Shadow Energies

The shadow is personal and universal at the same time: Everyone harbors a unique pattern of shame and guilt. Simple things like nudity, sexual intercourse, anger, and anxiety give rise to enormously complex feelings.The human psyche was set up with a hiding place, and for most people that is totally necessary, given the enormous difficulty of facing ones darkest impulses and deepest humiliations.Although the term shadow is used most of the time to describe a hiding place for negative energies, you have the power to turn positive to negative and vice versa. The same incident can have no emotional charge for one person, yet be a source for anger and shame for another person.Whatever is stored in darkness becomes distorted: Awareness, like fresh water, is meant to flow, and when it cant, it turns stagnant. In your inner world, there are countless memories and repressed impulses. You do not allow these to flow, which is to say to be released; therefore, they have no choice but to stagnate.Good impulses die for lack of being acted on. Love grows timid and afraid when not expressed. Hatred and anxiety loom larger than life. It is the primary property of consciousness that it can organize itself into new patterns and designs. If you dont allow consciousness to go where it needs to, however, disorganized energy is the result.The intensity of shadow energies is a way of getting noticed: Hiding something is not the same as killing it. Shadow energies remain alive. Even though you refuse to look at them, they arent extinguished in fact their desire for life becomes all the more desperate.Bringing consciousness to any energy diffuses it. Our shadow energies get stuck in patterns and habits. This doesnt alter the general truth that if you bring light into the shadow, its distortions start to lessen and eventually are healed.Adapted from The Book of Secrets, by Deepak Chopra (Harmony Books, 2004).