More Shadow Work
Merry Christmas to me!

Hello, good people.

Once again, I’m coming in a little bit late this week. And, this week I'm recovering from Covid! <laugh>. When it rains, it pours! And I once again, I will not be sad to see this year come to a conclusion.

What I can tell you is that over the last couple of weeks, this getting sick business between the head cold, and this weeks Covid, has had a dynamic effect, on my life. It’s grounded me – brought me to a grinding halt. Which in turn has allowed me to dig into some deep stuff, which I'll share with you.

I was going to pick up last weeks talk about sex and sexuality, but I'll get back to that after the holidays.

This week, what's hot on my plate is this inner work that I've been doing that I wanted to share with you. Because I'm absolutely certain there's some overlap between what I'm experiencing and what other folks are experiencing. On my end it’s akin to huge reservoirs of emotion that I've been tapping into.

So I just read Conscious Uncoupling, which is a program that my husband and I will be going through over the next six weeks or so, starting in January. We’ll have a wonderful opportunity to work with individual coaches who will guide us through that book to conclude our 25 year relationship. So that's a very, very big deal.

That book was the beginning.

Then, I listened to the audio version of a paradigm shifting and explosively enlightening and not so comfortable book, Codependent No More, the classic by Melody Beattie.

If you’ve grown up or in any way been affected by, addiction, whether as an addict or a person dependent upon addicted people with compulsive behaviors…whether that's substance abuse or, sex or gambling or shopping or whatever, I, highly, highly recommend reading this book. It's absolutely blown my mind in how I've seen myself in the behaviors that have been described.

One behavior that I'm going to focus on today, and I won't obviously go through the whole list of behaviors, ‘cause that would be a lot. One of the behaviors that I’ve completely identified with, is the concept of creating fantasy. When reality is lacking, we have this beautiful, incredible self preserving capacity to create a fantasy.

And that's what I've been dynamically talented at doing – the creation of fantasy, which of course, supersedes the reality that I'm actually living. And then I start to project that fantasy on to people around me, my loved ones, people I want in my life to love, and all sorts of dynamic dysfunction ensues. What I’ve learned is that doing fantasy is, on the whole, a disassociative behavior, which I'd never considered before.

So it's disassociation, now let’s take a deep breath.

That's a lot <laugh>.

And here I am, at my advanced age, coming to grips with this behavior that I've cultivated, perpetrated, projected, bought, and sold. And none of it based on my own awareness. None of it based on my intuition. None of it based on reality! So I can laugh about it now, but boy, oh boy, I've been boo-hooing some big old crocodile tears in my head-cold slash covid state over the last few week.

Let's face it, it’s a whole new level of shadow work. I thought I was done with all this shadow work. I was pretty certain I was done with shadow work, but it seems that there was one part of the shadow I hadn’t addressed. I dealt with the people, the places and the things, but I hadn't dealt with the number one part of the shadow, which is me.

[Oops technical difficulty] Sorry about that.

So, yes, disassociative fantastical thinking…the creation of story because reality is either too painful or too complicated or completely out of control because you're the child of addicted people, unconscious people, or people in pain with unresolved trauma of their own.

So that's a lot. So lots of shadow work on my plate.

I want to close out this week with a beautiful clearing designed to break through all of that disassociative thinking:

What have you defined as your life? What fantasy have you created as your life that isn't your life that you keep choosing as your life in order to not live? And everything that that is times a Godzillion, will you destroy and uncreate it? Right, wrong, good, bad, pod, poc, all nine, shorts boys, povads and beyond.

The last part of what I just said is called The Clearing Statement. If you come to an Access Bars Class that would be a part of that class.

So we’re just a few days out from Christmas and New Year's, and I'm wishing all of you a beautiful, wonderful 2024. I hope you fall in love with the reality of your life as I'm learning to do outside of fantasy and projection.

Ciao for now.