As the egoic mind begins to identify with a sense of self that is emotionally arrested in childhood, the pain-body energy will intensify. This trauma gets continually re-triggered every single time the pain-body justifies its existence by identifying with its wounded self. It’s as if the pain-body says, “I have been hurt by others and therefore I deserve to be angry.”
Anorexia is absent among tribal cultures. It is a disease that is a result of our “civilized” society. We are programmed to feel shame and guilt from early on when we don’t “measure up” to others around us. It is the ego that projects hurt onto others and it is the ego that feels pain so deeply. Every negative emotion you’ve ever felt such as sadness, depression, or humiliation has been because of your ego’s reaction and nothing more.
Ask yourself: What do I find distasteful, disgusting, or despicable in others? Do you find yourself pointing at others calling them derogatory names? Public figures that you despise will also be the target of shadow projections. Shadow Work Life Coaching can help you to realize that your emotion-based judgments are always shadow projections and are therefore rooted in unresolved trauma.
We can observe the shadow projection of blame just about everyday in the U.S. Government where it has resulted a polarity so inflexible that it has manifested itself as gridlock between the Democrats and the Republicans in both the House and Senate–for the last decade. Blame always comes from both parties. We’ve watched Congressmen and Senators place their allegiance to party principles before what is truly in the best interest of the people. With the exception of just a few, our government leaders have become political robots, walking and talking machines that can’t seem to get past their party’s ideology, and as a result, the whole country suffers. If the member of one party proposes a bill, any bill, no matter how beneficial or right it is for all–nearly every member of the other party opposes it.
Have you ever noticed that you can’t remember the beginning of a dream? When you’re dreaming, you never stop and think, “How did I get here?” You just take it for granted that there was a beginning. This is reality. It’s much like the waking life in that before the age of three, we don’t really remember much at all. One day we just arrived into our “dream of life,” not knowing precisely how we got here.
The following Spiritual Life Coaching exercises, if practiced regularly, can help you to become conscious of your ego, create a space between your egoic mind and your pure consciousness, and begin your path toward self transcendence:
No matter how much meditation or spiritual practice you do, until you comprehend how the pain-body manifests itself through you and through others, you will be tricked by it and subsequently slip back into unconsciousness every time it resurfaces. The first step is to realize that you have a pain-body inside of you. Think of it as a body or field of energy that prospers through your own anger, hatred, heaviness, anxiety, depression, stress, and fears of impending doom. However it manifests, it will be causing you to re-experience your early childhood trauma which is the time when your pain-body began to manifest.
In the movie, “The Matrix,” Morpheus says to Neo, “You are living in a prison that you cannot smell or taste or touch; a prison for your mind.” Just after college, I worked at a psychiatric hospital where I observed and recorded the behavior of schizophrenic patients. It became obvious immediately that their minds served as their own prisons.
Intolerance, racism, homophobia, and bigotry are extreme forms of disrespect for another human being. The shadow will judge another human being based on race, creed, culture, ethnicity, gender, sexual preference, and status. In so doing, it desensitizes and diminishes a soul into an inanimate object. The shadow does this in order to cloak the heart into the false perception that the person with whom it is stereotyping is somehow less than a life form. This is the shadow’s biggest trick when it comes to shielding itself against the boundless compassion of the heart.
How you do you transcend your shadow? By silently observing it in your family, in your friends, in public personalities, and finally, in yourself. Over time, paying attention to your shadow will preserve you in a state of non-drama, non-conflict, and non-reaction. The other day I overheard a young woman say to her friend, “What would life be without drama?” And she said it in a way implying that life wouldn’t be any fun without drama. Well, if she had asked me, I would have told her that life would be stress and anxiety free and full of boundless joy.
