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‘To do the work of the shadow, to travel along the descendent current with your heart open, is a radical act of kindness and courage. For when you re-embody to the unwanted, you remove the burden from others to metabolize it for you, which they cannot do. You are then free to love them, and to set them free.
In this way, love is not something you urgently seek more of or even something you can “give” to another. Rather, you become the activity of love itself, in all of your interactions with the phenomenal world. With others, with the trees, the sky, the ocean, the sun, and the moon. Even with the colors, the sounds, and the visions that emerge here.
For most of us, the sequestered material of the soma and the psyche is most vividly displayed in intimate relationship, especially as we start to allow another to matter to us, and as we take up the journey and the risk that vulnerable, exposed, embodied intimacy will always require. As nearly all of our wounding arose within an interpersonal environment, it will be most powerfully activated – as well as untangled and transformed – within a relational field.
As the ancient beliefs, emotions, and feelings erupt out of the collective, they do so seeking refuge and sanctuary where they can unfold and illuminate. The invitation is to infuse this sacred material with the revolutionary energies of embodied attunement. This holding is not passive but is raging and radical, and arising to seed a new world.
You need not abandon yourself any longer. You need not postpone participation here any longer, until a future moment when you are “healed,” “awakened,” less confused or are in possession of some new information.
With curiosity, with presence, and with kindness as your guide, you can discover that the shadow is in some paradoxical way only love in disguise, come to re-introduce you to the aliveness of your vulnerability, and to the field of warm, tender, open space that you are.‘
Palace Gate Counselling Service, Exeter
Counselling in Exeter since 1994
Palace Gate Counselling Service Blog 