Beginning shadow work - a course in Using the Gifts of our Shadow

So Jennifer and I signed up for our first shadow class, "Use Gifts of our Shadow." This promises to be life changing work -- some of the most powerful you will ever do. This is being taught by Carolyn Winkler and is based on her training with Debbie Ford, and her experience developing "Affirmative Energetics."

Working with our Shadows provides tremendous insight into ourselves and both our overt and hidden traits. The ability to recognize and integrate our Shadows back into our whole selves frees up a whole lot of energy. Recognizing the "gifts" of our shadows allows us to turn them around into our greatest strengths.

Over the next six weeks we are going to uncover some Dark and Light shadows, identify and step outside our Story, realize that the outside world is a simple reflection of our
inside world AND when change the inside, outside changes with it, see that we are all alike, all HUMAN with the same range of emotions and only circumstances make us choose or reject certain ones, learn that when we embrace both the dark and light parts of ourselves we become stronger, whole, and have more energy, and know know that we do not need to get rid of anything but instead integrate and embrace our wholeness and the gifts hidden inside.

I am really looking forward to doing this course together with Jennifer. We have gone through a lot as part of Operation: Hot Couple, and transformed our relationship and marriage. I began reading Debbie Ford's book "The Dark Side of the Light Chasers" where she also hit bottom in her life, and from there was able to turn things around. So that gives me a strong sense of relatedness to her work.

I am also confronted by my being so out of touch with my creative side, or at least the perception that I am. Perhaps the Shadow work can allow me to bring that out of the shadow and into the light. Having been the strong left-brain scientist growing up, I feel that I let that part of me die on the vine, considered that it had no value and therefore packed it away. Of course you can never really suppress parts of you, they just go underground, and there they tend to have other unintended consequences.