فصل 5

CHAPTER 5

KNOW THY SHADOW, KNOW THY SELF

Within each of us lies a solid gold treasure. This golden essence is our spirit, pure and magnificent, open and glowing. But this gold has been covered up by a hard shell of clay. The clay comes from our fear. It is our social mask: the face we show the world. Unconcealing your shadow reveals your mask. We must look at this mask with love and compassion for there is great value in understanding what we hide behind.

Consider the story of the Golden Buddha. In 1957, a monastery in Thailand was being relocated and a group of monks was put in charge of moving a giant clay Buddha. In the midst of the move one of the monks noticed a crack in the Buddha. Concerned about damaging the idol, the monks decided to wait for a day before continuing with their task. When night came, one of the monks came to check on the giant statue. He shined his flashlight over the entire Buddha. When he reached the crack he saw something reflected back at him. The monk, his curiosity aroused, got a hammer and a chisel and began chipping away at the clay Buddha. As he knocked off piece after piece of clay, the Buddha got brighter and brighter. After hours of work, the monk looked up in amazement to see standing before him a huge solid-gold Buddha.

Many historians believe the Buddha had been covered with clay by Thai monks several hundred years earlier before an attack by the Burmese army They covered the Buddha to keep it from being stolen. In the attack all the monks were killed, so it wasn’t until 1957, when the monks were moving the giant statue, that the great treasure was discovered. Like the Buddha, our outer shell protects us from the world: our real treasure is hidden within. We human beings unconsciously hide our inner gold under a layer of clay. All we need to do to uncover our gold is have the courage to chip away at our outer shell, piece by piece.

In my seminars I often work with people who have invested in years of therapy, transformational seminars, breath work, and other healing modalities. They ask the same questions: “When will it end? When will I be done? How much more work must I do on the issues that come up over and over again?” These people are not looking at themselves as magnificent Buddhas encased in clay shells. These people hate their shells. They haven’t discovered that their clay shells protect them in more ways than they can imagine. We need our shells for many reasons, and for each of us the reasons may be different. Even though our ultimate goal is to shed our shells we first need to understand and make peace with these masks. Do you think after the monks chiseled the shell off the gold Buddha, the Buddha angrily said, “I hated that horrible shell”? Or do you think the Buddha blessed the shell that served to protect him from being stolen away from his home?

When I was young my outer shell was tough, uncaring, and insensitive. Saying “I’ve got it all together” hid my feelings of inadequacy and gave me the illusion that I was okay. As I chiseled away at my shell, piece by piece, my shining essence began to emerge. But it was not until I could distinguish those aspects that made up my shell, as a cover-up for many hidden emotions, that I was able to see past my tough exterior. Once I started looking through the cracks I was able to let go of my shell. And when I came to appreciate and respect this hard shell for protecting me, my life was transformed.

Your outer shell is the you who faces the world. It hides the characteristics that make up your shadow. Our shadows are so well disguised that we often show the world one face when, in fact, the exact opposite is really within us. Some people wear a layer of toughness that hides their sensitivity, or a mask of humor to cover up their sadness. People who know it all are usually covering up feelings of stupidity, while those who act arrogantly have yet to reveal their insecurity. The cool people are hiding the geek within, and the smiling face, an angry one. We have to look beyond our social masks in order to discover our authentic selves. We are masters of disguise, fooling others but also fooling ourselves. It’s the lies we tell ourselves that we need to decipher. When we’re not completely satisfied, happy, healthy, or fulfilling our dreams, we know these lies are in our way. This is how we recognize our shadow at work.

The shift that needs to occur is perceptual. You need to see your outer shell as having served as protection, not just something that keeps you from fulfilling your dreams. Your outer shell is divinely designed to guide your spiritual process. By revisiting and exploring each incident, emotion, and experience that led you to construct that shell, you’ll be guided back home to embrace the totality of your being. Our shells are the road map to our personal growth. They are made up of all that we are, and all that we don’t want to be. No matter how painful your past or present might be, if you look at yourself truthfully and use the information stored in your outer shell as a guide, it will lead you in your journey towards enlightenment.

When you get to know your whole self, you will no longer need your shell to protect you. You will naturally allow your masks to fall away, exposing your authentic self to the world. You will not have to pretend that you’re more or less than anyone else. Everyone in the world can become your peer. Our shells are created from our ego ideal. The ego is the “Self” distinguished from other. Spirit combines “self” and other as one. When this union between spirit and self occurs, we become one with ourselves and one with the world. Most people don’t get very far unconcealing their shadow because they’re unwilling to be honest with themselves. The ego doesn’t enjoy losing control. The moment you acknowledge all aspects of yourself, the good and the bad, the ego begins to feel a loss of power. In The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying, Sogyal Rinpoche explains that the ego is our false and ignorantly assumed identity. So ego, then, is the absence of true knowledge of who we really are, together with its result: a doomed clutching on, at all costs, to a cobbled together and makeshift image of ourselves, an inevitably chameleon charlatan self that keeps changing and has to, to keep alive the fiction of its existence.

If you begin the process of unconcealing your shadow and a voice inside starts screaming for you to stop, know that it’s only your ego fearing its own death. Give yourself permission to uncover your true self. Challenge the person you think you are in order to unveil the person you are capable of becoming.

Using other people as mirrors helps you to decipher your mask. Go out and interview people close to you—friends, lovers, family, and colleagues. Ask them which three things they like the most about you and which three things they like the least. It’s important for the people you’re asking to know it’s okay for them to be honest. You’re the only one who can make it safe for others to tell you the truth. Find out if you appear to others the way you appear to yourself. Other people often see more positive aspects in us than we see in ourselves, and at the same time they see more negative traits than we see, or admit to ourselves.

People often resist this exercise. They fear being judged. The word judgment carries a lot of baggage, so I prefer to use the word feedback. Feedback is a useful tool. We never have to believe what others think about us, but if we are afraid to hear what the people closest to us have to say, we should take notice. Most people are afraid they will hear what they fear most. This is denial at work. Think of denial as an acronym for Don’t Even Notice I Am Lying. We only fear feedback if we know on some level that we’ve been lying to ourselves. If you honestly feel that what someone thinks about you has no basis in reality, you won’t care. We care when we’ve been deceiving ourselves and get called on it. Take Kate, for example.

Kate came to do some work with me and when I asked her to do this exercise, many of the people she interviewed said she lacked integrity. She was baffled because her whole life, as she saw it, had been about being honest at all costs. Knowing how this process works, I was sure the people around her perceived some aspect of Kate that she had hidden from herself. I asked her to close her eyes and allow images to come to her mind whenever I asked her a question. After we consciously took several deep breaths together I put on some music and began to guide her through a visualization. I asked her to go for a walk in a garden. I had her imagine beautiful plants, trees, and flowers there. When Kate was relaxed and comfortable, I asked her to remember a time when she had been dishonest, a time when she had lied or cheated, a time when she had no integrity. We sat in silence. Then tears began rolling down her cheeks. When Kate finally spoke, she recounted this story.

Kate had wanted to be a doctor her entire life. She had finished her last year of medical school and was in her third month of residency at a large hospital in New Orleans. It was dinner time in the hospital and everyone was busy. Kate was in a hurry too. She was making rounds, looking in on her patients. She entered a woman’s room and decided she wanted to flush a line around the woman’s heart with saline. Kate couldn’t find a nurse to help, so she rushed down the hall herself to get a tube of saline solution. Without looking at the tube a nurse had given her, Kate injected the solution into the line. Halfway through the procedure, the woman whom she was injecting the fluid into went into a seizure. Shocked, Kate looked down at the tube in her hand and saw that the label said potassium chloride. She stopped the injection immediately and stabilized the woman until she came out of the seizure. By this time, many of the staff doctors had come to try to figure out what happened to this patient. Kate had already hidden the tube. She was horrified. Because she broke one of the fundamental rules taught in medical school—never give medicine to a patient without first checking the label—she could have killed or seriously injured this woman. When the doctor asked Kate what happened she lied and said she didn’t know. Until this moment, Kate had never told anyone this story. In fact, she had never thought about it since the day she finished her residency and left that hospital. On that terrible day, Kate swore that she would never make a medical mistake again.

In the sixteen years since that incident, Kate became a world-famous physician and author, proud of her integrity and full of distaste for anyone with standards lower than her own. But in her personal life, what kept coming up was Kate’s friends questioning her integrity. Because she’d disowned this part of herself, buried it long ago, she was blind to it. Kate wore a mask of integrity to hide the part of herself that was deceitful. She had fooled herself into believing her own disguise.

This single act of dishonesty, which Kate had not come to terms with, took on a life of its own. When she lied to others in her relationships she was unable to see it. She complained that she was always being misunderstood. And despite all her accomplishments, Kate was never satisfied with her life. She feared intimate relationships, keeping her friends at arm’s length to make sure no one discovered her secret. She thought she loved herself but after our work together she could see there was a part she hated, an aspect of herself that once caused her shame and humiliation. Once Kate was able to see and own her lack of integrity, a light went on inside her. She was now able to see the other places in her life where she’d lied to herself or to others. When we finished our work, Kate looked years younger. She was able to release the giant lie she’d suppressed in herself. She felt light and free, but didn’t understand why. This is how I explained her physical sensation of release.

Think for a moment about how much energy it takes to hide something from yourself and the world. Try taking a piece of fruit, say, a grapefruit, and carry it around in your hand the whole day. Keep the grapefruit out of your own sight and make sure when you are around other people that you hide the grapefruit so they cannot see it. After a few hours, notice how much energy you’re expending. This is what our bodies have to do all day long. Except they don’t have just one piece of fruit, they have to deal with all of the pieces of fruit you’re trying to hide from yourself and from the world. When you finally allow these truths about yourself to surface, you’ll be free. You’ll have all that excess energy to spend on your personal growth and on the path to achieve your highest goals. We are only as sick as our secrets. These secrets make it impossible for us to be our authentic selves. But when you make peace with yourself, the world will mirror back that same level of peace. When you’re in harmony with yourself, you’ll be in harmony with everyone else.

Other people listen to what you’re saying, and see what you’re doing, but they are also conscious of your body language and whether or not it contradicts what you say and do. So it’s important to look closely at what you’re physically communicating to others. As Emerson said, “Who you are speaks so loud, I can’t hear what you’re saying.” What are you saying when you’re not speaking? Our body language, our facial expressions, and the energy we give off are constantly sending out messages. Recent studies show that 86 percent of our communications are nonverbal. That means that only 14 percent of what you say verbally makes any difference to those you are speaking to. You want to ask yourself: “What am I communicating in the silence? What are the messages I am sending out? Do I have a smile on my face when I feel sad? Do I look mad when I am telling you how great my life is? Do I believe I’m in great shape when my mirror tells me something else? Can I look into my eyes and feel good about what I am seeing or do I run away?” These are often difficult questions to confront. You have to give yourself the freedom to not like your answers, because inevitably there will be unpleasant ones. But they’ll be the most useful. Recently, I worked with a group of people who were being trained to lead seminars on healing. We were videotaping everyone so they could see how they appeared to other people. An attractive young woman named Sandra got up to speak. While her words were beautiful, all I could take in was the way she swayed—her slow, sensual movements that flirted with the audience. When she finished her talk, I asked her how she thought people perceived her. She replied, as competent and loving. When we asked the rest of the group, they made comments like “cute,” “sexy,” “has a lot of attention on herself.” I told her that if I were a man, I’d want to have a drink with her after the seminar. As a woman, I might be offended by her sexy movements. Everything she was doing was distracting us from what she was trying to communicate. Sandra’s goal was to provide people with information so that they could heal themselves. But all we could hear her saying was, “Look at how beautiful and sexy I am. Do you like me? Do you find me attractive?” All this was unspoken, but nonetheless, the audience was thinking about Sandra’s body instead of the message she wanted us to hear. We played back Sandra’s video without any sound and she was shocked by what she was communicating. When I asked her why she thought she was doing this she said she wanted people to like her, and she got her power by attracting men to her. The truth was that her body language was actually depleting her power. Sandra had been studying for years to be a healer. Now she finally had the opportunity to speak in front of large groups, and she was presenting them with her mask rather than her message. Sandra was more than willing to see and hear the truth even though she felt angry and embarrassed by her performance. She worked hard on owning her silent communications and the part of herself that needed so much approval from men. As soon as she uncovered this aspect of herself, Sandra was able to embrace it and subsequently became a great speaker who could fulfill her dream of helping people.

Interviewing others to find out how they perceive you is a scary process. But every bit of feedback is a blessing. It takes courage and commitment to see all of yourself. If you’re unwilling to hear the truth, you’ll be unable to transform your life. People often go through a kind of grieving process after they’ve discovered parts of themselves that had been hidden for a long time. If you’ve been fooling yourself about your level of self-love, you’ve got to let yourself feel sad or angry for a while. Remember the core of your being: the whole of who you are doesn’t change as you transfer certain emotions and impulses to your shadow. You never actually become a different person; the true, wonderful you always exists way down, deep inside. So coming to terms with your shadow is a way of remembering who you really are.

Now that we’ve received feedback from others let us continue the process of unconcealing our shadow. Another way to expose your hidden aspects is to make a list of three people you admire and of three people you hate. The people you admire should inspire you with qualities you’d like to emulate. The people you don’t like should get you really angry or upset. They would have done something which you find horrifying. The lists do not have to include people you know, although they can. They can also be politicians, actors, writers, philanthropists, musicians, or killers. After you’ve made your list, write down the three qualities you like or admire most about each person, and those you dislike or hate the most. Then, on a separate sheet of paper, make a list of all the positive qualities of the people you admire on one side and all the negative qualities you dislike on the other. My list looked like this: Martin Luther King, Jr.—visionary, courageous, honorable

Jacqueline Onassis—elegant, successful, leader

Arielle Ford (my sister)—spiritual, creative, powerful

Charles Manson—predator, fearful, hateful

Hitler—murderer, prejudice, evil

Harriet Spiegel (an old teacher)—arrogant, know-it-all, angry

These lists are a good place to find disowned aspects of yourself. Carefully go over each trait you’ve listed. I like to start with the negative traits first. In the beginning you might have trouble seeing how you have the same traits as someone like Hitler. It is important to break down any general word, like murderer. The question to ask is, What kind of person would commit these acts? For example, for murderer, you might say selfish, enraged, doesn’t value human life. If you come up with a phrase like “doesn’t value human life,” then ask yourself what kind of person has no value for human life. You might come up with sick, demented, and narcissistic. The important part of this process is to break the language down until you get to a specific word or a quality that you hate or dislike. Find the qualities that give you an emotional charge. Determine what plugs you in.

Steven, a successful business consultant who came to one of my seminars, had been meditating for eight years, and made a real commitment to alter his life. He hadn’t had a relationship for the past five years and was ready to find a partner, get married, and start a family. He felt ready to dig inside himself and to try to find out why he’d been so unsuccessful in love. By the second day, Steven had unconcealed many aspects of himself but there was one thing bothering him. On a break, he called me over to tell me there was a gentleman in the seminar he could not stand. I asked him what he disliked so much about this other man. He only thought about it for a second, then whispered in my ear, “He’s a wimp, and I hate wimps.” I didn’t say a word but stood there quietly until Steven was ready to speak. There was a glimmer of recognition in his eyes as he told me this story. When Steven was five years old his father had wanted him to go on a pony ride. They were at a state fair with his entire family. Steven had never seen a real pony and was awfully scared of this big animal. When Steven told his father he didn’t want to go on the pony ride because he was scared, his father had scolded him: “What kind of man are you going to make? You’re nothing but a little wimp, you’re an embarrassment to our family.” Steven was punished. Since that day, Steven made a decision never to be a wimp again. He spent the rest of his life trying to make his father proud. He became a black belt in karate, played college football, lifted weights, all to prove he wasn’t a wimp. He’d managed to fool his father, but he’d also learned to fool himself. He’d forgotten this painful incident.

I asked Steven if he could see any area in his life where he was still a wimp. After some thought he said he was a wimp about women. He was afraid of women, of communicating honestly with them, so whenever there was a problem in a relationship Steven just left. He’d left almost every women he’d ever been in a relationship with, and at this point he was even scared to ask attractive women out. I told Steven to take some time to fully feel his shame and his embarrassment.

When I asked Steven what the good thing was about being a wimp, he looked at me like I was crazy. He couldn’t comprehend how something this horrifying, something he’d spent his whole life denying, could be a gift. But then Steven remembered a time when being a wimp had probably saved his life. When he was in college, a group of his friends had gotten together to do some drinking. They’d been going at it for a couple of hours when one of the guys suggested going to a bar in the next town. Steven’s three other friends decided they should all go. Steven was scared to drive drunk or to be in a car with anyone who was drinking and driving, so he told his buddies he had a date and was going to get laid. He didn’t want to tell them he was scared to go. He didn’t want to be a wimp. Two hours later, his friends drove off the road, one of Steven’s closest friends was killed, and the other three were seriously injured.

Steven couldn’t believe what he was remembering. He had blocked this painful incident from his mind. At the time of the accident he figured it was just luck that he had skipped out that night. I asked him if there were other times when being a wimp had kept him out of trouble. He could see now how this trait had made him a cautious man, had kept him out of fights, and had probably saved him from all kinds of trouble. We talked about many past incidents before I asked Steven how he felt about being a wimp now. His face lit up. He had embraced it. He could see now that this aspect of himself had been valuable many times. Steven could now be proud of it. The shame and the pain disappeared.

Steven’s new perspective empowered him. We do not have any say about the events of our lives, Nietzsche commented, but we do have say over how we interpret them. Interpretation can really ease our emotional pain. Inventing interpretations is a creative act. As soon as Steven could love and respect his wimpiness he was able to stop projecting it onto other men. Instead of being repelled by wimpy behavior he could be informed by it.

Later in the course, Steven got to know the man that he thought was a wimp. He was amazed at how different this man seemed to him. Had Steven changed that much or had this man changed in only a couple of hours When Steven owned being a wimp, it changed the lenses he looked through. Now he could see clearly. Letting go of his need to be macho, Steven could accept his sensitivity, shyness, and cautiousness. It let him open his heart and allowed people to get close to him.

Unconcealing is the first step of the shadow process. Unconcealing requires rigorous honesty and willingness to see what you hadn’t been able to see. Acknowledgment of our shadow self begins the process of integration and healing. Remember that each of these “negative” traits has a positive gift for you, more value than you can ever imagine. It’s only a matter of doing the work, and in a short while you’ll receive the blessings of wholeness, happiness, and freedom.

EXERCISES

1. Here’s a list of negative words. Take a few minutes and identify any words that have an emotional charge for you. Say out loud, “I am____.” If you can say it without any emotional charge, then move on to the next word. Write down the words that you dislike or react to. If you are not sure that the word has any charge for you, close your eyes for a minute and meditate on the word. Repeat it to yourself a few times out loud and ask yourself how you’d really feel if someone you respected called you this word. If you’d be angry or upset, write it down. Also spend some time thinking about words that are not on this list that run your life or cause you pain.

Greedy, liar, phony, cheap, hateful, jealous, vindictive, controlling, nasty, possessive, bitchy, wimp, evil, geek, prudish, womanizer, angry, secretive, codependent, alcoholic, predator, drug addict, gambler, sick, fat, disgusting, stupid, idiot, fearful, unconscious, masochistic, bulimic, anorexic, unimportant, shyster, compulsive, frigid, rigid, abuser, manipulator, victim, victimizer, egocentric, better than, foolish, emotional, pompous, ugly, sloppy, loud mouth, big mouth, passive aggressive, smelly, lame, coward, jerk, inauthentic, offensive, inappropriate, wild, dead, zombie, late, irresponsible, incompetent, lazy, opportunist, lush, stingy, unfair, dumb, traitor, weasel, immature, gossip, snippy desperate, childish, floozy, shrew, pansy, golddigger, hormonal, cruel, insensitive, scary, dangerous, explosive, perverted, psychotic, needy, energy sucker, shit disturber, mean, defensive, man-hater, sad, frail, impotent, insipid, castrated, mama’s boy, nervous, arrogant, miser, spinster, slut, deceitful, judgmental, imposter, superficial, violent, thoughtless, martyr, hypocrite, love buyer, sneak, grudge carrier, condescending, competitive, power hungry, wasteful, insane, sinister, bigot, white trash, anxious, stuck, hot shot, goofy, woman-hater, sadistic, nose picker, loser, worthless, failure, envious, critical, flabby, neglectful, whore, shameful, dirty, bitter, shameless, bossy, inflexible, old, cold, withdrawn, soulless, heartless, has-been, cagey, resentful, racist, unenlightened, snob, elitist, faggot, dominating, sleazy, overbearing, inflexible, bad, ignorant, thief, cheater, scammer, pushy, classless, trashy, devious, conniving, groupie, insecure, depressed, hopeless, not good enough, beggar, whiney, asshole, ballbuster, frugal, unlovable, delinquent, scared, hyper, nosy, intrusive, perfectionist, anal, know-it-all, ass-kisser, malicious, resentful, righteous, freak, useless, middle class, resistant, withholding, betrayer, inferior, destructive, thick-headed, confrontational, weak, impatient, full of shit, dyke, self-destructive, imperious, idiot, ruthless, oversensitive, pigheaded, tightass, tasteless, uninteresting, lifeless, empty, diabolical, ridiculous, wretched, pain in the ass 2. Imagine that an article was written about you in your local newspaper. What are the five things you would not want to be said about you? Write them down. Now try to imagine five things they could say about you that wouldn’t matter to you at all. The question is, are the first five things true and the second five untrue? Or, have you decided with the help of your family and friends that the first five things are the wrong things to be, therefore you do not want them said about you? We must uncover what’s behind these words, so we can take back these disowned parts of ourselves.

Write down the judgments you have about each of these words. See if you can identify when you first made that judgment or whom you took the judgment from. Was it your mother, father, or another family member?