Insights for your personal evolution
The Dark Side of the Light Chasers: Reclaiming Your Power, Creativity, Brilliance, and Dreams
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Shortly after I became intrigued with learning about my shadow side, a colleague recommended The Dark Side of the Light Chasers: Reclaiming Your Power, Creativity, Brilliance, and Dreams
We begin in childhood to disown parts of ourselves, usually through family experience which shapes our core beliefs. “The pain you experienced when you were two, six, or eight is just beneath the surface of your consciousness. Until it’s transformed, it’s always there driving your life.” The coping techniques we enacted from childhood remain our behaviors as adults. Ford teaches that we “attract whomever and whatever we need to mirror back the aspects of ourselves that we’ve forgotten.” The universe provides exactly the experiences that will teach us particular lessons.
The simplest method of discovering what we need to learn is to recognize the traits that bother us the most in others. We project onto others what we deny in ourselves. It’s important to make the distinction that simply noticing a trait isn’t enough. The moments that affect us emotionally are the opportunities to focus on. Once you embrace a quality in yourself, others with the same quality can no longer annoy you. The charge around it is lost and miraculously the particular trigger evaporates from your experience.
I have attempted explaining this concept to others and it often meets with resistance. In this current trend of positive affirmations and focusing only on the positive, it is difficult to understand how bringing attention to the negative could be at all helpful. Ford says, “When we believe we can only be one or the other, we continue our internal struggle to only be the right things.” However, when we are able to integrate those negative aspects, we accept and become our total selves.
Likewise, we project positive traits onto others which reveal the possibilities in ourselves. We are not able to see qualities in others that we don’t have ourselves. Often we admire others because we wish we could be more like them. In fact, we have that potential but often live in denial.
A revealing way to discover your shadow side is to ask others what they perceive as both your positive and negative traits. Ford states, “We never have to believe what others think about us, but if we are afraid to hear what the people closest to us have to say, we should take notice. Most people are afraid they will hear what they fear most. This is denial at work.”
In order to live authentically, we must take responsibility for all events in our lives. We are not victims of chance, our experiences are reflections of our selves. We choose how to interpret and respond to the people and circumstances that surround us. Ford says it best in this statement: “Don’t strive for perfection, because it’s the desire for perfection that leads us to build these walls. Strive for wholeness, and for light and dark to live equally. Just as everything has a light side and a dark side, so does every person, because to be human is to be it all.”
Book Author: Debbie Ford
Riverhead Books, 1998
http://www.riverheadbooks.com
Debbie Ford conducts seminars on the dark side at the Chopra Center for Well Being in La Jolla, California, where she is a consultant, teacher, and integral faculty member. She also leads her own day and weekend Shadow Process workshops nationwide.
Other books:
Why Good People Do Bad Things: How to Stop Being Your Own Worst Enemy
Spiritual Divorce: Divorce as a Catalyst for an Extraordinary Life
The Secret of the Shadow: The Power of Owning Your Story
The Right Questions: Ten Essential Questions To Guide You to an Extraordinary Life
The Best Year of Your Life: Dream It, Plan It, Love It
