The Book of Secrets - Deepak Chopra [61]
CHANGING YOUR REALITY TO ACCOMMODATE THE EIGHTH SECRET
The eighth secret is about the mind’s “dark energy,” to borrow a phrase from physics. The shadow exists out of sight. To find it, you have to be dedicated to a journey of descent. Think of this journey as going back to retrieve parts of your life that have been abandoned because you felt so ashamed or guilty about them. The anger that erupts from the shadow is attached to past events that were never resolved. Now those events are over and gone, but their emotional residue isn’t.
Shame, guilt, and fear cannot be accessed by thinking. The shadow isn’t a region of thoughts and words. Even when you have a flash of memory and recall such emotions, you are using a part of the higher brain—the cortex—that cannot touch the shadow. The journey of descent begins only when you find the doorway to the lower brain, where experience is sorted out not according to reason but according to intense feelings.
There is an ongoing drama inside your lower brain (identified with the limbic system, which processes emotions, and the reptilian brain, which reacts in terms of raw threat and survival). In this drama, many issues that would be interpreted reasonably by the higher brain—getting stuck in traffic, losing out on a business deal, being passed over at work, having a girl turn you down for a date—trigger irrational responses. Without realizing it, everyday events are causing your lower brain to draw the following conclusions:
I am in danger. I might be killed.
I must go on the attack.
I am so hurt, I will never recover.
These people deserve to die.
They put me in agony.
I don’t deserve to exist.
Everything is hopeless—I’m lost in the dark forever.
I’m cursed.
Nobody loves me.
To communicate these feelings on the page, I’ve had to verbalize them, but in reality, the most appropriate way to view them is as energy—strong, impulsive forces that have an impetus all their own. Rest assured, no matter how free you feel from these shadow energies, they exist inside you. If they didn’t, you would be in a state of total freedom, joy, and unboundedness. You would be in unity, the state of innocence regained when the hidden energy of the shadow has been purified.
Today you can begin to learn how to feel your way into the shadow. Shadow energies make themselves known whenever
You can’t talk about your feelings.
You feel out of control.
You feel a flash of panic or dread.
You want to feel strongly, but your mind goes blank.
You find yourself breaking down in tears for no reason.
You have an irrational dislike for someone.
A reasonable argument turns into warfare.
You attack someone without provocation.
There are countless other ways that the shadow gets entangled in everyday situations, but these are among the most common. What they have in common is that a boundary is crossed—a controlled situation turns unexpectedly anxious or causes unexpected anger or dread. The next time you experience this, watch and see if you feel guilty or ashamed of yourself afterward; if so, then you have touched, however briefly, on the shadow.
An eruption of irrational feelings isn’t the same as releasing them. Venting is not purification. So don’t mistake an outburst for catharsis. Shadow energy is purified through the following steps:
• The negative feeling comes up (anger, grief, anxiety, hostility, resentment, self-pity, hopelessness).
• You ask to release it.
• You experience the feeling and follow where it wants to go.
• The feeling leaves through breath, sound, or bodily sensations.
• You have a sense of release afterward, coupled with an understanding of what the feeling meant.
It’s the last step that tells the tale: When