The shadow

I’ve been making some solid progress in integrating myself in recent days.  We are meant to be meshed together, the threads which compose us a unitary whole, even while separate.  Many of us are ripped apart, and conversations and understandings needed between our parts.

Today during my Kum Nye practice I had that scene come up from The Shining, where the beautiful naked woman becomes a twisted and sickening hag.  I felt the feelings of disgust and revulsion that came up, and I kept the two images in my mind, and asked: who were you before?

And it hit me I had a before too, that I have evil in me too, but that every psychopath on this planet has a before.  Being good is natural, and it is pain that pushes us in other directions.

And it hit me that it is not our ego which suppresses our dark side.  It is commonly supposed that our vanity keeps us from self knowledge.  It isn’t: it is pain.  You cannot know who you are without feeling how you became that way, and if it was overwhelming and happened when you were very young and vulnerable, these feelings are awful.  I use booze to deal with them, but that is changing.  I can feel, now, the part I am feeding with my drinking, which NEEDS it.

I don’t think most people who do not have horror in their lives realize how life saving the ability to sedate oneself reliably is or can be.

But something is changing in me.  I can feel it.  I am beginning to get back on the positive side of the ledger.