The Golden Shadow
“All that glitters is not gold,”
William Shakespeare
but…
all that is gold does indeed glitter.
The Golden Shadow
Have you ever dimmed your light? Have you ever exiled the deepest, most sacred parts of yourself so that you yourself wouldn’t be exiled?
There lives within us something unknown. It lies out of our vision, in the shadows, where we once hastily cast it, hoping no one would see it. It is golden in hue and made of such preciousness that we hid it in fear others might envy and hate us for having it.
Yet to hide it from others is to hide it from ourselves. So desirous and desperate we are for acceptance, so distasteful and repugnant we deemed it to be. And, so, to rid ourselves of it, we hid it so deeply that we ourselves forget it’s there.
It is the golden shadow. The unknown, forgotten parts of ourselves that we banished from our being in attempt to fit in with the world. Our judgment is unwarranted as it is, perhaps, the best parts of ourselves. What’s in this golden shadow is our uniqueness, our skills, the very things that make us luminous.
It gives refuge to our natural instincts that bore no credentials in a logical world, to those dreams that soared high when practicality is put on a pedestal. It houses our ability to feel and know through all the senses in a world that would rather be anesthetized.
Once upon a naive and easily influenced mind, we believed the only way we could be accepted in a black and white world was to hide that which made us stick out.
We feared outshining those around us for fear of being ostracized. To think and be different is a dangerous game to play in a culture determined to keep order through docile obedience.
There is much we hide for the fear of being seen, yet to hide is to fulfill the prophecy. We dim our lights and then the people meant for us can’t find us.
Of what service is hiding our gifts? Of what purpose is hiding ourselves?
Shadow work is a guiding principle of Jungian psychology. Like some eerie folklore, we may think that the shadow is bad because of its title, but the shadow is not synonymous with evil. It is far simply unknown.
Most of what’s in the shadow is gold, even the things we discover and immediately judge to be bad. It is a matter of uncovering, dusting off, finding the gold, and polishing it into our own fashion of jewelry.
To discover the shadow is to become awakened.
To harness and balance its essence is to become fully alive, to become fully ourselves.
