Happy Monday!
I hope you all had a restful, playful, creative, enjoyable weekend!
I hope you enjoyed the first part of Exploring Your Shadow-self.
It appears that in my discussion on shadow-self in Pt.1, I forgot to mention all four qualities I attributed to Enlightened people.
I learned of these four qualities during an interview I listened to with Ken Wilber, where he mentioned that Sri Aurobindo had investigated a wide variety of spiritual Masters and found these four qualities common among the ones he deemed as legitimate.
In my studies of consciousness and enlightenment, I came to a very similar synthesis.
In essence, I felt that what Sri Aurobindo had identified as the true qualities of a legitimate spiritual Master were equally indicators of how conscious they were; the more conscious we are, the more we draw from our True Potential and the less we draw from our proposed “self”.
Just so those of you who are interested can be aware of all four of the qualities I referred to as those of enlightened human beings, they are:
1. They can turn a negative into a positive.
2. They create equanimity and harmony wherever they go.
3. They create beyond the laws of (Newtonian) physics
4. They all draw their power/ability from Unconditional Love.
In my blog to day, I will share:
1. Enlightening Your Shadow-self Pt. 2 (2)
2. Show-N-Tell with Paul
Enlightening Your Shadow-self Pt. 2 (2)
To begin, it is important to realize that our personal and collective shadow-self isn’t all bad.
Within our shadow, we contain a treasure trove of positive attributes and qualities hiding in the dark right next to the unconscious sources of our limiting behaviors and the beliefs and viewpoints generate them.
With the understanding of how love expands in awareness as conscious rises (discussed in Pt.1 as my Love model), and what the symptoms of shadow-activation are, we are ready to move forward.
Today, I share 14 of the most common ways our shadow gets created, and triggered into action.
I begin this journey by explaining what I call “The Big 8 Archetypes” in my new CHEK 4-Quadrant Coaching Mastery program, and how they relate to shadow experiences (click on the resource links to learn about the upcoming UK and US workshops and on-line training).
I give a variety of examples to help bring clarity to the concepts, and offer a wide variety of possible solutions to illuminating your shadow.
I conclude with sharing some helpful resources to support your own enlightenment and healing, which are listed below.
I hope you enjoy this final segment of my offering today.
Resources:
1. CHEK 4-Quadrant Coach workshop: In the UK or in the US
2. PPS Lessons 1 and 2 – online
3. The Last 4 Doctors You’ll Ever Need! – multimedia ebook
4. 1234 for Overcoming Addiction, Obesity & Disease – Audio Workbook program
5. CHEK Holistic Lifestyle Coach Level 1 – Live training
Show-N-Tell with Paul
My lovely client, Marya and I spent three days together last week working on balancing her body-mind, and synthesizing her personal myth.
Marya is a Princess-Warrior, who gives her love to the world by helping to protect natural resources from large corporations, as well as creating shelters for crack babies, and under-privileged children around the world.
I love working with Marya. She has a heart of gold and gives a lot of herself to help many others. She, like myself is engaged in an on going, learning relationship with the Caregiver Archetype.
The Caregiver Archetype (CA) is a very challenging archetype; it is often considered a spiritual path to enlightenment for souls ready to grow their consciousness by engaging in the healing process with others experiencing deep challenges in their lives.
As we evolve, we must transcend and include our previous stages of conscious evolution.
This process always begins with “I” consciousness; this means being conscious of respecting and meeting your individual needs.
If one is seized by the Caregiver Archetype (WE and ALL levels of collective consciousness) before they have adequate mastery of themselves, a painful tug-of-war begins.
The heart of the caregiver feels compelled to reach out, often with frequent acts of Agape Love (nurture) and Eros Love as compassion.
The danger that emerges is that the caregiver may unconsciously begin to identify himself or herself by what they can do for others.
They are often people with enough emotional depth to allow themselves to truly feel others in need, creating the capacity for strong emotional resonance.
Because the caregivers are so often helping those who are stressed, and emotionally unsettled or even volatile, if they haven’t spent enough time nurturing themselves, their sense of self-integrity becomes porous.
It is through these pours that the energy of their ego leaks out to others, and the stress within others leaks into them.
If caregivers are successful in their work while maintaining this imbalance of “I as WE”, they often find themselves being promoted to positions of greater responsibility for yet more challenged people.
Reaching out to the world with their empathetic/feeling-self, they can begin to feel all the fear and pain in cities, states, nations, cultures, and even the world.
As caregivers become progressively engulfed in their empathetic experience of WE and ALL, it is as though the left (feminine) side of their being becomes so significantly heavier and overly energized that the right side of themselves is no longer strong enough to maintain balance on the tightrope of Love.
Adrenal exhaustion often becomes chronic fatigue; an occasional cold becomes a frequent issue; regular or occasional exercise becomes “I don’t have time to exercise”, and sadly, “I don’t have time to exercise” is also tied to “I don’t have time to eat well, sleep well, or be with myself.”
This opens them to experiencing a crisis of their own.
The crisis begins when they begin to have feelings of resent toward themselves for not caring for themselves, and/or toward those they are caring for; they are there fulfilling their need to rescue, or create a sense of meaning in their lives, but they are not wholly there in energy or presence.
If such a person isn’t careful, their soul will allow any means of bringing them back into awareness of loving themselves as a means of being authentic as a teacher of deep healing.
The soul, in my experience, brings illnesses, diseases, and limitations in the exact way needed to “illuminate individual consciousness.”
This helps the imbalanced caregiver to become more aware of the necessity of being loving, empathetic, compassionate, and creative with, and for themselves.
This is a form of shamanic initiation, opening the door through the path of the wounded healer – the path of authenticity.
Because I’ve been expressing the Caregiver Archetype for 32 years of my life, and have walked the painful path of my own Self-Realization in the process, it gives me joy knowing I can help Marya and others find the delicate balance on the tightrope.
We began our three-day session together by co-creating a mandala to symbolize her intentions for herself, and our intentions for each other; anytime a therapist works with another, there is mutual learning and healing occurring.
This is the mandala we created together. Surrounding it are Marya’s healing intentions and practices to live each day. She is a very powerful woman capable of helping countless people and I’m glad we were brought together to learn together.
In Native American healing traditions, the rattle is considered to be a means of purification. I have always had a deep harmony with rattles, and have helped myself and many others heal with specific rattling therapy applications.
The rattles I’m using were given to me by two of my amazing students, Bo and Caroline (Pine Groove Athletic Club) in Michigan; thank you both for the beautiful rattles…they love to help people!
I offered Marya a rattle balancing session coupled with chakra and energy systems balancing; I use stone healing wands configured specifically to conduct light energy in the frequency range of various chakras, organs, glands and biological systems.
She had recently returned from working with children in Africa, and the trip took a lot out of her, not to mention the food challenges she encountered there.
Marya and I have been working on assessing, and redefining her personal myth (life story).
She has recently made transitions in her life to become the person she is. When we go through transformative stages, it is important to identify what in our story is, and isn’t working for us any longer.
We forget that we are both creative beings, and great storytellers that LOVE to tell others and ourselves stories.
As we come to understand the nature of our mind (and psyche) through the progressive integration of the thinking, feeling, sensing and intuitive functions of our consciousness, we naturally have an “Ah Ha!” moment, in which we realize “we are the author of our story, and therefore, can also direct our story.”
The next step is understanding what the key elements of our story (myth) are, and who the actors (archetypes) and cast and crew are, and what we want/need on stage to enact our story fully.
This training is an essential element of my new CHEK 4-Quadrant Coaching Mastery Program.
This program will be available on-line in the near future, but I am conducting two live workshops this year; those attending the workshop get the on-line course free as part of their tuition!
If you would like to register for this powerful workshop and learn more about healing yourself and coaching others, I will be offering it in the following locations:
Carlsbad, CA.: September 15-18
Marya and I had a great time working together, growing together, and healing each other as we always do.
THANK YOU! Marya, for all the love you give yourself, and the world!
I love your new myth!! The beautiful Princess with an enlightened Warrior protecting Mother Nature and the people that need help.
My Son Mana Is My Joy!
Mana is ten weeks old today, and he’s growing like a weed! He’s doubled his weight, grown over five inches, and is becoming more and more interactive each day.
He loves his baths with Mommy Angie and Momma Penny too!
He must have great karma because he lives the life of a rock star, and we love sharing that with him.
Life brings plenty of pain without it having to be induced by parents. We all feel blessed that this expression of The Divine chose us as his guides, and we love him with our whole hearts every day.
He’s begun cooing and talking a lot. He loves carrying on long conversations with Momma Penny in the morning.
Angie describes it as “Mana telling Penny stories”, and he really gets animated when he talks too; maybe the time Angie spent in Italy when she was about 4 months pregnant influenced him.
He LOVES to dance too! He really likes music with a distinct beat and dance rhythms. Angie holds him and puts rattles in his hands and they dance to the music.
He really loves doing this and we love watching him express his joy. He is a vibrant, strong, organic baby.
Healing Art
My long-time client and soul-Brother Jason shared a couple art pieces he recently created to encapsulate some of the work we’ve been doing together with his power animals and body-mind integration.
I love Jason’s art; his brother, Jared creates amazing art too!
Thanks for sharing with us Jason, I know many of us get a healing just connecting to your own healing vibrations through you art.
My amazing, spiritually brave client Danne from Sweden is going through chemo therapy at the moment.
He is working with his Spirit to spiritualize the medicine to help his immune system expel any expression of “not-self” and restore harmony in his inner-community.
Danne is an amazing artist, and he makes it all easy for us to imagine what it feels like to be in chemo therapy in his mandala (above), yet we can also see his soul-Bird reaching down from above to pull him back up into his vitality.
Amazing art Danne!
Blessings of Well-being from all of us here, and the many people reading this that are capable of sending love your way (just focus your love on the mandala and it will be with Danne!).
After painting my yearly mandala, which took me over three months to finish, I needed to do something free-form. I wanted to “play” and not be concerned with details. I am in the process of painting this one, which represents the recent shift in my working archetypes.
I’m now a father again, so the Father Archetype has risen to the position of dominance (north position of cross), while the mystic occupies the south position; the west position represents my Teacher Archetype, and the east position represents my Hermit Archetype.
I’m looking forward to getting home from my teaching trip to the UK so I can enjoy finishing this one!
Thank you for joining me and sharing my blog with me today.
I hope you feel creatively inspired, and that you recognize the importance of loving and caring for yourself as a means of authentically offering the energies of wholeness and wisdom to others and the world!
Love and chi,
Paul Chek
