Shadow Work/Spring Cleaning
March 16, 2009
Along with the first crocuses and daffodils that begin appearing in late winter/early spring in western Oregon, comes my desire to open the doors and windows, get out the broom and sweep out the dark corners and hidden crevices of home, body, mind and spirit.
The past six weeks or so have been quiet ones in my Spirit of Leadership practice. I could question the impact of “the economy” on my clients, the intensity of the season, the amount of effort I’ve made to introduce my work to others, etc. and I have done all those things. However, the flow of financial energy moving through my bank account has been so dramatically reduced that I recognized a need to look more deeply within.
The daffodils are blooming now and the past two weeks have been an opportunity for deep inner shadow work. After years of clearing and healing trauma from my previous and current incarnations, one might think that there is an end to the soul’s wounding that is achieved after a certain level of work. Ha! I keep finding layers and layers and layers. During my three-day retreat last week I worked those layers as deeply as I could and found lots of shadows to illuminate.
As I opened to the root cause of many of these shadow places in my psyche, body and soul, I found a commonality. Integrity. Or, rather, the lack of integrity. Gay Hendricks and Kate Ludeman write in their book, The Corporate Mystic, “Nearly every personal or corporate disaster begins with an integrity problem, and often a small one. Left untended, like a tiny shimmy in your front wheels, a small integrity problem can escalate quickly to shake loose anything that’s not tightly connected. When things are not going well and you cannot figure out why, assume an integrity glitch.”
Being in integrity requires two basic experiences: Be Who You Are with yourself and with others, and do what you say you will do.
In deeply exploring the question, “where am I not in integrity as who I am, with myself and with others?” I had the opportunity to discover many places where I had split, fragmented, avoided, and denied the existence of my shadows. These are places where I had made a choice go out of integrity and had somehow managed to continue functioning despite partitioning my soul, burying my feelings in the tissues of my body, or overriding my natural inclination for clear connection with negative habits.
Where we create experiences of separation, whether through our family, ancestral or soul wounding, we diminish our opportunity to be in integrity with ourselves and with others. This is called a split, or fragmentation of the soul. When we choose to take responsibility for where we are split or fragmented, or out of integrity, a change happens almost immediately. Immediately the body, mind and soul begin to come back into a state of unity, cohesion and presence as the fragments come back into wholeness and the split places mend into oneness. In fact, the Merriam-Webster dictionary defines integrity as “the quality or state of being complete or undivided”.
So, when we say for example, “I take complete responsibility for Who I Am, anywhere I am not in integrity”, then relax, open and allow the feelings and thoughts to come forward, staying present with the feeling and really feeling it fully, staying present with the thought and allowing the information to come forward and be recognized, dramatic healing can happen. Notice your body, notice your emotions, feel what it can feel like when you take responsibility for your integrity and notice the sense of wholeness, completeness and unity that is happens naturally. This is the natural transition into integrity.
As we integrate this new wholeness, this new integrity as our mind, our body and our soul, it will become immediately evident which actions to take next. When we are in integrity we naturally do what we say we will do. We take responsibility for our agreements where perhaps we didn’t fully do that before, and we direct our energies toward creating more integrity in our lives.
This is felt by others and reflected back to you by the universe. We also recognize immediately where we haven’t been in integrity in our relationship with ourselves or with others and begin to take the necessary steps to return to wholeness.
As I emerged from my soul’s Spring Cleaning retreat, I made an Integrity List with the names of people I needed to call or talk to, to clear up energy between us where I wasn’t in integrity. Making calls to the people on this list has not only been cathartic (at first quite scary, then courageous, then joyful) but it has already created new opportunities for new experiences, deeper relationships, and yes, even more positive financial flow. Now, I look forward to discovering other places where I have not been in integrity so that I can take responsibility and welcome the new opportunities that come from wholeness.
Much love,
Jack
