Traversing the shadowlands
The period leading up to the Solar Eclipse is a time of shedding and deathing all that is no longer in alignment with the gateway being opened to humanity. The death is not physical, it’s the Phoenix wisely knowing when it’s time to return to the ashes, letting go of the old in order to be born anew. In the shamanic tradition I was taught that the most powerful medicine is found in the darkness. When we journey into the shadows, we are called to face our greatest fears, our doubts, the pieces of ourself we reject and suppress. Being willing to see what lives in these dark and forgotten places requires courage and an open heart that can meet the pain, suffering, shame, and fear with deep compassion and love.
As I witness life unfold in my country and around the world, I feel a knowingness that we are traversing our individual and collective shadowlands. It is time. The human experience we seek to co-create cannot co-exist with these shadows we have so long failed to acknowledge. Human hearts are raging, ideologies are marching openly in the streets, corruption, threats of nuclear attacks, human trafficking, rioting, bloodshed. It’s ALL coming out of darkness and into the light, it doesn’t matter that we don’t want to see it, to believe it can exist. It is time.
The morning after the protests and violence in Charlottesville, VA, I read so many words of hate and anger in response. I was reminded of my time in Plum Village, learning from the Buddhist teacher Thich Nhat Hanh and the principle of inter-being. He invited us to consider how it is that we can look at another and judge them with hatred — who is to say that if you or I lived the life the one we judged has lived, we would not find ourselves in that same place, having made the same choices?
“No one among us has clean hands. No one of us can claim that it is not our responsibility…The truth is that everything contains everything else. We cannot just be, we can only inter-be. We are responsible for everything that happens around us…Looking deeply into ourselves, we see the other, and we will share that pain and the pain of the whole world. Then we can begin to be of real help. Every side is ‘our side’; there is no evil side.”
— Thich Nhat Hanh, Peace is Every Step
As these teachings returned to my awareness, I was was reminded of my own lineage and the roles my ancestors had on both sides of many conflicts. At times they were the victims, in other instances they were the perpetrators. During my freshman year of college, we were asked to write about a family member for a sociology paper. During one of our regular meetings my professor mentioned my paper and remarked, “So your grandfather was a Nazi solder? That’s interesting.” My grandfather was a mechanic, drafted into the German army, and he was a prisoner of war. Despite hearing this account of family history on several occasions, until that moment no one had ever spoken it so plainly. In that moment something very powerful was brought out of the shadow and into the light. Yes, my grandfather was indeed a Nazi soldier. It led me on a powerful exploration of my ancestry and myself and I will always be grateful for that moment of illumination.
Many times on my healing journey I met my beliefs, my stories, and their shadow sides in all their illuminated glory. Many times I was called to see the ways I carry the experience of being both the victim and the perpetrator in any number of ways, and to acknowledge them both. I’ve also worked with clients who engaged in powerful work to heal the shame they carried from an ancestry that thrived on enslaving other people, from being related to people who carried out violence and atrocities. We carry so much within our cellular memory, in many ways we carry the totality of the human experience. Acknowledging these parts of ourself requires a brave and courageous heart, deep compassion, and willingness to see that the idea of “the other” is only an illusion. This is what it means to traverse the shadowlands.
Of course we should feel all that we are feeling in response to what is being acted out around us — outrage, horror, anger, disgust, sadness. We must feel it all AND being willing to venture into a space of understanding how it still lives on in the hearts of so many of our brothers and sisters, in OUR hearts. We must confront the ways we benefit from inequity and feel relief that we aren’t labeled as “the other” in any number of situations. Suggesting or demanding that people move to a different country, firing them from their jobs, turning our backs to them because of their hate-filled views is not the answer — we cannot meet hate with hate. “Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that. Hate multiplies hate, violence multiplies violence, and toughness multiplies toughness in a descending spiral of destruction....The chain reaction of evil — hate begetting hate, wars producing more wars — must be broken, or we shall be plunged into the dark abyss of annihilation," Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
In the course of history many have given their lives to fight the darkness, the hatred. Many of our ancestors have been present on battlefields of the not so distant past, and many are there now. We are being asked to confront this same darkness and to do it differently, by going deeper and confronting the dark corners where these shadows are still allowed to exist within ourselves. It is only then that we will have the capacity to hold a deep space of compassion and carry love throughout the shadowlands of humanity. Because it’s not just about countering the protests in the street, it’s about cultivating the courage to speak up when the shadows emerge in conversations among our friends, within our families, our spiritual communities, and our neighborhoods. A friend brilliantly named that our familiar spaces are most often our lion’s den, our proving ground, to see how firmly we can stand in our power and our truth and do so with love.
There are maps that show “the path of totality” for viewing the upcoming solar eclipse. I believe we are all in the path of totality of what is unfolding in our hearts and all around us. There is powerful medicine and healing balm to be found in digging deep and bringing the totality of shadow into the light. May we step into this magnificent eclipse portal with the full measure of our expanded hearts and have the courage to traverse the shadowlands with the full measure of our light.
