In Response to "You Want To Know God, Feel Your...Shadow..." [1]

Perhaps, on some level, I've intuitively comprehended and embraced the necessity of coming to know my own Shadow...maybe this is due to many lifetimes of darkness wherein I exerted only feeble half-measures to find my way free, or maybe because I remember as a breech-birth trying to claw my way back ("...please don't send me out there again, there will be too much pain...") or maybe because, as a child born with an inner Light that the ill adults in my world wanted to steal or stamp out, I instinctively went inward to a world where faeries and spirits could comfort me, and yet every year it became harder to breathe, every year it was more apparent to me that I didn't want to be here...and this would always be the point at which my soul sought to forcibly leave...and repeat ad infinitum, the futile pattern...

 

I only remember one previous life with any detail, maybe a second one farther back, but the one I believe to be my most recent incarnation is the one that has spoken to me, haunted me, ever since I remembered it...him, rather, at age 19...I don't have a lot of details. All I know is that he was a young, handsome, fair-haired Englishman who was quite smart, but very socially phobic. He also had terrible scars on his face and body which I originally mistook to be acne and other assorted scars from I knew not what. It wasn't until I met with a female shaman about 7 years ago that I was given more of a glimpse of his truth. She confirmed my memory but said that the man had survived Smallpox, not acne, and that the scars his illness had left him with were so shameful to him, and that in addition to his general anxieties over being among people, and his self-reproach regarding possible homosexual leanings, he one day decided enough was enough and so he blew his brains out...

 

Given the fact that I grew up with a very shame-based mother and stepfather in this incarnation, and that my biological father, who'd been a drunken, womanizing, poetic, devilishly beautiful bastard, had disappeared for many years, it isn't surprising that it took me less than two years to drink myself out of college. But it wasn't just that I drank a lot. It was where I wandered when I drank, to whom I gravitated, not completely consciously of course, but on some level I must have understood that the world to which I would soon give myself was the darkest one of which I could conceive in New York City.

 

And that was where I went. Headlong towards my first beloved friend in that city, Elizabeth, who herself had been a Dominatrix in San Francisco...and oh, how she looked the part, and my little girl self from Vermont was entranced and terrified at the same time...Thus, less than two years after my first contact with Liz, I found myself wandering off to a place, alone, that advertised similar work... At first it all seemed harmless. No trauma, nothing too dark or unbearable. But then it was discovered by management that I was completely incapable of inflicting actual physical pain upon other human beings, and so it was decided that I should be the one who was hurt. I'm not going to go into detail, but suffice it to say I was really badly hurt, daily welts, blood, wounds that had no time to heal before the next, plus the numerous psychological traumas I encountered. So that by the time 10 months had passed in that reality, there came a moment when something deep inside me realized that my last thin thread was frayed to the point of snapping, and that if I didn't then escape, I would be dead.

 

At that point I only vaguely recognized myself in mirrors. The creature in them was little more than a feral animal. I remember looking out at people through savage eyes, as if to say "one step closer and I'll kill you..." So indeed, I was seriously far gone. Around that time, knowing not what else to do to save myself, I asked God to help me stop running, because that was how I felt, like I was running in a nightmare and I couldn't stop. Then, suitably enough, about a week later, I fell and shattered an ankle one night, and the injury was bad enough that I had no choice to go home to my parents. At that point I entered therapy, stopped drinking, and life went forward, with some other trying twists and turns.

 

Still, something told me I hadn't seen the last of Hell. So about 8 years later, I took a dive into the jagged abyss one more time. I drove to South Side Chicago and allowed myself to get car-jacked and kidnapped. During those few days, I was held at knife point, and at another interval, I was threatened with a metal pipe...and yet, when my life was on the line those two times, somehow I wasn't afraid. I just looked at my attackers with a mixture of compassion and ferocity, and I told them they didn't want to kill me, and then they ran, looking back just once as if they'd seen a ghost, or a demon. Likewise, following the kidnapping, when I "woke up" and realized it was time for me to flee, I asked God to show me when the perfect time for flight would be. And when that time arrived, I looked outside and saw my car and my keys in the ignition, waiting for me. Needless to say, after that final foray through the Darkness, I resolved that I had journeyed far enough into Hell to last me the rest of my life.

 

It has now been almost 20 years since then, and although I'm still on a low dose of anti-anxiety medication, I'm soon to taper off it and begin a vitamin therapy program, as well as a sugar-free vegan diet so as to get my Pineal gland into a better state of Being. I guess the point of all of this is that, in order to know my Shadow, I threw myself into some maddening excursions through the seediest underbellies of human existence that I could find. And then, with the beloved aid of Creator and Creation, I somehow came back alive.

 

Yet what is really beautiful to me is that therein I saw the Beast and she was Me. But by then, she didn't frighten me anymore, not even with growl or her sharp teeth. So I couldn't leave her to die there, I brought her back with me, and I bathed her in lilac bubbles, and clothed her in downy pajamas, and I put her to bed, and she's truly at Peace.

 

Of course I admit that I'm not at all perfect. I made the choice to go on S.S. Disability ten plus years ago due to Chronic Fatigue and some Depression, but, all the work I've done in the interim, the intense healing, nurturing and cradling of an inner wound so vast I think many people wouldn't have survived it, let alone fought their way back to this sweet ecstasy of wholeness. But I did, and with a lot of Sacred assistance, like eyelid-kisses from God, that is.

 

So when the creator of the above-referenced lecture said that we need to face our 'fucking shadows', I feel I have a very good idea of what he means. Oh, my inner damaged woman, my scraped and scabbed and starving, catatonic wraith still exists as an holographic image inside me. But that's all she is. A husk whom I have healed from.

 

Of course I would never advocate that anyone else make the same insane, reckless, self-abusive, life-threatening choices I made. I'm highly certain that there are better, safer, gentler, wiser ways to come to intimately know and exorcise our shadows. But maybe for me, maybe I'd just lost patience with my soul for what I sense were many lives of just flat-out quitting. Maybe I had to be extra hard on Hillary, to make me face myself and ask, Is it really this endless, empty death you want, or is it the excruciating ecstasy of being alive? Of course I choose 'excruciating ecstasy' hands-down today:) And I choose to allow my Shadow girl to stay at rest...

 

Thank you for reading this first blog of a new member.

 

Breathingly...

Medusafern/Hillary