Shadow on the Solstice
A little baby made it earthside.
Freyja Joy, my little Scorpio babe. She's perfect and it is incredibly difficult not to share a thousand photos and tell everyone everything about her.
Just need everyone to know :) Ok, now that that is out of the way.
Shadow. Having a baby, especially a baby girl, has brought a lot of unconscious patterning to the surface. For me it revolves around assuming I’ll be a horrible mother, lose everyone I love and end up alone forever… but that is not the point today.
This time of the year holds us close to literal darkness, and as we are natural beings that energy carries into all aspects of us - the physical, mental, emotional, spiritual, etc etc.
It’s easy, I believe, to get lost in the unnamed darkness of our minds, heavily influenced by the shadow (as in UNKNOWN, unconscious, unseen) of our belief systems, our ability to perceive and interpret the world. And often we do everything we can to subconsciously escape it and its heaviness, which most of the time is nothing more than the constrained effort to not look at it and act as if it doesn’t exist.
Like if we look directly at it we’ll melt, we’ll crumble, and it will consume all of our capacity to just hold it the fuck together day to day.
It has been shown that naming an emotion alters and/or stops the physiological process of said emotion in our body.
That means: names hold power.
Naming that which is slowly moving out of shadow into light will give us power.
If you are consistently trying to ignore the elephant in the room and if you are tired of doing so, CHANCES ARE your system is ready to name that bad girl and see what kind of expansion and freedom live on the other side of intentional engagement. To understand what lies within aligns and makes more acute the process of desire-will-action in our lives.
That’s all I got. I don’t mean to preach. Well, maybe I do. But I promise it comes from my practice, my (sometimes very limited) experience. My thoughts are what I can offer in these trying times. It has taken me days, months, years, a lifetime to look at elements of my shadow, and to try and transmute that into wisdom. To grant myself peace, joy, happiness, compassion, all the things. It’s a process that will continue to last days, months, years, and a lifetime.
That, again I believe, is one of the secrets of the work of yoga - it never ends. Round and round we go, chutes and ladders all the way to the top only to recognize it isn’t the peak. It means we GET TO always explore, grow, learn, adjust, and discover simultaneously new and ancient realms.
You can do this. As I say every time, it is the work we were made to do. Our human experience evolves and creates new worlds the more we hold space for everything, the more we choose not to be bogged down by the natural outputs of being alive, of being in material form. We are so so so powerful, so capable of handling all this universe has to offer. Love to you.