The Shadow of “I don’t Belong Here”

This last week I have been attending a five-day Conference on Healing and Transformation in Santa Fe, NM where I live. From the moment I was considering attending the conference, the little voice of doubt in the back of my head kept asking “Why should I be doing this?”  I had read through the prospectus and as I am one to consider myself somewhat of a skeptic when it comes to the Age of Aquarius,  and also as I am not a professional counselor or therapist and I wasn’t taking the workshops for  Continuing Education Credits (CEC), I felt panicked by the idea that I may be wasting my time and money on this realm of woo-woo stuff.  When I finally signed up, I faxed my registration with my credit card information on a Friday evening and waited until Monday to call to confirm receipt of my fax.  The person who took my call told me that my fax was nowhere to be found and could I please fax it again and the little voice again was there “Maybe it’s not meant to be!”  I sent the fax again and I received a call later in the day to confirm my registration.  I told a few friends who I believed might be supportive and enthusiastic about my registering for the conference and they too asked why I was doing this and I found myself again with that little voice questioning my decision. I felt sad for the lack of enthusiasm I was feeling from my friends and asked myself “Am I nuts? I really shouldn’t be doing this!”

     When day one finally arrived, I got up a little earlier than I usually do, got dressed and had my usual cereal and banana with rice milk. My plan was to leave with plenty of time to arrive early enough to park and find out where my first workshop was and instead I got on my computer to check my email and do other things until it was almost past time to make it to the conference without breaking a few traffic laws. About two miles from home I couldn’t find my cell phone, so in a panic I raced back home to retrieve it and wondered again, “Why am I doing this?” I finally got to my first workshop and discovered that I was the only participant who was not receiving CEC’s for the workshop. In the next workshop that afternoon, I really felt like I signed up for the wrong workshop as I noticed that I was the only man in a room of about 25-30 women and on top of that, I judged that the chairs were really too close to each other.

     The point of this story is this. Throughout much of my process in attending this conference, I was vaguely aware of my shadow “I don’t belong here!” and I got to watch it show up day after day throughout the conference in a variety of different ways.  Had I not been writing these blogs about aliveness and shadow for the past few months, I would probably not even been awake to the announcement about this conference, nor would I have gone very far beyond the first time that my little voice said “I don’t belong!”  With my aliveness present throughout this conference, I have come away with a clearer sense of purpose in life, which is to heal myself so that I can heal others by sharing my shadows when they show up.  I am grateful to my alive self for giving me this wonderful gift and, in the process, allowing me to share this gift to all with whom I have the opportunity to be alive.