mindtooloud

find and separate our self’s shadow from our Inner Self

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Not a bad practice,  The one I'm familiar with is to rewind your day dispassionately at night.  Slowly remember and review your actions without emotion.  The one in the thread seems to limit it to a certain scene during the day.  Its training in contemplation and to be less reactive. 

 

Not so much shadow work, where you delve into motivations behind your actions and speech.  Especially the darker side, being both critical and appreciative of it as a source of good, ie will, strength and not so good,  selfishness and destructiveness.

Edited by thelerner
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They never did define "shadow self". 

 

Basically they are talking about awareness including self awareness.

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Reading about the "shadow self" reminds me of a meditation experience I had many years ago.  I´d decided that I was going to meditate for ten minutes each and every day, but for some reason I just couldn´t get myself to sit down and do it.  Weird, right?  I was berating myself.  Ten minutes, I told myself, was such a teensy amount of time to do anything.

 

Well,  finally I´d just had it with myself and said I was going to do it right then no matter what.  And as soon as my butt hit the cushion I was in tears. Immediately I got it....oh, THIS is why I was putting off my meditation.  Turns out there was a bunch of not-so-easy-to-face emotion right under the surface, and I didn´t even know it until I started my practice.  Or rather, part of me did know it (which was why I was avoiding meditation) but it wasn´t a part of myself I was consciously aware of.

 

We´re all like this.  There´s the part of ourselves that we know easily, and an often much larger part of ourselves that we don´t know, a part lost in shadow.  Often we keep parts of ourselves that we don´t like very much repressed in the shadow where it seems we don´t have to deal with it.  Shame especially gets locked in the shadow-self closet.  But the funny thing about the shadow is how much good stuff there is down there too -- joy gets buried along with the shame, childlike wonder, playful spontaneity.

 

Much of what we talk about when we talk about practice involves engaging with these shadow aspects of who we are.  The idea is to know yourself better.  To take aspects of self hidden in darkness (where they often end up controlling us from behind the scenes) and bringing them to the light.

Edited by liminal_luke
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Reading about the "shadow self" reminds me of a meditation experience I had many years ago.  I´d decided that I was going to meditate for ten minutes each and every day, but for some reason I just couldn´t get myself to sit down and do it.  Weird, right?  I was berating myself.  Ten minutes, I told myself, was such a teensy amount of time to do anything.

im having the same/similar problem, whenever i sit to meditate i just cant, i try for several seconds and get distracted and i dont push my self to keep tying, i just cant get my self to meditate like i would before sometimes

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im having the same/similar problem, whenever i sit to meditate i just cant, i try for several seconds and get distracted and i dont push my self to keep tying, i just cant get my self to meditate like i would before sometimes

Sounds like you need a method that requires you to devote a lot of attention to the meditation process.  Something that keeps your mind totally occupied so it can't play its monkey games.

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Sounds like you need a method that requires you to devote a lot of attention to the meditation process.  Something that keeps your mind totally occupied so it can't play its monkey games.

hmmmmm, like would counting backwards from 100 while meditating be helpful, or do you mean something different?

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hmmmmm, like would counting backwards from 100 while meditating be helpful, or do you mean something different?

Actually, that is the method I was taught for self-hypnosis.  Yes, I think it is worth at least trying.

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