Dancing With Your Shadow

BY KIM NATARAJA

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“I would know my shadow and my light so at last I shall be whole” (‘Child of our time’ – Michael Tippett)

The spiritual journey is about integrating the ‘ego’ and its shadow with the deeper ‘self’ so that we may have “life, life in all its fullness.”

Dancing with Your Shadow, both the book and the workshop, looks at practical ways to become aware what helps and hinders us on this path and the role meditation plays in that adventure.

We are a beautifully interconnected energetic system that is integrally linked into a wider cosmic whole. Yet we live as if we end at our skin boundary, independent and separate from others and from the environment. Even within this outer membrane we see ourselves as made up out of separate parts: body, mind and spirit. Not only that, but we also have a strong tendency to put value on only one part and deny another one any importance at all: perhaps the body rather than the mind, or the mind rather than the body, the material ‘ego’ rather than the spiritual ‘self’, one aspect of the ‘ego’ rather than another. The result is fragmentation and lack of balance. We need to become aware of what we are doing, start accepting that all these aspects are of equal value and form an unbroken whole.

Our ‘ego’ is very important; it is our means of survival. We have been given a physical body with senses that allow us to interact with this material plane, with emotions to deepen our experiences and with a mind able to plan, rationalise and analyse. Those are the means that allow us to experience, learn and survive in this world. The problem is that we forget that they are the means and not the end. They constitute only one part of our created being, our ‘ego’, which is impermanent and subject to constant change.

But we also have a deeper, unchanging and eternal element, the ‘self’, that is our link with the eternal nature of Divine Reality.

The ‘ego’ through its preoccupation with survival causes us to forget who we really are. The ‘self’ calls us and tries to remind us that we are ‘children of God’. The resulting clarity of vision will help us become aware of emotions and desires that hide that reality and have a tendency to overwhelm us and influence our behaviour, our ‘shadow’. Spiritual, moral and emotional development will then occur side by side.

This will inevitably effect a transformation of consciousness and thus a transformation of the whole person. It will fundamentally change us from people living at the surface to fully alive human beings.

“In these pages anyone…. will find a guide, a friend and a teacher to walk - and to dance - with.” (Laurence Freeman)