The Shadow can come up in many subtle and often unnoticed ways. I’ve just caught one in the act!
It’s Sunday evening, I’ve just been casually browsing the internet for a few minutes, and I decided to do a bit of work, to look at something that would move work forward a little bit, and as soon as I decided to do so, I noticed my energy diminishing! I noticed a physiological response and the feeling of being tired that, I’m well aware, wasn’t there a split second ago in the moment before. So something caused it that wasn’t primarily to do with general physical tiredness.
Fortunately, as I’m now used to noticing such things, and have long-since been introduced to the workings of The Shadow and the psyche, I was able to know that the feeling of tiredness wasn’t actually a primary signal or response of physical tiredness – but that it was a secondary response to the more significant meaning and implication of any activity that revolves around work, or success, or sense of self and true and false conscience – as compared to just pottering about online without a care in the world.
In fact, I bet if I want to, I can get rid of that particular feeling of tiredness just now, by stopping for the moment and doing something else less important or less socially signficant. As it happens I don’t want to. I’d rather find out what the shadowy resistance is about, heal it, fix it, and replace a negative belief with a positive belief. …or three.
And the fact is, that it is possible to engage in business and productive activity with the exact same level of relaxedness of mind of that of the ‘just pottering about’ state. So that’s a good thing for me to re-remember for a start. The second is that there was clearly some learned, conditioned, false-self resistance to the meaning that would come with doing that task. I’m letting that mull over right now.
Work and business and money and success and livelihood means something to us – it is culturally charged and is often charged for us as individuals. But the tasks that it involves, in and of themselves, are actually no more difficult and no more energy requiring than their mundane and domestic counterparts that we find easy, and that hold no energetic charge for us. For example, in and of itself, driving to work is no more difficult or stressful or resistance-requiring/causing than driving to a holiday destination…
…Searching for the latest sports news is no more difficult than searching to find a supplier of materials – yet one drives us forward towards ‘Success!!!’, and so can be something we often don’t do simply because of it – due to complacency, the conditioned fear of success. And here’s my favourite, classic and clear example; a child playing a computer game needs to find a password to a magic door, whilst a highly-paid software engineer needs to find a password to access a piece of business software… – and the difference is…? the emotional or energetic charge that we hang on the meaning of the thing – or the likely meaning of it’s potential success.
Whenever we don’t want to look at something about ourselves, some aspect about ourselves, we may find ourselves feeling tired all of a sudden because of the feeling of discomfort, or at least unfamiliarity, that comes with that. That’s all this article is about really, merely pointing out that this can be the case – and that we can then do what we want to and choose to in response to that, once armed with this information.
It’s something that we can look out for. …because we can ‘catch’ it, and notice it, we can get at another little bit of our Shadow; uncover another bit more of our positivity, self-belief and natural, full-powered, true self.
James Blacker
