The Shadow Woman
Those voices.
You could let them transcend you,
or you could let them bend you.
She says transcend me, send me to the stars,
but it’s not that easy when shitty self talk consumes who you are.
“Your mind is a garden
Your thoughts are seeds
You can grow flowers
Or you can grow weeds”
I know, ma, I know. But how? Show me how?
[Huge thanks to Valerie Silvestri and Ori Segev for the photos]
We all have voices waiting to emerge, waiting to be rebirthed inside of us. As children, our voices are clear and prominent. It’s effortless to speak out and express our identities.
This is why my favorite age group to work with are 9-12-year-old girls. Beneath the layers of their skin they’re bubbling with creativity, as rainbow colors pump through their veins and glimpses of who they could be in this world consume their minds.
“I want to be a make-up artist/lawyer/professional tennis player/singer!”
Cheeyah!
Anything is possible in childhood and early adolescence.
But then life happens. Bullying, societal pressures, cultural expectations, stereotypes and conditioning oppress us and mold us. These things drip into our subconscious, play with us and terrorize us. We mostly are products of our environment. Our childhoods, our family life. Growing-up. It’s made us who we are today. The people that loved us and didn’t love us. And the people that we loved and didn’t love. These experiences all shape us drastically and piece us together as we grow into our adult bodies.
As we enter adulthood, it seems that we are mostly just picking up the pieces from our wounded pasts. Everyone has been hurt, some more than others. We try to put ourselves back together. We choose an identity that seems to fit us best. We gravitate toward similar people, yet also dip our feet into different people as we try to make sense of life.
Somewhere along the journey, unfriendly voices take over and tell us we can’t be all that we’ve dreamed of.
I wonder, as we enter adulthood and accept the inevitable responsibilities, if we’re suppressing the most sacred parts of ourselves.
More than ever, the world needs us to be authentically, us.
What if we could heal ourselves and others by befriending the voices in our heads, instead of letting them derail us completely? I was beginning to think it was impossible to be friends with the negativity inside of me, but I believe those negative voices might actually have something valuable to say.
Recently, I discovered This is Woman’s Work by Dominque Christina. Christina describes these voices, these archetypes, as our “Unclaimed Hallelujahs”.
Psychologist Carl Jung was the original advocate for archetypes, as he believed archetypes to be the mythical characters that reside all across the collective unconscious.
Christina altered these mythologies and created her own, as an opportunity to “meet” these voices head-on. While working with these archetypal characters, we can author ourselves and more clearly define the voices inside of us- instead of just instantly tagging them as negative or unwanted. There’s a reason for what we’re feeling inside of us and repressing it is dangerous. Repressed emotions can lead to a long list of mental and physical manifestations.
We believe we need to stay put in our preordained archetypes made for us. It is now time to let that go. It’s time to stop limiting ourselves and putting our unique gifts on the back-burner. It’s time to spring into the fullness of ourselves. What is the thing that keeps you in the shadows, keeps you silent?
[The Shadow]
She’s ready to come forth into her own image,
to be the bearer of light, the healer, that she was ever destined to be.
Her past selves taunt her, beg her to stay put in the darkness,
but she is ready to leave the past behind.
She’s been calling out to be heard,
for she withholds the secrets of the universe, evidence of a fruitful midnight.
A true creation story with a lesson,
A lesson in how to conquer the fear of the dark.
She whispers gently,
let’s unfold every place that is bent or molded
Be aware or be blindfolded
It’s a quest that kills,
But don’t die yet, love.
She says you are enough.
No room for basic round here.