I believe the cornerstone of spirituality and a life lived in peace and harmony is that you must do shadow work. Most of what I’ve read and seen people talk about is that you must get rid of your shadows. You must banish pain, shame, doubt, and all forms of negativity to embrace the positive side of life. You can do that, but if you do, you go through life living a half lie. That’s worse than a whole lie. You don’t need to get rid of the shadow parts of yourself; you need to embrace them and love them as fully as possible. If you try and happen to succeed in banishing sadness, you’ll never know what it’s like to be happy. You need both to live a full life. That goes for everything. If you banish the thoughts of death, you can never fully appreciate life. They are one and the same. If we rid the world of death, then life as we know it wouldn’t exist. We’d be half-assed zombies living the rest of our lives without ever truly living a day at all. Darkness isn’t bad or the enemy. On the contrary, darkness is the original creation of life. Everything we know was born from original darkness. It is the original womb of creation in which all was birthed. They say that light dispels dark, but in reality, darkness gives way for light to shine its brightest. Just as the night falls and gives way for the day to awaken and let the sun shine on all—singers and saints alike. It’s the ultimate form of unconditional love. Also, as the night fades beyond the horizon, the sun rises to spread love and light to all it touches, but there comes a point in time, both in the morning and evening, when the night and day are equally present and become one for a moment in time. They are opposite sides of the same coin. You can’t have one without the other. The same thing goes for everything else! Without sadness, we’d never know what happiness is. Happiness is interdependent with sadness. Without knowing the depths of sadness, we’ll never know the heights of happiness we can climb. Without pain, we wouldn’t know what pleasure is! They are all teachers guiding us throughout this journey of life we’re on. It would become monotonous. They all need each other to become the best version of life as we know it.

We must adopt a loving attitude toward our shadows. We need to talk to them and try to understand them. They are a part of us, and the louder and more negative they seem is a desperate cry for love, forgiveness, and acceptance. We created them early in life not to thrive but to surrender to reality. Non-duality is projected as negative. Give up the negative to possess the positive. Yet who coined it as negative? It’s just a natural part of life. Some ignorant fool that looks for the part of life we’ll never truly understand. So instead of fighting with ourselves, we must take in and love our flaws and all. For our flaws are the pillars on which our strength stands tall. If we look back on our life and the struggles we had to endure, which we felt were going to kill us, we’ll see that we made it through them all and we are still here standing tall. We are stronger and more courageous than we give credit for and will ever realize. We are miracles in disguise waiting to remember who we are. We have the building blocks of life and the breath of God running through our veins. Our anxieties and depression, among others, were created when we were young to help us cope with the way we perceived life and were coping mechanisms to help us survive when everyone else turned a blind eye. As we got older, we forgot what they truly were, and they escalated more and more often, getting louder each time. We convinced ourselves that they were bad and here to hurt us, but the truth is that they were left alone, unloved, unseen, and misunderstood, so we tried everything we could think of to destroy them and feel “normal” again! They only showed up more often, getting louder each time, only to try to get our attention and remind us they were created by us as friends and companions so we wouldn’t feel alone and scared. Then we did to them what we think they’re doing to us, but they are only a cry for help so we can shine our ever-loving light on them and just talk to them. They are a part of us we try to get rid of, and that only makes us feel worse. Imagine they are a lost and scared little child that is lost and deeply scared and hurting. If we came across them, we wouldn’t treat them as bad; we would speak to them from our hearts and souls, comforting them and letting them know we won’t abandon them and leave them to spend their days in misery. We would talk to them in a loving manner and stay with them until they found their family and realized they are, for we are angels in human form!!

-ŤerryŠalmon!!!!