Under the covers

I've been hiding.  From world, not from myself.  No indeed.  I've been going through a horrible process of transformation.  I've heard others talk about it, but had never experienced it myself: when we sees only our faults.  Over and over again.  Day in, day out. 

I wanted to go deeper and deeper I went.  Below the sugar coated, nice-girl image I have of myself and into the shadowlands.  I've seen a lot of my own shadow.  So much, in fact, that now I'm ready to surrender it, to bless it and release it.

It is the synchrony of a sublime intelligence that, at the same time as this process was unfolding within, I started reading a book that told me exactly what to do when we meet our shadow side.  Marianne Williamson is probably the authority on A Course in Miracles; in A Return to Love, she says that we are unable to turn our shadow into light ourselves, that is the job of the divine.  How right she is, if I could have done it by now, I would have. 

Here I am, decades after starting my spiritual journey, and still airing the same mean, fearful, tight thoughts.  Getting past them is not my job; thank goodness because I don't know how and, in fact, I'm fed up of trying to figure out how.  She suggests that all shadowlands thoughts can be transformed by offering them to the Divine, in the form of the Holy Spirit. 

This means I'm praying nearly all day as each time I recognise those repetitive, tight thoughts, I pray for their transformation and then I surrender them.  Thoughts that have plagued me and shamed me for decades, I can now surrender to a power beyond myself.  I no longer feel I need to 'own' them or punish myself for having them: I can let them go, knowing that one day, they will dissipate and eventually dissolve.

Walking the spiritual path isn't always light-filled.  Sometimes we dip into our own darkness, into the crevices we'd rather ignore; rather than pretending those thoughts don't exist, letting them go with love must surely be a wiser path.