What Is The Human Shadow?

Who You Think You Are

Every human being has an idea of what sort of person they are.  The human shadow is everything that does not exist within your accepted self-image.

Who You Think You Are Not

In reality a human being seems to be a potential to be anything at any time rather than one fixed way.  Therefore your self-image keeps you trapped in one way of being.  You feel stuck.  Anything that comes into your awareness that doesn’t fit with your accepted self-image makes you feel bad.

When you feel bad your mind continues to focus on all the parts of your life that seem to not be working.  Then you feel even worse.

This all continues until you wake up to the fact that your self-image is just a mental idea.  It is just a concept; a creation of the mind.  It is not actually you but rather it is how you think you are.

Who Are You Really?

I nor anyone can’t tell you who you are because we would just be exchanging information.  You can’t use the mind and its functions such as intelligence and reasoning to discover the truth of your existence.

The task is to release attachment to being one particular way and instead be willing to experience and be everything.  This is closer to who you are in reality, rather than your self-image.  Even if this way you think you are was full of neat sounding traits like intelligent, sexy, funny, lively, loving you still have the potential as a human being to experience all the opposites.  If you do experience one of these opposite traits one day you would feel terrible because you were attached to being the positive trait.

It is all the opposites that lie outside of your accepted self-image that we call the human shadow.

When you accept that you can and do experience EVERY potential human trait you transform your experience of life.  Life begins to flow effortlessly.

How Do You Discover Your Shadow?

You discover your shadow self not through your mind but via awareness.  Just by watching and observing each moment and what you feel and believe to be true about yourself and the world.

The quickest way is to watch and observe your shadow projection onto other people.  This is when you have some negative feeling towards another person because you judge them to be a certain way.  It is extremely subtle and is why so many people go around feeling annoyed and irritated with others.  Anything that does not fit within your accepted self-image gets projected by your mind onto someone else in your life.

If you are sure you are never rude then rude people will show up in your awareness.  If you believe that you are stupid but don’t accept that about yourself as a potential human experience then you will dislike someone else because you think they are stupid.  Whatever is in your shadow shows up in the outside world.

What Can You Do About This?

Healing the shadow is about reclaiming these traits that you project onto others.  A human is potential not fixed.  You are not one way so work to not care about being a certain way.  If you were to get in with a bad crowd who did drugs and crime and joined a gang you would change.

What you need to do is what they call shadow work.  Healing the shadow means finding all the traits that are outside of your accepted self-image and welcoming them back like long lost children.  The human shadow has within it huge potential for growth and getting your life back on track.