Why do I have a shadow? Could I have grown up without a shadow?

1.       

           As we work with shadow, one of the way it eludes work with us is by blaming others for its creation -

          "Others did this to me.They should be working on their shadow."
            Blaming others for the shadow that I have., can we grow up without developing a shadow?

Ans to my shadow

It is a euphemistic idea of growing up such a way that we would not have a shadow. Our abilities, feelings and capacity to impact others existed before our minds developed enough to recognize and deal with it.  A new born child for ex, has such a huge impact on its parents. Its actions can drive people around it crazy. But it has no awareness of it and in no way can deal with this power that it has over others.Thank God for it, otherwise it would have been an ignorant tyrant on the parents. Though the newborns dont realise this, kids as young as 7 month olds start realising this and start manipulating to get their way done!

Our sexuality develops before our ability to build strong and responsible relationships with others. Our abilities to build relationship as adult is the basis for marriage which we now understand has to be done only after we reach 20s

Our minds are a tad slower in developing compared to these basic human aspects.We often cannot fully understand the consequences, advantages and disadvantages of our energies. 

Hence there is a need to safeguard these wild energies in us before we can understand and deal with them, to be able to take responsibility of them. Hence it is essential for our parents and society to help us from our wild emotions before we can deal with them. In the process these parts gets pushed underground for us to deal with them later. But as we grow up, our abilities become better, it is natural for these forces to start putting pressure asking us to deal with them again. Unfortunately, even after we grow up, many a time, this need to deal with these energies is forgotten. Our parents and societies also often are not geared to teach us how to deal with them effectively.

For ex, if you are 30 and not yet fully understood and expressed your sexuality, that emerged at puberty, then you are in for trouble!

It is when our ego and self are ready, that we can bring out our shadow and deal with it effectively.

This also reason for us not to blame others, particularly our parents for our shadow. Ultimately shadow exists because we did not acknowledge it in ourselves. Now, after our minds are mature enough, we can choose to acknowledge these parts of ourselves and thus bring them out.

This natural process may however be deviated at times because of injuries to the ego-self. This may leave us incapable of handling our shadows effectively. These may be cases of severe abuse, lack of safety for young children, etc. Such times, the adult may seek professional help in the form of therapy to heal the injured part and then develop the ego well.

Below is a link to the flyer of our upcoming prog on Shadow
https://sites.google.com/a/partneringwithuniverse.com/home/the-programs/light-from-the-shadow

The Invisible Feminine in the Organisation

I have been in discussion with a friend past month regarding how 'uninclusive' today's corporate organisations are of the Feminine. The Feminine with a capital 'F' is my way of saying not women or females but the aspect of nature. That one which is part of the Masculine-Feminine duality which is present everywhere, in both man and woman. We, me and my friend, and a lot of others we talked to, agreed that there is a need to include the Feminine, value it, etc. We were convinced of its utility even. But the challenge was to describe the function and the contribution of the Feminine in the organisation, or even to fully describe of it works,the aspects of an organisation that falls under the Feminine nature. This definition should then help us to understand how it contributes to the organisations and how an organisation is doing on those aspects. As we continue to dialogue on it, I had an interesting metaphor to describe the way the dichotomies play which shows how difficult it is to describe the Feminine.

The metaphor is that of an object and its background.
From time immemorial we have admired, respected, valued  a finished work like a construction project - bridges, buildings, a product of literature - poetry or novels, fiction and non fiction,  theories on physics, psychology and all else. All of these come under the definition of success as we understand it. Or rather I should say production of such an entity is what we call success. Then we further had to measure it with wealth, fame and other associations that we make with success.
We naturally understand the struggle which goes behind the production of such an entity. The vision, planning, skill, knowledge, hardwork. This is what is the basis of calling it a success, of respecting it and of the sense of pride.
All is fair, so what is my point. My point is that these entities are always the fantastic object in the foreground. We never notice the background. In reality it is the background which inspires, nourishes, supports, gives a context based meaning to the foreground object. Imagine a beautiful picture of a black swan is meaningless in a black background. One of the most fascinating aspects of Monalisa is its variation of the background. The foreground is that of a woman with a slight smile, but what holds you to the painting without you becoming aware of it is the background of it. On one side near and on the other far. But for the conscious mind, we only see the foreground object of the woman with the smile.

Similarly in each of our supposed achievements, our successes, we rarely look at the background. There is a commons saying - Behind every successful man there is the hand of a woman. While we may recognise a woman as an inspiration, the credit of the success is still given to the man. Unless that unclear 'hand of a woman' is articulated more, it will remain a mystery and never credited.

In organisation setting, I see this as the culture, the values, the relationships, etc which form the context of the individuals to work in. When we assess an organisation we asses its IPs, its fixed assets, its clients, its orders, its inventories, etc. How do we value the more subtle context in which these exist? It is impossible to get the full meaning of the assets without its context. What do you think will happen to the company which asseses another company on its fixed assets, IPs, clients and orders, accordingly buys the company. But having not fully understood its context, culture, relationships, can this company integrate it into its own?

Without the right context, can creativity, ownership, commitment from employees exist?

Modern management science has put all this in the area of HR and OB and then put HR and OB into the back seat. How many people do you know who were HR VPs and gone ahead to become CEOs? This is depsite many companies declaring that our people are our assets (interestingly, the one person I know who went from being a VP HR to COO and then CEO is a woman -Anne Mulcahy of Xerox. See this link -http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/10_18/b4176133023904.htm).
The lack of psychology applied in organisation is indicated in this - A sound plan to deal with employee turnover is to have back-up for your key people! This is an HR practice with no application of Psychology to employees, only of Project management. What happened to creating a space where employees would like to work, building relationship with employees such that they have commitment to the company, to the project and may even help in finding, grooming replacements for themselves. Which is the strategy followed in your company?

For me personally this is how the Feminie in the context is difficult to see, value and quantify to grow. It is like the what we see in a Shiva temple. How often do you notice the Yoni around the erect Phallus?

Invoking the Connection

We are a part of the Universe and this fact is either known to us only as Knowledge or as an Idea but not really as an experience to us.

This aspect, which is out of our experiential realm, does create great damage in our everyday life; we are totally living unconnected with the environment causing a great damage to it and thus causing damage back to us.

Many people talk to make us understand the dangers of our way of life, though such talks and writings causes some kind of awareness, it seems we are not in reality aware of it in toto and what to do to save us. We may perhaps know certain responses like reducing the use of vehicles which cause danger to atmosphere through its emission of carbon monoxide, reduced use of electricity, restriction in the use of water and so on. And we expect that such initiatives should lead to continued availability of the natural resources leading to a conducive environment for human existence. But, year after year, the deteriorations are only increasing despite our so called efforts. We have, of course reasons to defend. We can say that all such efforts are really insufficient to alter the state and we need to do more and so on.

What we really need is to understand that we are all at the moment considering our existence as something separate, individualistic and in fact inimically isolated to the environment and to the Universe. We have not yet fully realized that we are parties to the Universe and we have to partner to the universal processes. This is the process we need to take on immediately. Such an initiative from our side will create a total change in our way of living and alter our current turmoil with the environment. We will inherently know what we have to do and how we have to live which alone is the solution to the current problem we are facing. Any initiatives other than this will always be short of achieving the desired goal. If we have to do that our current belief that we are individuals, separate beings will have to change and a new belief that we are part of the Universe has to come in; and our primary task is to partner with the Universe.

Is this too far away from reality? An approach to this answer is in checking our own experiences to see if we have experienced this. We have, sometimes, in our life experienced this one-ness with the Universe.

When we have felt a kind of sadness which cannot be explained properly when we see other human beings suffer in life, when we felt indescribable joy and energy when we are in the midst of nature, when we cuddle with our pets without inhibition, when we felt the soft touch of grass and flowers, and so. All such occasions have felt for more than ourselves, we have perceived more than what the 5 objective sensed have sensed, we have felt we are a part of a larger whole. It has mildly communicated to us our reality of interconnectedness. But we have moved away from such feelings and experiences by thinking bringing rational thinking.

We are also crippled by our inducted belief that we are not one with the Universe but are one above the Universe. Evolutionally, we set out to use the environment around us for our benefit to survive and then to thrive. However, in the industrial era the heroism of humanity was thought to be in manufacturing dream machines to artificially regulate every aspect of our life. The image of the hero was the enterprising man to mine, manufacture, build sky scrapers, machines, cities, etc. With rise of our expertise in this area we have now come to see ourselves as masters of our environment; our environment existing for us to use it, people included. A reflection of this attitude is in the disdain we have for rituals for nature like worship of the rain gods. Our belief in our own ability to predict rain, get water from dams and canals has reduced our reverence for the power of nature in the form of rains. Rains are no longer to be prayed for, they are now to be forecasted. It has also changed our relationship from being connected to it and partnering with it, to using it.

So, we have to resurrect our belief of oneness, see the systemic connection, feel interconnectedness, relate with responsibility and move to an attitude called holism.

We have such connection with the Universe in us. It is natural in us. But without realizing it, we cut the links and loose the interconnectedness at several locations.

Sita's incomplete Individuation Journey?

In Ramayana, Sita does not seem to have completed her individuation journey.

The most striking point for me is when Janaka tells Rama while giving away Sita that she will be a shadow to you, following through thick and thin, Sita herself also says this before they set out to the exile. From this ideal position of wanting to give everything, she comes to a point where she has no other go, read - her Ego is so assaulted that she wants to disappear into her origin, her mother, read - unconscious, again.

As I have been thinking about this myth for a couple of years now, one perspective that is emerging freshly to me is that, Rama has taken her as a partner to his Ego, the conscious Persona that has been groomed to be the Righteous King. This Persona is the one that marries Sita. His own journey with his Anima is still incomplete. In the life led by this Persona, he accepts difficulties, he accepts the 'weird' 'irrational' behaviours of the ununderstood Anima either in the form of Kaikeyi asking for his exile or Sita asking for the Magical Deer. His conscious and righteous response to this ununderstood, irrational demand of the Unconscious is how he stands and builds a Rama rajya. All his agonies, his love, his passion, his foolishness are all either undealt, kept personal or dealt with the help of Lakshmana. There are many a places where Lakshmana counsels him in his search for Sita.

Sita seems to have set out to give her full to Rama but unreceived in her entirety, she finally has to go into the greatest container of all, the Mother Earth herself. She hardly spends any time as the Queen.

To this day, mothers treat their daughters with a bit of extra pampering. They say, after all, she has to undergo difficulty at her in law's house.

Divinity

It is that state in which we were born. But such is the natural  
default state that we know it not. Till we turn our back on it going  
behind knowledge which promises the 'knowing' of it. And we chase  
behind this illusive knowledge. Now our divinity has to work behind a  
screen to make us see it and accept it after facing it. For the  
individual's conscious mind, divinity is now an unknown force  
operating behind a screen of ignorance. It inspired fear am draws  
attention. Lo! Behold it now appears as your shadow the devil as a  
serpent operating unknown to you. The one whose power you fear and who  
you blame from putting you out of Eden and towards knowledge

What does the water in us hold?

A thought from the weekend intensive program...

In the waterside reflection, a point that came up was that water has the capacity to contain things. Like the water in a kalasha holds the mantra or a sankalpa or an intent.


If more than 60% of the body is water, this water is capable of holding a lot. Our thoughts, our intentions, our words must all be stored even in this water.
Slowing down, letting go and bringing fresh ideas probably refreshes us throughout, down to this water in our bodies.
If a host of negative thoughts are held in us as a thought pattern in this water of the body, and it forms 60% or more of our bodies, the amount of influence it must have on us must be tremendous!

Holding the Intent.

When we partner with the Universe, We need to learn to hold our intent.

 

What is holding our intent?  

 

I am consultant and I go to meet our client.  Our client faces a problem

and wants a solution.  As a consultant we offer our best thought out 

solution.  Our client wants to look at the solution offered and/or wants

to have discussion with their people.  

 

When I came out, I hold the intent that the client system get a solution

ever lasting one.  It need not necessarily from me but from any where

and from any one.  The intent is for solution not from me.

 

For every idea is a form of energy and the energy wants to manifest.

we hold our intent for the energy and also the energy form in its 

best manifestation. 

 

More on this subject, next.

 

Halasyam
Hala