The Shadow Knows. . .

I have been reading a fascinating book. It's called Meeting the Shadow. Edited by Zweig and Abrams, it is a collection of writings by various philosophers, theologians, psychologists and psychiatrists on the shadow side that each of us carries.

What is the shadow? It's those aspects of our own being that we repress or disown in order to be acceptable and accepted in our world. In our culture, things sometimes inadvertently get repressed in an effort to control something else.

For example: your toddler pushes down another child and takes away his toy. You are shocked, but you are enlighted enough not to scold. Instead, you tell your child that it's not okay to treat another child that way.

But if you don't acknowledge that your child is angry and give her some ideas of how to deal with her anger, she may get the idea that it's not okay to get angry.

Anger is a not a bad emotion. It carries a lot of power to change things. The key is in how you express the anger. It was the anger of a mother that created Mothers Against Drunk Driving. So how do we teach children to acknowledge their emotions, which are part of who they are, in ways that are constructive and liberating?

Greetings

Welcome to postings by AlexAngel and her friends. I'm new to this, so it may take a while to get the hang of it.

Is this a personal journal? A "vanity blog" where I can display what a deep and sensitive person I am? Will I be posting an "inspirational thought for the day"? Possibly. Probably.

I want a place to talk about my day, not in terms of the trivial events that happen, but in terms of the deeper experiences that come from really being present in the moment.

For example, I have been noticing this week that fall is emerging. The shadows are becoming longer, and the air is a bit crisper at night, even if the day has been quite warm. For me, it awakens some primitive impulse - to begin preparing for winter. This means drinking warm tea, stoking up on comfort foods, and buying books to read on cold, rainy winter nights.

Was there a time when humankind went into hibernation in the winter? I suppose there must have been in some parts of the world. There seems to be some deep genetically driven compulsion here, that starts with a sense of anticipation, and a gut-level anxiety about survival.

As human beings, I believe we are not at our best when we are focused on survival. That drives behavior in reaction to a belief in scarcity. "Will I have enough to eat until spring? Will there be enough wood to keep the fires going?"

That's where faith comes in. But it seems, no matter how many winters I have survived (physically and metaphorically), I still come up against the same fears! Maybe this is the place to explore those fears: the shadow of the human condition.