 1985 and 7th place woman, 3rd British woman in the 1986 London Marathon in a time of 2.36.31, which gained me selection for the Commonwealth Games.
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