Relationships, Soul Growth, and Shadow Work
There’s one thing I am sure of: we have not come to this earth to just get by. We came here to flourish and blossom as a soul and relationships can help us do so if we dare to let them.
Love at our deep core, love nourishes and sustains our being. That is why babies need to be loved in order to keep alive. The hunger for love is so strong that as children we tend to conform to what is expected of us so we can get our love dose. We so badly need love that we seek it in the conditional love of people around us, who usually fail to see our unique soul.
When we grow up and form love relationships with a significant other, we know deep inside that this might be an opportunity for our soul to be seen and fully recognized.
But then all our shadows come out too…
“When love is present everything that is unloved is coming forth to meet it and be healed,” said my teachers. For this reason, all our shadows can come up to the surface, especially when strong love is present in a relationship.
A term coined by psychoanalyst Carl Jung, a ‘shadow’ is any aspect of ourselves that we do not like to identify with. Because we find them distasteful, unwelcome, or foreign, they get pushed into the shadows. Those rejected aspects of us actually yearn to be met with love and acceptance, but at the same time they can hardly trust love, so when they meet love they immediately test it.
Many people can love us when we shine — when we are smiling, feeling empowered, and certain. It’s easy to love a person when they’re shining.... But will our beloved love us through our shadows too? Will our beloved give their love for our weaker, more vulnerable, darker parts? Will they see us deep —deeper than the shadows—into the purity of our soul?
When our partners see deep into our soul they don’t buy into our victim stories nor do they believe our shadow demonstrations. When their loving gaze is fierce enough to pierce through the drama we feel really seen and this love can heal.
What I mean to say is that we can see our beloved ones deeper than their shadows. The shadows are the other side (Sitra-Achara in Kabbalistic language) of the personality. None of them is the soul. On the soul level, there is no division between light and shadow yet. There is a spectrum of light to dark on the soul level too, but Dark and Shadow are not the same things (as Bruce Lyon explained in one of his books and I did in lectures and other articles).
When we pierce with our gaze of love through the layers of personality and shadow we see the sacred soul of our beloved as it is prior to their incarnation, we feel the call that exists in this soul to manifest into matter - and as I said above: this soul did not come here to be a good taxpayer not to conform to social norms. It came to blossom in its super unique way.
Unfortunately, many relationships fail at this point by not being able to see the soul of the other when old patterns are activated. Many of us feel that if we see the shadows of the other we see into the depth. Many forget that there are levels deeper than the shadows, a divine soul whose light is sometimes actually shining through the cracks in the personality more than through the places where we feel whole.
When our love relationships become just another place where we must conform, compromise and perform in order to be accepted our soul is deeply insulted. At this point, many people give up, shelter themselves, and protect their hearts. Many people’s souls are lonely within a relationship.
What makes relationships Sacred is when we allow each other to authentically bare our souls and live soulfully together, day by day. In Sacred Relating we do not ask our beloveds to conform and “be normal” because the soul is not “normal” at all — it is utterly unique, and we are here to let it SHINE!
Ohad Pele / February, 2020
