O Efeito da Sombra - Debbie Ford (legendas em Português)

34 year old teacher Mary Kay Letourneau was nabbed in a torrid affair with a 12 year old student in current resident laws television of Jim Baker was spitting on all fraud and conspiracy popstar Michael Jackson village actor and misanthrope arrested for our children drug use another tabloid rest Jews Italians and other ethnicities Governor Eliot Spitzer of New York immediately there I like after charged with indecent exposure televangelist Jim vehicles nearby prescription bottles it's really bizarre to me when someone does something so stupid 25 years ago I woke up on a cold marble floor and I

had passed out after a night I should say another night of drugs but something had shifted and I knew that if I didn't make a dramatic change in my life that I was going to die and I called my mother and I said I need to go back into treatment and I had already been in treatment three or four times all these other times I left on day ten I started to feel great I'm drug-free I'm not like any of these people I'm out of here and I would pack up my little bag put my

little arrogant suit on and March myself out of treatment and I was free I was going to make it to the other side by day six or seven I'd be on the phone looking for my drugs and end up right back in rehab so instead of running away this time I went into the bathroom and I got down on my hands and knees and I started begging please relieve me of this pain grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change I cannot change my desire to leave and in that moment on that

floor something happened to me something that was like magic it was mind-blowing to me because all of a sudden after a few minutes I knew I could stay one more day how could I go from terrified and my mind going a million miles a minute to this place of complete peace I walked out of there on day 28 knowing that there was something that I had to find out about the shadow is dark its secretive it can be dangerous shadow is everything that we don't want other people to see things we hide things that we

lie about not only to others but to ourselves and they are the sort of monsters that come out of the caves in the middle of the night it is that dark intrinsic side of us that each and every one of us tries to hide because we've been told from such an early age that these are not acceptable components of who we are to have one aspect of the soul you have to experience the other aspect of the soul the counterbalance it hello darkness my old friend I've come to talk to you again jad they were

talking about the shadow you anytime you don't have a shadow as if you're standing in the darkness the shadow shows up in so many ways writing bad checks drinking too much cheating on our tax returns dipping into our expense account at a family trust eating chocolate cake in the middle of the night after three days of dieting and depriving ourselves screaming our kids are verbally abusing our partners after being the nice guy at work all day surfing the internet and visiting porn sites while our wife makes us dinner cheating on our husband while he is

hard at work trying to provide all the extra pleasures in life for our family stealing our co-workers ideas and claiming them as our own the shadow is made up of the thoughts emotions and impulses that we find too painful embarrassing or distasteful to accept so instead of dealing with them we repress them right now hundreds and millions of people are living in denial of their individual shadow and all of us are being affected by the collective shadow in more ways than we can imagine the collective shadow manifests as evil as war as zone of social

injustice as radical inequities in our economic status you know right now we have 50% of the world living on less than $2 day 20% of the world living on less than one dollar a day we are totally in denial of the fact this was also a manifestation of our collective shadow why because people in social institutions financial institutions political institutions corporate institutions are in total denial of the shadowy energy they don't even understand it you mean what we call evil in the world is the manifestation of our collective shadow turned pathological repressed in rage in

denial people who express self-righteous morality are usually the ones who have the darkest deepest shadows the shadow of the Catholic Church which pronounces on homosexuality as evil and calls gays sinners while hiding pedophiles in its own clergy these are all the expressions of the shadow the entire trajectory of human history at this point is like the Titanic it is headed for an iceberg it is going in a direction that is unsustainable and it is going in a direction that is unsurvivable if not for us then at least for our children or our grandchildren and from

an archetypal perspective each and every one of us is the captain and the temptation is it's too painful the temptation is to just distract ourselves the temptation is to pretend it's not happening or the temptation is to go into cynicism or the temptation is to just go into anger and indulge that and not do anything and each and every one of us are challenged at this point don't be the captain who just goes downstairs and ghosts to sleep everything that expands has got to contract what goes ups got to come down people are gonna be

confronted with their shadow and have been living high living wonderful everything's been exorbitantly exuding and now suddenly there's going to be a contractive phase and if you haven't met yourself if you haven't done yourself work if you haven't been on the inside done some exploration and cleaned up you know cleaned your house and detox that you're going to be in trouble the birth of our shadow occurs when we are very young before our logical thinking mind is developed enough to filter the messages we receive from parents caregivers and the world at large even if we

had the best appearance we inevitably got shamed for displaying certain qualities and received the message that something about us was not OK that something was wrong with us or that we were bad agree little - now you going to eat all those before dinner these messages get ingrained in our subconscious like a computer virus altering our perception of ourselves and wounding our healthy sense of ego when we suppress any of these qualities we are living in denial of all of who we are and of course it's different based upon our environment if you're raised in

a family of blue-collar workers and you declare that you want to play the piano or you want to become an artist that artistic quality will be negatively received and you may end up having to suppress that on the other hand if you're raised in a family of artists and intellectuals and you declare that you want to start working on construction or you want to be really athletic that may also be perceived of as negative we try with all our might to pretend that we are not that which we hate in fact proving this is an

all important task for the wounded ego a task which the ego believes is vital to its existence the wounded ego must hide all that we believe is unacceptable about ourselves to accomplish this task it constructs a mask to prove to others that we are not as defective inferior worthless and bad as we might fear we are none of us likes to admit that we have these flaws and insecurities so to hide them we create a persona at a very young age we start to wrap ourselves up in a new package that we believe will bring

us a love attention and acceptance that we hunger for we create personas so that we can belong most of us have a public life and a secret life we work hard to feel good about ourselves and a moment later we do something to sabotage those good feelings we were maths that we believe will take us where we want to go and these masks take many forms which one do you wear our masts become our prison beneath the masts that we show the world our wounded egos are in pain the parts of us that were deemed

bad and wrong by others and now by ourselves are literally screaming to get out to be set free and be accepted and logged as a valuable part of who we are when we deny ourselves a safe outlet to express our dark side it builds up and becomes a powerful force that is capable of destroying our lives as well as the lives of others this is what I call the beach ball effect so everything that we reject we have to keep beneath our consciousness we try to bury it so to speak now how much energy it

takes to put a beach ball underwater you take your selfish self you take your angry self you take your to good self you're not good enough self you take all of it and it's like you have 40 beach balls you're trying to manage and then what happens when you're holding that beach ball underwater when you're young you got lots of energy so you can manage a lot of beach balls but then when you're not in the myths a possibility when your defenses are down when you have your attention on some big prize you're gonna win

all of a sudden boom somebody does something what happens to the beach ball pops up and hit you in the face what's road rage is it anything more than that beach ball coming up we see it in the media all the time a filmmaker he's making deep Christian films all of a sudden gets drunk Scheldt anti-semitic comments in a drunken rage in a radio star makes his living like being a great communicator all of a sudden makes it comment a racial slur so all of these beach balls at you are trying to manage are you

successful at it no it's all but not anymore when you don't deal with the shadow that part comes out and it'll creep up get a creep up in work places and creep up in relationships the more we try to suppress those societally determined undesirable qualities the more they find interesting and often mysterious ways to express themselves and it would be like locking somebody in the basement who wants to get out so they do things down there to get our attention into until we recognize them and let them know because those aspects of ourselves that we

don't like exit through a kind of detox process it's got to come out in order to be released when a my beach balls happened in front of a roomful of people so I'm out of treatment five years I've been floating around trying to become the most perfect person how could I have people want to be my friend how could I be a little more spiritual I was on the quest and I thought I was doing a really beautiful job and I went to another workshop we had to get up in front of the room and

say what we were committed to in the world I thought I was just being wonderful and everybody was looking at me like you're all looking at me and from the back of the room this woman screams out you're a [ __ ] and I thought well I know that how did she know and I was horrified I was so humiliated it was the one word that I didn't want to be called and she said to me tell me something good about being a [ __ ] I said there's nothing good she goes well you're a

[ __ ] there's got to be something good about being a [ __ ] and all I could think of was all the ways that that part of me had hurt me and at the time I was a retailer and she said do you ever get damaged merchandise delivered to your store and I said all the time she said is there ever time where they don't want to take back the damaged goods and I said yes and she said well do you ever have to get a little forceful or a little [ __ ] and

I said oh my god yes and I was remodeling a house at the time she said when you're a couple of weeks late and $20,000 over budget does it help to be a little [ __ ] would it help you and all of a sudden I realize that when I finally said to the contractor you need to finish my house he finished my house and this light went on inside of me that this part of me that I had shame that I had hated so much actually came bearing gifts she said either you're gonna use

it or it's gonna use you and that was a life-changing moment for me when we fully understand the human soul we find that it's a place of ambiguity of contradiction of paradox all experience is a result of contrast light and shadow pleasure and pain up and down backwards and forwards in order to have manifestation you need opposing energies you need your enemies to be who you are the human soul is simultaneously divine and diabolical sacred and profane sinner and Saint Eastern wisdom traditions we have a saying the sinner and Saint are merely exchanging notes so

once you understand that then first thing you realize is to have a shadow is normal if you had only truth goodness harmony on your side and the complete absence of the other there would be no creative impulse let's say only the evolutionary creative impulse in the universe and the universe would rapidly burn itself into the heat death of absolute zero if on the other hand you had only death impulse of inertia or destruction or entropy then the universe would rapidly collapse into a big black hole before you could say Deepak Chopra we are the microcosm

of the macrocosm this means that every quality that we can see in another exists within us we possess every human characteristic and emotion whether active or dormant whether conscious or unconscious there is nothing we can see or conceive of that we are not we are everything that which we consider good and that which we consider bad how could we know courage if we have never known fear how could we know happiness if we never knew sadness how could we know the light if we didn't know dark all of life is based on the coexistence of

these pairs of opposites our shadow is forever hiding from itself rather than confront our own darkness we project these unwanted qualities unto others when we are projecting our shadow selves it sounds like this she's so soft centered he's so full of himself these people are idiots what a loser afraid of our own unworthiness and simultaneously afraid of our own greatness we unconsciously transfer these qualities onto another rather than owning them ourselves those we project on own pieces of our unclaimed darkness as well as pieces of our unclaimed light until we take back all that we

have projected away what we can't be with won't let us be one of the most frequently asked questions I get is how do you know if you're projecting if it's your stuff or theirs I think it was best said by revered philosopher and psychologist Ken Wilber he says that if a person or thing in our environment informs us if we receive what is happening as information a point of interest we probably aren't projecting on the other hand if it affects us we're pointing our fingers judging if we're plugged in chances are that we are a

victim of our own projections think of someone from your own life who discuss a noise or repulses you and think of the qualities about them that you must hate now imagine this person standing right in front of you and I want you to put your hand out point your finger at them and say you're an idiot or you're a know-it-all or you're selfish now stop where you are keep your finger pointing at them and now notice that one finger is pointing at them and where are the other three fingers pointing back at you this is

the phenomenon of projection instead of acknowledging the qualities within us that we dislike we project them onto someone else we project them onto our mothers our kids our friends or even better some famous public figure who we have never even met if I asked each of you what you love about these people you would each have a different response the people that you hate also represent some aspect of yourself that you don't own notice what you think and feel as you look at each of these people you whatever we judge are condemned in another is

ultimately a disowned or rejected part of ourselves I was watching the events of 9/11 on TV with a friend of mine and after that we were driving down the street and turned to my friend and I said you know now on the Arabs are gonna be the new blacks they're gonna get the brunt of a lot of projections that blacks have carried and this culture for a long time now a lot of times blacks react we react to those projections and we project back and that creates a vicious cycle and the ego consciousness just responds

the way it should really because it's designed to respond as a survival mechanism that's what the ego is all about to help us survive but it's mechanical its reactive when an aggressive negative energies is directed at us the ego immediately wants to defend and react of course when you react to a projection you become that projection and I didn't want to become an angry black man that doesn't mean that I don't get angry I certainly can and do get angry but I express it and let it go there's an old Sufi story about a philosopher

who made an appointment to debate with a Sufi wisdom teacher named Nasrudin when the philosopher arrived at his appointment he found Nasrudin away from his home infuriated the philosopher picked up a piece of chalk and wrote stupid oath hun as Rudin's gate when Nazaruddin got home and saw this he rushed right over to the Philosopher's house I had forgotten that you were to call and I'm sorry I missed our appointment he said but I remembered it the minute I saw that you had written your name on my gate great Swiss psychologist Carl Jung who coined

the word shadow and shadow work said that is the shadow the person we'd rather not be rush limbaugh heated drug addicts and then it was revealed that he was one himself Reverend Ted Haggard railed against homosexuals and was later caught in a drug and male prostitute scandal a powerful example of projection at play is that at the ex governor of New York Eliot Spitzer as a public official Spitzer worked tirelessly to rid the streets of prostitution rings ultimately he wound up getting busted for having a relationship with a call girl which ruined his reputation and

his political future if we look at this through the eyes of the shadow I would suggest that some time long ago probably as a young man he had the impulse to sleep with a hooker since this wasn't politically or socially acceptable he buried this impulse deep inside only to be brought down by this very unconscious urge it's fascinating to see that he tried to destroy the temptation in the outer world because unconsciously he knew that the real danger lurked in his inner world this is why we want to deal with the shadows rather than trying

to convince you that you're not all those negative things and encouraging you to think a good thought shadow work urges you to get in there and to be with what you are resisting because what you resist will persist if you don't deal with your shadow it will deal with you the cost of ignoring a destructive pattern is that you're going to self-destruct you will implode rather than explode you know my training is as a neurologist so I've spent well over three decades studying how the nervous system organizes this information and it's really quite interesting when

you look at the fact that really even though we think of having one brain we actually have three different brains we have this very primitive brain which some people call the reptilian brain and if you look at a reptile look at a crocodile it really just has two responses on or off so if you ever watched a crocodile trying to eat a wildebeest seems to be very quiet and suddenly explodes and then it goes back into its quiet state so that response is really a very basic survival response but the mammalian brain which is sometimes

known as the limbic brain has created a modulating effect on that reptilian brain so the limbic system has brought into this very primitive on/off response gradations meaning you can be a little bit on significantly on really on but then on top of that mammalian brain really just for the last couple hundred thousand years we've evolved this human brain which is called the neocortex and uomini new cortex new covering of the brain and that actually allows us for the first time in evolutionary history to decide whether or not we want to react at all if we

look at brain scans we can actually see in a traumatized brain this part of the brain kind of shutting down becoming dark the part of the brain that is associated with emotions is that part you might be familiar with the fight or flight or freeze response the amygdala which is the fear processing center in this part of the brain really becomes bright so what happens is trauma changes brain functioning and then that triggers changes and stress hormones in the body which are not a good thing it's crucial to be able to recognize and express any

kind of pain without that it's it stays with us it lodges in the body and it causes us to react to live unconsciously the unresolved issues that people have in their bodies their emotions has an absolute direct correlation with their physical bodies their health and their well-being their expression of wellness overall they think that their help is somehow separate from their emotions they are intimately connected obesity diabetes heart disease and cancer they're all the result significantly of chronic unprocessed inflammatory molecules that have their correlates in the psychologic world of chronic unprocessed emotions and experiences every

single one of those conditions is a byproduct of our stress levels it affects our health intimately most people are aware that what they eat and what they drink affect their toxicity levels what they don't realize is that what they think and the emotions that they've built up over years are really the most toxic the ways that people have dealt with this traditionally and historically are inadequate my patients are are in overwhelmed this is not New Age mumbo jumbo this is actually hard science the science here now is indisputable that thoughts that emotions affect the organs

of the body we have to be mindful with every single thought that we have every single day how they want to create our heaven or hell how do we treat one another because we are the source of everything within us there is a poem by Rumi called the guesthouse which in many ways describes a human journey this being human is a guesthouse every morning a new arrival a joy a depression a meanness some momentary awareness comes as an unexpected visitor welcome and entertain them all even if they are a crowd of sorrows who vitami sweep

your house empty of its furniture still treat each guest honorably he may be clearing you out for some new delight the dark thought the shame the mouse meet them at the door laughing and invite them in be grateful for whoever comes because each has been sent as a guide from the repressing our anger may seem like a good solution but pretty soon we run out of places to hide divorce stress at work financial trouble or tension within our families provoke the shadow until finally it erupts the ancient Vedic texts known as the bhagavad-gita states that

man should discover his own reality not Ward himself for he has himself as his only friend or as his only enemy but if he rejects his own reality the self will war against him it's easy to love yourself when you wake up feeling strong and worthy and you have enough money in the bank and you feel great but how do you love yourself when you feel broke when you've been hurt or abused and that sets off the conflict which as we get older those wonderful forces that we've locked up in our shadow are rattling the

cages and sometimes if we're distracted they sneak out and we think and the people around us think what were we thinking and the answer is we weren't thinking when we're pressed the shadow can look like this you you we have to resolve the undigested emotions that are buried in our bodies and lodge distress in our minds we have to unearth own and embrace the very parts of ourselves that have caused us the most pain and the moment we do the light of our awareness we'll begin the process of transforming them we think we're alone we

think we're different we feel isolated or abandoned and then when we come together we find out that we all go through traumas but to be human is to be challenged and that everyone has gone through some trauma and if we're courageous we see that there is gold to be mined in every experience it's very interesting cuz I don't remember a single day where my mother was not drunk you know and I had to live through this I didn't understand it very very confused by it all why is this happening why this happening who are you

because as she would drink and as she became into that space I knew I didn't know her and I just wished she was dead I said I wish you were dead wish you were dead I want the pain out of my life out of my life cuz you don't belong here whoever you are this intoxicated person and as a child looking at this and the father wasn't there either I had to figure this out all I did was what she was dead right well natural 3040 years later after she had passed over shows many many

years after that and after getting involved in this work I realized that that was indeed one of the most incredible blessings of my life I learned from that situation about compassion and I learned about forgiveness and that's a pretty big one to have to learn about forgiveness you know we see these things as horrific experiences terrible experiences dark experiences when the truth they're really enlightened experiences because they help us to be who we are they help us to be compassionate they help us to be forgiving they help us look at someone very very differently what

doesn't kill us makes us stronger at a certain point in life it's about saying I have been through what I've been through I've succeeded in some ways perhaps but I've also failed in some ways I've been strong at times but I've also been weak at times I've gotten some things right and other things I've gotten wrong and some things have gone well for me and some things have been damned an awful the issue is what am I going to do with all of that you know two people can go through the exact same situation on

an external level but internally they do two completely different things with it that's why we you know we read incredible stories about people who went through the Holocaust or people who were in victims of genocide and yet they survived and yet they go on to live extraordinary lives and then you meet other people who went to a fraction of that in terms of an internal trauma but they stay stuck in it forever we begin to ask ourselves what am I getting from staying stuck there what am i avoiding from staying stuck there and what we

are avoiding is the greatest challenge of all and that is to be who we can be in order to serve the world I asked a few people to share their own shadows stories some of them are complete others are ongoing all of them are portraits of a fearless commitment to transformation Swee is like that beautiful combination of a miracle that part of her that she deemed so worthless and unlovable actually comes bearing the greatest gifts and makes her the shining light that she is today the pain that I've been carrying throughout my life was to

pain of believing that I was abandoned by my parents because I wasn't pure enough I'm actually mixed in terms of you know half Japanese half Chinese I was considered makes an impure enough to be raised in Japan you know my parents live in Japan and they love me with my grandparents in Malaysia I just felt so abandoned and rejected my father ended up getting a divorce from my mother he remarried another Japanese woman but nobody ever told me that when my father came back with his wife that um she's not my mother I felt the

immediate rejection that didn't want me in their lives and that they would rather have you know two dogs than have me with them because I have always discarded my Japanese identity in favor of my Malaysian Chinese identity I felt like the country has betrayed me and I used that pain to really put it into my my work I heard a project was in trouble in Japan and I volunteered to go to Japan to fix this problem because I know that I could do it that one day I stepped into Tokyo and I just felt that

this is where I need to be to really discover and explore the Japanese half of me in less than three years I create a business from 40 million to over two hundred million dollars in a country dominated by men you know never heard of a half Japanese half Chinese woman being a business leader in a big US telecom world so I couldn't be the leader I am today without going through the emotions and the pain that I went through my whole life if we look deeper we will see that we all have a divine recipe

all of us have shame about things that have happened to us we've all gone through difficult times we address these issues so we can quiet our minds heal our bodies and get closer to our heart's desires Hector had to let go of his macho persona to make peace with the one that he loves the most which was his father my father was your traditional Mexican man in the sense of working hard wanting to get ahead when provide for his family and as a young boy I was looking for his love I wanted his attention the

challenge was trying to figure out what was wrong with me because obviously something's wrong with me if number one he's not giving me the attention I want as a little boy and I give me the love yelling at me you know being verbally abusive obviously I did something wrong to something wrong with me so I carried that story from that point on for a long time and I realized he probably wasn't gonna do it the way I wanted he probably wasn't gonna tell me what I wanted when I was a little boy nickel thick yet

Oh dad Lord oh I love you son I did some personal growth work I went inside looked at the shame the guilt the pain I went through that I healed that and I was able to have that forgiveness with my dad and let that go I wasn't gonna tell him I love you for him I was gonna tell him I love you for me my dad passed on and I'm really grateful that that I listened to that inner voice that said you know go ahead and tell your dad that you love them do it for

yourself dr. Eadie eager is one of the most beautiful divine women on the planet today and she survived the worst circumstances something that most of us can't even ever imagine to May 22nd 1944 when I arrived in Auschwitz there was chaos my father was and separated from us and my sister and I facing dr. Langham and I didn't know who he was until he turned and he pointed to my mountable to the left and my sister and I to the right I asked the inmate when will I see my mother and she pointed at the

chimney and fire was coming out of the chimney and she said you better talk about your mother in past tense she's burning there my sister and I hugged each other and said the spirit never dies the spirit never dies I remembered that so vividly even today in Auschwitz we didn't know when we took a shower whether Buddha is going to come out or gasps and then there were others wooden into the world wires they got electrocuted and that night dr. Mengele came to the barracks and wanted to be entertained and my friends we knew that

I was a very talented gymnast and so they volunteered me and I ended up dancing for dr. Mengele I closed my eyes and the music was Tchaikovsky and I was dancing in Budapest the Romeo and Juliet I completely disassociated and we had choices I chose to look at the gods that they were not imprisoned and I was I remember they took my blood about twice a week and I asked why are you taking my blood and the man said I'm taking your blood too into German soldiers so we can win the war I said to

myself I was a pacifist I was a ballerina I backed with my blood you never gonna win the war so I created the part in me that I was able to still be in charge of and not allowing anything what happened externally to Lerner my spirit I remember I said if I survive today then tomorrow I'll be free I remember when Morita came to the shadow process and everybody was looking for the negative qualities they needed to embrace Morita couldn't even say hers and I kept asking what is so horrible that you can't even say

it and she said because of my background mine is that I'm a Nazi I was born in Germany in 1955 ten years after the war I found out what house 1112 what my country but this is a subject we never talked about my grandfather wouldn't tell me about his experience my mother wants nothing to do with this I'm not the only German that holds this and lives this in Heights does and I found many ways to sabotage myself from ever tasting power or success because you know Hitler was successful to come into power and the

power was horribly abused I didn't interact with any Germans at all I stayed away from them and it did not want to act with that interact with any Jewish person because I didn't want to cause any more pain and I was ashamed samia's was willing to shine light on the darkness and willing to take back her own projections for the good of all humanity in 2006 when Israel bomb Lebanon at the time I was trying to evacuate members of my family and tried to bring them over to the US and there were no news you've

got you needed to figure out how to reach to them I became so angry again because here is my family and the bombing one day I was watching TV I saw girls crying little girls I saw they were living nice girls and of course you know every time I saw like I've been living these kids being bombed and everything I was really really angry I was like you know yes yes yes Lex bomb the bastards kind of thing and at the end I realized they were reporting from the Israeli border on the other side of

the border and they looked exactly the same a little bit nice girl that or killed on the other side of the border I saw the pin and that day that they amid a commitment to myself that I will no tolerate that kind of cruelty irrespective of which side of the border is happening now I'm not saying that if you and I rise up to become the people that we are capable of being that we will rid this planet of war in our lifetime but I believe with all my heart we will achieve enough this lifetime

that humanity will go in that direction it's open breathing authentically who you are and not being ashamed of it there's nothing to be ashamed of because everybody has a shadow if somebody doesn't there must be pathological when on leading the shadow process it feels like my own journey has come full circle I've been very judgemental over the years I was having some really dark dreams about you lost they're all true when we embrace our totality we experience freedom my heart feels as big as my god it's no longer like little anymore it's like it's me

and embrace it with love love cuz that's what we're here for to give and receive love can't even believe that you Margaret I figured out who you were I remember if I hadn't faced my darkness I never would have found my life our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure it's our light not our darkness that most frightens us we ask ourselves Who am I to be brilliant gorgeous talented and fabulous but actually who are you not to be you are a child of God

you're playing small doesn't serve the world there's nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won't feel insecure around you we are all meant to shine as children do we were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us it's not just in some of us it's in everyone and as we let our own light shine we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same as we are liberated from our own fear our presence automatically liberates others consider the story of the Golden Buddha in 1957 a monastery in Thailand was being

relocated in a group of monks was put in charge of moving a giant clay Buddha in the myths of the move one of the monks noticed a crack in the Buddha concerned about damaging the idol the monks decided to wait a day before continuing with their task later on one of the monks came to check on the giant statue he shined his flashlight over the entire Buddha and when he reached the crack he saw something reflected back at him his curiosity aroused the monk got a hammer and a chisel and began chipping away at the

clay Buddha as he knocked off piece after piece of clay the Buddha got brighter and brighter after hours of work the monk looked up in amazement to see standing before him a huge solid gold Buddha historians believe the Buddha had been covered with clay by Thai monks several hundred years earlier before an attack by the Burmese army they covered the Buddha to protect it in the attack all the monks were killed so it wasn't until 1957 that the great treasure was discovered like the Buddha our outer shell protects us from the world our real treasure

is hidden within we human beings unconsciously hide our inner gold under a layer of clay all we need to do to uncover our gold is to have the courage to chip away at our outer shell piece by piece you can't fight darkness with darkness but you can switch on the light all of the work we do on the shadow is to get us to this point where we can forgive to do forgiveness we put blindfolds on to make it safe for people to share their deepest secrets I forgive myself I forgive myself for not finishing

college I forgive myself for beating up my sister I forgive myself I forgive myself for hating my body for screaming at my kids laughing enough for thinking I'm a stupid incompetent [ __ ] for stealing is my first boss for being rich for being the elephant for drinking too much not speaking out I forgive my long Gophers forgive my snow miser my pudgy men cheat on my diet I forgive myself forgive myself myself I give myself you are forgiven you are forgiven or forgiving you are completely I think a lot of people are very afraid

of their shadow they don't even want to consider that they have one Brent is one of the holiest men that I know and he is so spiritually evolved because he uses the pain of his past to be the greatest expression of himself today this story really began for me when I was nine years old and I was attending a summer camp that was managed by an order of religious men during that summer I was molested by by one of the religious men I remember that experience being a beginning of a split for me from myself

it happened a number of other times during that period of time I was at that camp I was always afraid that that guy was gonna come in and an overnight I even went so far as to to borrow a knife from someone that I kept under the pillow there's a nine year old kid I remember I just felt like some part of me died at that time I went on with my life holding on to that secret holding on to that shame of not really being connected with myself and the difference between forgiving and condoning

forgiving is seeing the true heart of another person it's beyond all the action in holding anybody to blame we limit our own love people need to know that they can get help that they don't have to carry their shame alone that they don't have to live in a secret and that there are people that are holding the light for the that are willing to see them as they are through the shadow it's the only way to see yourself is to is to look at the light and the darkness and to embrace it I use that

analogy of being like a drowning person where someone's holding your head underwater and at some point you realize that you have to be the one that fights your way back to the surface what happened to me as a child has given me a real depth of compassion which I am I'm so grateful for is it's so clear to me when I work with people how how they're suffering how they're hiding and it's been the greatest gift of my life that I'm in a position where I can where I can honor people in that way I'm

just I'm just so grateful to be able to connect with people on that most vulnerable level that deepest level of the soul okay I regain my faith because I asked for it forgiveness doesn't happen in your head until it happens in your heart my mom was walking downtown Beirut with the young Israelis and she turns to my dad and her mother had been killed by the Israelis she goes Mustafa these are young soldiers don't they have a mother and if she can forgive who are we not to forgive well you can't move on if you

don't forgive the train stops if you don't forgive and mostly you had to forgive yourself for taking whatever happened to you too deep too deep place did it shut you down the universe will deal with that person's karma you're not you don't have to worry that if you quote unquote forgive them that they're gonna somehow live an undeserved wonderful life each and every one of us needs to work full-time Unseld forgiveness our motivation to forgive is increased when we understand why it's so important it's not just to make their day better it's to free you

and forgiveness is the hallway between the past in the future the future expression of who we are as a planet as our country in America depends on the people that grow up that become the next presidents that become the next politicians economists we want to make a difference we want to somehow get it right you know to feel like we did or at least we tried to do what we came here to do that is the gold that is being mined today but that's because the world is growing we're entering a new age that's what's

going on that's why we're talking about this you are a force of love you are made from love and love is the most forceful energy you could ever have except that energy accept who you are accept your inheritance if you will you're the total being of love and don't waste a minute of it I've come full circle and this is the external of what was going on inside of me how we are enable to to perceive everything in life as an opportunity for growth I got married I have three children and five grandchildren in one

great-grandson and that's the best revenge to Hitler so if you want authentic peace of mind creativity kindness compassion joy then you've got to understand your shadow and be ok with it Sullivan if shadows could talk they would tell us that were as precious as a million pounds of gold that our brightest light can shine only when we've accepted our darkness that there is wisdom in every wound that there is a greater future waiting for us that we are children of God and have a right to be here that we were all created equal that our

pain is not personal but belongs to every man and woman alive life is a magical journey of making peace with both our humanity and divinity they would tell us that we deserve better that we matter that we are more than we ever dreamed possible and that there's light at the end of the tunnel that there is nobody in the world quite like you what if you knew in every cell of your body that you were living a divine plan a plan so important so vital for the evolution of humankind what if you knew that everything

that was happening right now that doesn't fit your ego ideals is happening to support you in stepping out of the smallness of your darkest thought into the brilliance of your biggest dream if you take this journey I promise you that you're going to experience more love more happiness they've ever had before you