It’s an honor to have a guest blog today by one of my favorite teachers, Teal Swan. She explains in great depth and with brilliant sophistication something that I wish more people understood about the Law of Attraction – you can’t fool it. The Universe will mirror to you what you are offering vibrationally, no matter what WORDS you use or even THOUGHTS you think. Because our subconscious or unconscious mind speaks louder. Our shadow side speaks louder. Emotional traumas that are unhealed and unintegrated in our body and energetic field speak louder. These hidden and rejected aspects of ourselves must be lovingly attended to (aka brought to full consciousness) in order to manifest effectively.
Are you looking for some guidance in identifying what you may be resisting or suppressing? You’re welcome to join my free group challenge and bring some light to those shadows. We begin on March 30!
To understand how The Law Of Attraction applies to the human shadow, we first have to know what the human shadow is. So, what is the human shadow?
When you first come into this life, your ego (the fancy word for separate identity) is not fully formed yet. The ego is primarily formed in relationship to others and so the majority of your ego comes about during the process of socialization. This is the time that you learn about the concept of good and bad right and wrong, acceptable and unacceptable. Most importantly you learn about the aspects of you that are acceptable and unacceptable. It becomes very clear that love and reward will come in response to what is acceptable and abandonment and punishment will come in response to what is unacceptable. As a result, we begin to ignore, deny and suppress what we think is unacceptable about us; we split our consciousness meaning, we divide ourselves. And this is how the subconscious mind is born. We could call the subconscious the shadow because we cannot see it clearly and thus are not aware of it and the conscious the light because we can see it clearly and are aware of it.
Separation and division is not a natural state, it is an unhealed state and so the shadow aspect strives to be integrated again regardless of how much we wish that it would “go away”. Our shadow rears its head whenever something in the subconscious is triggered into our awareness by circumstances in our life. For example, if our partner doesn’t show up on time, which triggers a deeply suppressed feeling of abandonment that we are not even aware of, we might spend the next 45 minutes flipping out in what seems to be a massive overreaction to the situation at hand.
And the integration of unconsciousness leads to complete and total awareness. Even so, shadow work is popular with some spiritual teachers, psychologists and life coaches and very unpopular with others. Even channels and spiritual guides disagree on the subject of shadow work.
The top arguments against shadow work are “If you focus on your shadow all you will get is more shadow” and “If you focus on needing to clear yourself of your shadow, all there will be is more shadow to clear.” These arguments come from a very limited and elementary understanding of consciousness, resistance and The Law of Attraction.
If it were true that positive focus creates a pure positive person then a person who is petting a puppy or focusing positively consistently would have a pure energy field that is clear of “wounds”. But this is not the case. When I am observing someone’s energy fields and they are focused on something that is positive like a puppy, parts of their energy field become lighter as if they are allowing more energy in while parts such as aura tears and rips and imprints remain unhealed, especially in the emotional body field.
When we experience something traumatic on an emotional level, it works the same way as it does with physical trauma. To use an aggressive example, if you are involved in a head on collision and you end up with a compound fracture, for the average person (who does not bend the laws of this time space reality), no amount of pure positive focus is going to put the bone back together again. And if you begin to focus positively chances are that positive focus will simply lead you directly to a doctor who can put the bone back together again. It’s not a comfortable process. It’s a process that demands that we admit that the bone is broken and put it back in place and put a cast on it and focus deliberately on creating the healing state of that particular ailment.
If we get a compound fracture and we attempt to distract ourselves from the fracture by thinking positive thoughts, we are now in a mental and emotional tug of war between the aspect that has awareness that this is a serious issue that needs conscious attention and the aspect that doesn’t want to admit to the reality that this is a serious issue that needs conscious attention. Why would we be focusing positively in this scenario where we have a compound fracture? To avoid something.
What is the result if we try to escape from, ignore or get away from our compound fracture? It festers. We become incapacitated if we survive at all. In short, when we try to avoid something, the thing we are trying to avoid gets worse. And things we are trying to avoid are the premium content of the human shadow.
This is the exact scenario we face on an emotional level. If we suffered an emotional trauma and we ignore, suppress or deny it in favor of positive focus, we are using positivity to get away from negativity. The emotional wound does not get better; it festers. If you do focus positively, chances are that your positive focus will simply lead you straight to someone who can help you heal and ultimately integrate your emotional wounds.
When you realize that you are using positive focus to avoid something that feels negative to you, it is time to release resistance to whatever you are trying to avoid. To release resistance to something, you have to turn in the direction of it instead of away from it because turning away from it is done from a space of resistance to it.
When I say, “don’t think about lemons” you think about lemons. This is what we’re ultimately doing on a subconscious level by trying to use positive focus to avoid negative emotions. We’re saying, “Don’t focus on the way you actually feel”. It only serves to magnify the way that you actually feel until the reflection is so big, you can’t escape it. It manifests itself in more aggressive and more aggressive ways hoping that you will come to terms with it and release resistance to it. We are already in resistance to our shadow aspect. This resistance is why it is subconscious in the first place.
So what do we do when we are in resistance to something? We must release resistance to that specific thing. But by obsessively focusing positively and trying to ignore it and divert our attention from our shadow, we only resist it further. Because we are trying to avoid it, we are in essence focusing on it and sending it energy without even being aware that we are doing so.
The perfect example of this is Jerry Hicks. Jerry Hicks, who I happen to love, as many of you know ended up getting cancer. This turn of events created massive doubt in the Abraham community. Here is a person who promises in accordance with Abraham that if you focus positively, you can’t get ill. Well it just so happens that cancer is the unfinished business disease. It always comes about as the result of childhood trauma. For Jerry, growing up extremely poor and having been discouraged again and again from his far-reaching ideas made several imprints in his consciousness that despite his positive focus did not go away. Whenever he got close to those shadows, he did what he thought was best and simply diverted his attention away from those shadows. They festered because that “avoidance” was in fact resistance. And that ultimately manifested in a condition that took his life. This is not an uncommon story. The most common turn of events when we repeatedly ignore or deny what is real for us but that is unwanted by us is that it manifests physically as an illness or another physical condition that we cannot ignore.
We don’t only suppress and deny and banish unacceptable bad things into our subconscious; we also suppress unacceptable good things. This is what idolization is about. Idolization is nothing more than the projection of the suppressed positive attributes within one person, onto another person, so that they may admire the reflection instead of the source. But for the sake of this [article], I’m going to focus primarily on the unacceptable bad things we suppress.
Awareness is always the first step towards vibrational increase when we are dealing with something we were not consciously aware of. It’s the first time you shine light in the dark closet to see what is there.
It will cause you to feel authentic and grounded within yourself. We fear our shadow; this is why we resist it. By becoming aware of it, we come to understand it and understanding is the #1 way to diminish fear.
There is one massive exception. Positive focus works on everything except for the things you’re trying to use positive focus to avoid. Another way of saying this is positive focus works on everything except for when positive focus is used as a tool to enable our resistance.
Many of us are excited to find the power of positive focus because it seems like a get out of jail free card. Positive focus seems like a magic pill that will make it so we can escape and avoid all of our unwanted things. And unfortunately because of improper understanding of law of attraction, many teachers back up the idea that all it takes to create a perfect life is perfect positive focus. Consider this, if we are enthusiastic about positive focus because it feels like a get out of jail free card, it means that we have big things we are trying to avoid.
We are like emotional cripples who on one level know we are really hurt and on another level don’t want to admit to it. We’d rather believe that if we focus positively enough, we will miraculously be put back together again.
Whatever vibrations are contained within you are being matched exactly by experiences in your external world. And like it or not, your shadow aspects are vibrations within you that are attracting experiences into your life that match them. These shadows must be integrated in order to cease being points of attraction.
I often use the analogy of the radio dial when I am talking about the Law of Attraction. Basically whatever station your dial is turned to, dictates what signal and therefore radio station you will receive. On an emotional level, this means if you are tuned to joy, you receive joy. But this analogy only works if you see yourself in your entirety as one dial. In reality you are more like a switchboard of a multitude of dials. The various frequencies that are being received by these dials, add up to your overall vibration. You have a dial relative to every subject in your life. My dial relative to relationships could be set on despair and so I receive relationships that cause me to despair. While simultaneously my career dial could be set to elation so I receive career opportunities that makes me feel elated and I love my job. If you improve the frequency of the signal being received by just one of these dials, your overall vibration increases. But to say that any positive focus in any area of your life will cause positive improvement in all areas of your life is not accurate. Regardless of how much you positively focus on your career or on your friends or on your body, you can still have a terrible vibration about romantic relationships and so you still experience negative romantic relationships. Then you start to feel like positive focus doesn’t work.
If we acknowledge that a person is made of pure source energy and pure integrated consciousness when they come into this life, you could imagine that this pure consciousness is a light much like our sun. As the person develops through life and experiences traumas, they do not gain darkness. The light does not go away; rather their light is obscured. When you do shadow work, you will notice that it is as if you have wiped a dusty film off of a window. You do not need to work at creating light, more light simply streams into the room because you have removed what was obscuring the light.
You could alternatively see your subconscious aspects as anchors that are holding you underwater. If you turned in the direction of the anchor and unhooked yourself from it, you would not need to swim towards the surface. You would naturally begin to float upwards. This is what your vibration does when you do shadow work, like a buoy it naturally increases because the things that were decreasing it, are integrated, the no longer weigh your vibration down.
Saying that “if you focus on shadow work, there will always be more to do” is like saying that if you stand at the sink and begin to clean dishes, there will always be more dishes to clean, as if a new one will pop up in your sink the second you finish cleaning the last one. People who have dedicated some aspect of their practice to shadow work know from personal experience that over time less and less shadow work has to be done because you have become more and more integrated. But there is a reason why some people feel the opposite.
When they first give themselves permission to open the closet to their subconscious, their subconscious comes rushing out like Pandora’s box. It can be likened to an energetic or an emotional flu. Because so much of you was deemed unacceptable while you were growing up, a great portion of you was banished to the subconscious. Because of this, a great deal of shadow needs to be integrated. If you are one of these people, your closet is so full of denied and suppressed aspects that your closet is bursting at the seams. As a result, it feels like your shadows are never ending. Every day there’s a new shadow and you feel the same way you do when you have the flu; like you’re leaning over a toilet and you can’t stop throwing up.
It’s easy and tempting to think that your life has gotten worse since you started shadow work. But this is a healing crisis. This is a purge. And ironically, this is the point that most people stop shadow work and turn back from where they came, when it is actually the time that they are passing through the eye of the needle and if they would keep going, instead of turn back, they would integrate if not attain an enlightenment experience. They would experience freedom and wholeness and peace for the very first time.
Because if you turn around to face your fears they no longer hold power over you. You are no longer resisting the unwanted by running away from it. Instead you are shifting into a state of allowing by accepting it. And by doing that, it cannot hurt you or haunt you anymore.
Like a ghost, your shadow will follow you to the ends of the earth begging for the light of consciousness to turn towards it. No amount of positive focus will make it disappear. And long story short, focus upon the shadow does not create more shadow because the shadow that is exposed to the light of consciousness ceases to be shadow.
Teal Swan, “The Spiritual Catalyst” is a well known teacher who writes and speaks publicly about spirituality, the meaning of life, God, The Higher Self and the road to health and happiness. Teal is part of the first 1980s wave of indigo children. As a result of her unusual abilities, Teal was taken into a local cult at the age of six and ritualistically tortured for 13 years. Since her escape, Teal has become a spiritual leader, utilizing her extrasensory abilities to educate people about the united, energetic nature of this universe and to teach people how to find both health and bliss in the midst of even the most extreme circumstances. Her book, The Sculptor in the Sky, is available on Amazon, and at most major book retailers. To find out more about Teal’s life, workshops, teachings, and extrasensory abilities, visit her website or YouTube channel.