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Embracing Our Dark Side
by Margaret
Paul, Ph.D. |
Our wounded self, the aspect of us that has
our fears, limiting beliefs, and desire to control, is
our dark or shadow side, not because it is bad but
because it is cut off from the light of Spirit. It lives
in the darkness of fear and the heaviness of false
beliefs instead of in the light of love and truth.
Moving toward "enlightenment" is moving into
the light of truth. When we release our fears and false
beliefs, our energy lightens.
Doorways to Darkness
The light of Spirit enters our hearts when we choose
to open to learning about loving ourselves and others,
and the darkness enters when we choose to close our
hearts and act from anger, fear, shame, judgment or
hurt. This is what happened in The Return of the
Jedi, the last of the original Star Wars series. In
this movie, the emperor, who was the epitome of
darkness, was trying to get Luke to join the dark side.
He knew if he could just get Luke angry enough or
frightened enough, he would want to kill his father,
Darth Vader, and then the emperor would own Luke as he
had owned Luke’s father. The emperor knew that anger
and fear were the doorways to darkness.
Our anger, fear, shame, judgment and hurt are the
cracks in our energy field through which the darkness
enters. The darkness can also enter when we cloud our
energy with drugs, alcohol, nicotine or sugar. Do you
recall the trial in San Francisco that employed the
infamous "Twinkie defense"? About twenty years
ago, the mayor and a city supervisor were shot down
inside City Hall and their killer got a short sentence
because of his "diminished capacity" due to
having eaten a diet of only junk food.
In one of my dialogues with my spiritual Guidance,
she challenged me about darkness. She said,
"Margie, you have worked for many years to be
physically healthy. Not only that, you have striven to
be immune to illness. Likewise, for many years you have
sought to become a more loving person. Now your task is
to become immune to darkness." I was blown
away. Becoming immune to darkness means never
acting out of my wounded self’s feelings of fear,
anger, shame, judgment or hurt but always moving
into an intent to learn about these feelings as soon as
they come up, and releasing them to Spirit once I learn
how I am causing them. I can tell you, it’s quite a
challenge! I don’t know if I will ever fully
accomplish this, but it certainly is a worthy goal.
Through purifying ourselves on the physical and
emotional levels by eating well and doing our healing
work, each of us can reach a place where our frequency
is high enough that we can do this, we can hear our
spiritual Guidance all the time. Being in
conscious connection (and dialogue) with both our
emotional feelings and our spiritual Guidance at all
times is one of the goals of the 6-Step Inner Bonding
process that I teach. By dialoguing with both our
feelings and our spiritual Guidance, shining the light
of truth into our wounded self’s fears and false
beliefs, and releasing our emotions to Spirit, we begin
to heal the cracks in our energy field through which the
darkness enters.
The Inner Bonding process is about developing a
spiritually connected loving adult self who can release
the beliefs and emotions of the wounded self, open to
the joy and creativity of the core Self, and stay
connected with the wisdom of Guidance. When we feel
hurt, angry, judgmental, shamed, blaming, depressed or
frightened, we can dialogue and discover and release our
beliefs and behavior that are causing these feelings.
These painful emotions come from our own limiting
beliefs and unloving behavior toward ourselves. However,
when you have been operating most of the time from your
wounded self, you cannot suddenly become the loving
adult you need to be in order to do the dialogue process
and release the painful emotions. So, often, your early
dialogues may be between one aspect of your wounded self
(for example, the part that chooses to indulge in binge
eating), and another aspect of it (the part that is
furious at being overweight). Since dialoguing between
two aspects of your wounded self won’t get you
anywhere, you might conclude that the Inner Bonding
process doesn’t work.
Here’s what’s really not working: We cannot bring
light to darkness with darkness. In other words, we can’t
heal our darkness by being furious at it. We can
transform darkness into light only by learning about and
loving the darkness. We heal darkness only with
light--the light of love. Our challenge is to
acknowledge, welcome and embrace the part of us that we
judge as bad, unlovable or unworthy, and it’s a
challenge that calls for the loving adult.
But how can we have a dialogue between our wounded
self and our loving adult when we haven’t yet
developed a loving adult? Here your imagination comes
into play. You need to imagine that the dialogue is
between your wounded self and your personal spiritual
Guidance. (If you have not yet created this connection,
see pages 173-178 in my book, Do I Have To Give Up Me
To Be Loved By God? for how to create this). You ask
your wounded self questions and offer comfort and help,
not from your own thoughts, but from what you would imagine
your loving, wise and powerful spiritual Guidance would
say and do. (You can see two examples of how this works
in the dialogues in chapter 8 of Do I Have To Give Up
Me To Be Loved By God?) Or, if you know a person who
you feel really is loving, wise and powerful, you
imagine that person in dialogue with your emotions.
Either one is a good stand-in for your loving adult.
Susan Sarandon, in the movie Dead Man Walking,
is a wonderful role model for loving behavior. She plays
a nun who has been asked by a murderer on death row to
help him avoid execution. The murderer, played by Sean
Penn, is a despicable human being. Not only did he rape
and murder in cold blood, he is a racist and he
continues to avoid responsibility with his blame, lies
and manipulations. Almost no one in the nun’s life
supports her efforts on his behalf. They accuse her,
blame her, shun her, yet never once does she lose her
connection with God. She tells the murderer that he is a
son of God and therefore greater than his worst acts.
While never condoning his acts, she never condemns him
as a person. She lovingly confronts him with himself.
Although she does not like him, she loves him. She
becomes the face of God for him, and through her love,
which is God, he opens his heart and is redeemed. Penn’s
character is very dark, the worst of the wounded self,
while Sarandon’s is very light, the best of the loving
adult.
Given that you might not have role models of loving
behavior in your daily life, you can use your spiritual
Guidance as your role model to emulate and assimilate.
Eventually, when you do this long enough, you begin to
take on the qualities of your Guidance. This is how you
develop your loving Adult. It takes practice. You have
to learn to concentrate on this imaginative process and
to trust what you hear.
When clients of mine first start to do this, I
generally hear them say, "How do I know this is
real? It feels like I’m just making this up, that it’s
just my imagination." Many of us have been
brought up to believe that when we create--whether it be
poetry, a painting, a song, a musical score, a book, a
screenplay, a theory--we bring these things forth from
our own minds. We may believe that we actually have the
capacity to be creative all by ourselves. The truth is
that creativity flows when we are open to Spirit and use
the gift of our imaginations.
I no longer believe that my theories, my writing, my
paintings or even the words that flow from me when I am
working with someone or leading a workshop come from my
own individual mind. I experience my mind more as a
receiver of Divine information, which I can then
transmit through my writing, speaking and painting. Just
as love, compassion, truth, peace and joy are not
feelings we generate from within our own small selves
but are gifts from Spirit, so too are our imagination
and the creativity that flows from it. We all have the
capacity to learn to access the Source of wisdom and
creativity.
It has taken me time and practice to trust the
information that comes through me. I have learned over
the years that when I do not trust my spiritual
Guidance, bad things happen. This really hit home for me
in the summer of 1995 when I was leading an Inner
Bonding five-day intensive in Missouri. It was the
fourth day of the intensive and I was pouring some tea
from a pitcher during one of our breaks. I heard my
spiritual Guidance say, "Do not drink that, it is
contaminated." I decided I was being paranoid and
drank it anyway. The next morning I woke up with a
terrible sore throat--the first time I had been sick in
years--and so did a number of other people, all of whom
had drunk the tea. Even with all the years I had been
dialoguing with and listening to my Guidance, I still
lacked trust and needed another lesson in humility: that
my individual mind, unplugged from spiritual Guidance,
doesn’t know much.
So it takes a lot of practice, yet practicing seems
to be difficult for many people. If you were determined
to become accomplished at a particular skill, for
example playing a musical instrument, you would think
nothing of practicing every day. In fact, you would know
that you needed to practice daily in order to become
skilled and then continue practicing daily to maintain
your skill. Becoming skilled at connecting with yourself
and with your spiritual Guidance is no different. You
will become skilled only by daily practice, and you will
continue to reap the benefits only by daily practice. It
is only through daily practice that you will learn to
consistently hear and trust both your Guidance and your
true Self. The problem is that the wounded self won’t
practice, so unless you pray daily for help in shifting
your deepest desire from getting love to being
loving, you will not have enough of a loving adult
to override the wounded self and make the decision to
practice.
Many of my clients, coming to me for help because
they are suffering, find that they start to feel better
within days of starting to practice Inner Bonding. Then,
as soon as they feel better, they stop practicing and go
right back to feeling badly. Sometimes they then
conclude that Inner Bonding doesn’t work. This is like
saying that if you have a young son and you give him
love one day but ignore him for the next few days, he
should continue to feel happy because of the one day you
did give him love. This doesn’t work with your inner
child any more than it does with real children. Just as
babies need you to be constantly tuned in to them, your
inner child needs you to be constantly aware of your
feelings and needs. Becoming this aware and maintaining
this awareness takes daily practice.
The good news is that practice really pays off.
Clients of mine who have been practicing Inner Bonding
for an extended period of time (it varies for each
person) find that eventually they do it all the time.
They naturally stay tuned in to their emotions and their
spiritual Guidance, and they naturally dialogue with
them whenever they feel anything other than peace and
joy inside. They find themselves doing it in the shower,
while preparing meals, doing chores, waiting in line at
the market or stuck in traffic. After much practice,
they are delighted to find that they no longer allow
themselves to feel badly for any length of time. They
learn to release their painful feelings and move back
into peace and joy. They are progressing rapidly toward
wholeness and oneness with God.
©Copyright
Margaret Paul, Ph.D.
All Rights Reserved.
Margaret Paul, Ph.D. is the
co-creator of Inner Bonding, a transformational six-step
spiritual healing process. She is a best-selling author,
noted public speaker, workshop leader, consultant and
Inner Bonding facilitator. She has been leading groups,
teaching classes and workshops, and working with
individuals, couples, partnerships and businesses since
1973.
Margaret is the co-author of Do
I Have To Give Up Me To Be Loved By You? (over 400,000
copies sold), Free to Love, Do I Have To Give Up Me To
Be Loved By My Kids?, Do I Have To Give Up Me To Be
Loved By You?...The Workbook, Healing Your Aloneness,
The Healing Your Aloneness Workbook, and author of Inner
Bonding and recently released, Do I Have To Give Up Me
To Be Loved By God? Her books have been translated into
ten languages: German, Italian, Danish, French, Spanish,
Portuguese, Chinese, Japanese, Dutch and Hungarian.
Healing Your Aloneness and The Healing Your Aloneness
Workbook are best-sellers in Germany. In her spare time,
she is an artist. She has three grown children.
Contact: 310-390-5993,
888-6INNERBOND (888-646-6372), Margaret@innerbonding.com,
www.innerbonding.com,
Inner Bonding® Educational Technologies, Inc., PMB #42,
2531 Sawtelle Blvd., Los Angeles, CA 90064
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