My Shadow of Righteous Indignation

I got an email last evening from a friend which he also sent to a larger list of his friends and which, in my judgment, contained ethnically inflammatory remarks directed from one ethnic group towards another. Now as this friend of mine is a dear one to me, I was both disappointed and angry with my friend and replied with my righteous indignation and asked to be removed from any list with regards to future communications of this type. As I write this, I am both angry and sad to have received this from a person who I felt had unresolved issues in his life in areas for which I could only offer compassion and yet to whom I had promised to be commited to his well-being regardless of my feelings, and then I receive this email.

So, I ask myself, what is my friend mirroring in me that I’m supposed to get in this situation. After all I spoke of earlier yesterday morning (see Celebration Reading 2/21/10 - A Shadow around Being Inspired) about mirroring and humbling myself to being inspired, am I to suppose that I might have to humble myself to being righteously indignant?

I don’t quite know what the answer might be or if there is an answer, but I know that if I look hard enough that I will see in the mirror a reflection of something I really don’t want to see. I am not going to resolve this before a night’s sleep intervenes so I am going to wait for the light to cast my shadow in this and that requires the light of day, in this instance. Yet as I sit here I’m beginning to feel a rush of tingly energy in my back, arms, legs and chest, really breasts, and my heart is pumping faster, I’m feeling agitated and somewhat sexually aroused, all at the same time. If my friend really believes this as truth instead of propaganda, he has crossed the same line that he once said I would cross if I used one particular ethnically charged slur towards him, even in jest. I feel that even though I am of neither ethnic group in this case, I still feel violated in the same way.

Well at least I have my mirror and yet this issue still generates a charge in me. Again I will have to wait to channel the rest until light shines on the world.

Wow! It just dawned on me, no pun intended, that I didn’t realize that I had this line that I am not willing to cross to see that what my friend is doing right now is expressing a need, and that I just can’t see what it is yet, even though I know that his need is there.

So then, what is my need? Maybe if I can see that, I will able to mirror my need to his. I know that I need to be able to really get past my shadow long enough to listen and hear. Am I mirroring his fear and anger from his forgotten past? I certainly do not feel safe with him, and maybe that is all I need - to look at how I can make myself feel safe with him again. So now the ball is in my court to play and I’m no longer agitated though I’m still feeling aroused. I’m also actually relieved and humbled by my experience that all I have yet to do is to feel safe with my friend again because now I can see that needing to feel safe is what was being expressed by the email that had started this match in the first place.

And I’m also wrong about needing that night’s sleep to discover what is so for me.

Withholdings and Perpetrations

One of the insidious aspects of shadow is that it can and will color my reality, just like colored sunglasses, often to the point that when I interact with another person, whether a stranger or a significant relationship in my life, I will passively view that person through the filter of my shadow and not be able to see or really be with that person. On the other side of the passive shadow is the active side of perpetration, where I will actively engage in the process of causing damage to the character or sense of aliveness of an individual or group of individuals by gossip or its more passive counterpart, withholding, along with projections, judgments or anything else that allows me to avoid responsibility and accountability, at the cost of intimacy, authenticity, vitality, integrity, in short, the cost of my aliveness and the aliveness of the other person. On the other side of the cost is, of course, the payoffs, such as righteousness, being comfortable, saving face, and most importantly, not having to be responsible.

I have lived most of my life going for the payoff of righteousness, comfort, saving face and not being responsible. I have finally reached the point where the payoff is no longer important enough to cost me my aliveness or the aliveness of another. Not only is it not important to go for the payoff anymore, just seeing the payoff itself stacked up against the cost of my aliveness has tipped the scales for me to see that by giving up righteousness by seeing it as a cost rather than a payoff, has allowed me to see that aliveness, along with the intimacy, authenticity, vitality, and integrity that aliveness brings with it, is the real payoff.

I have realized that the power in discovering my own perpetrations with another is that it also provides the opportunity for me to clean up the perpetration by communicating to the person with whom I have the perpetration, but only if my communicating is equally compassionate to the other as to myself and that also allows the communication to contribute to the relationship and not cause further injury or damage. The chance of further injury should be the measure by which I decide whether to communicate my perpetration or wait until my motive is as clean as the communication. To do otherwise will do more to hold the perpetration in place rather than to further the aliveness of the other and with that, the my own aliveness, as well.

The Shadow of “Thinking That I Know”

Have you ever known someone who you just want to avoid like the plague because they not only seem to know it all, they probably also believe that they do,and that seems to turn you off to them, in some way?  A recent encounter into this shadow happened with a customer to whom I was delivering flowers.  Shortly after I had left her house to return to the store I received a call from an associate telling me to go back to retreive the flowers because the customer said the flowers were wilted.  I returned to her house and in retreiving the flowers, which seemed fine to me, she told me that she had her own rose bushes and “she knew roses.”  I conceded and took the flowers back and when I was returning from her house, I was thinking about how there might be a shadow whenever I think that I know something that someone might not know and still make them wrong for it by making myself right. Once I realized the opportunity to be a witness to the this moment in the car, that is to take myself outside of any emotional, rational, or other such attachments to this situation, I got to see the woman as me.

So how does thinking that I know become shadow?  If I am wanting to be right about something, by my focus, I can no longer be in the present moment, to just be alive with the person with whom I am sharing the air, time and place. Instead I am stuck in my story about the other person thinking that he knows, and therefore I can’t experience any aliveness in the person or in myself, for that matter. In fact, all I have is story and as I have recounted before, story, like understanding, is the booby prize.

Noticing this once again, I can choose aliveness over righteousness, and with that choice, everyone gets to win.