Shadow Talk: 3 Knights and a Baby

This morning’s Shadow Work found me reading my Tarot cards. I was exploring an issue and I got three of the four Knights reversed! That’s a very strong message because Knights are about extreme expressions of energy and personality. When the cards are right side up, they represent an outward expression or pursuit. When they are upside down, they represent an extreme inward pursuit.  I got the reversed Knight of Coins– which can represent someone who’s preoccupied with the material world; the reversed Knight of Cups which represents emotional dishonesty and the need to come out of the closet; and then the reversed Knight of Wands which represents someone who is reckless and out of control, causing emotional devastation.  By the way, this evening, before going to bed, I pulled the reversed Knight of Swords which means being seduced by illusion, being destructive and someone untrustworthy.

Now, y’all know that I can go to some extreme inward pursuits! Hahahaha! I Am the Shadow Master! However, this was some serious Spiritual awakening and obviously, they were wanting my attention.  These extreme cards were speaking the language of my deepest darkest fear, and my job was to ride the wave of their message and to keep my eyes open all the while.  Shadow Work is not easy, but it is essential if you want deep healing and clarity.  I do the work beyond the call of duty because it is my vocation.  The more I learn about myself, the easier it is to facilitate for other people.  I recognize spiritual bypassing and other shortcuts that don’t allow people to have the breakthroughs they desire.

So at the third Knight, which was the Knight of Wands, I was overcome by the vision of me sitting at the dining room table of one of the houses where I lived when I was five years old.  I had refused to eat the peas that were served for dinner. I hated peas, and there was a time (before I began censoring myself, betraying myself, and denying myself) that I would not do what I was told to do. I was defiant and focused and I knew what I knew.  I didn’t have a trace of doubt in me.  When something felt wrong to me, then I said it clearly.  I don’t know exactly what was in my mind, but I knew that not another (now cold) pea was going to enter my mouth. I sat there wearing a little outfit of sky blue. It was dark and just a sole dim light shone over the table where I was sitting. The rest of the house was dark and quiet.

In my mind’s eye, I saw this vision of me and I watched as my mother snuck up quietly behind me wearing a witches black hat, a wig and a big scary nose. I remembered that night… How my mother snuck up behind me and scared the life out of me.

As I sat watching this scene unfold, I did what my training as a coach and healer prescribes, which is to enter the child’s body and to experience everything from her perspective fully– feeling every emotion.  This is an important act of validation for the child within me. When I take on her feelings, I am telling my whole system that it is okay to have these feelings and that it is nothing from which I should escape.

So I took my Inner Child’s perspective and felt the anger, shock, terror, shame and utter despair that overtook her as the butt of my mother’s cruel and insensitive prank. It was real terror and my mom tried to kiss it away but I hated her in that moment. It wasn’t funny. I was vulnerable, innocent and alone. I was an only child and I slept alone and braved the boogey man on my own.  When I was emotionally wounded, I had to recover alone because my mother wasn’t going to be there while I picked up my own pieces because she was too busy dismissing my tears and downplaying her own fucked up behavior and minimizing my response of terror.  In the Completion Process, it’s this type of parental posturing that we are overcoming when we go in for redemption.  As children, we feel strong emotion, and the parent says (usually well-intentioned) “Be a big girl.  It wasn’t so bad.”

The next step in healing is to validate the Inner child’s perspective while she tells you it in her own way. So you bring in your adult self and you comfort your little one.  During this process, we never invalidate, minimize or downplay. We never make excuses or justify what was done. We never impose the adult perspective on the child. For example, I would never say to my Inner Child, “She didn’t mean any harm,” or “She was doing the best she could.”  By stating those things, we put the responsibility back on the child, but the child needs to be unburdened!  She’s a child and is not able to take responsibility for her mother.  She has already learned to take responsibility for herself by suppressing her feelings so that she is not a burden and kicked out of the tribe!  So I let my girl talk and she told me how mad she was and lots of other things that bugged her.  She talked a lot but more than words, I felt her anger and dismay as heat radiating from her body.  When I had finished validating her, it was then time to heal the scene by letting the child chose a more appealing outcome.  This step lets the child feel empowered and able to make choices for themselves.  It is really important to let the child do whatever they want during this step because this is where they get to exercise their authority and command the space where they have autonomy:  their memory.

My little one wanted to throw stuff around the room because she wanted to express her rage.  I totally let her do that.  She said that she also wanted to hit Mama with the plate and do an earth shattering scream. After I allowed her to play out her anger, she was calm.

I had a strong intuition to do something out of the norm.  I asked my little one if she wouldn’t mind me changing things around a little bit and she was eager to see what I was going to do.

I decided to replay the scene, but this time, that rather than let my Inner Child become the victim of my mother, I would pause the scene and change the dynamic. My Intuition said that I needed to show my Inner Child something important about her own perspective. So we replayed the scene and then we paused it, this time I told my little girl self that Mom was sneaking up to scare us. I told her to simply drop the plate of peas on the floor when Mom jumped at us. My little one was a little perplexed because she thought Mom was going to get mad. I thought so, too, but I was prepared for a fight.

So my little one, on cue, right after Mom leapt in for the scare, dropped the plate of peas to the floor and just looked straight at me who was sitting across from her on the other side of the table. To our surprise, Mom was utterly stupefied. Mom saw her daughter unperturbed by her mean prank and gained new respect for her. My mom simply and quietly picked up the plate and peas and took it all away to the kitchen. She did not feel mad… She felt proud. It was weird… it’s not that she was proud that her daughter wasn’t afraid of witches, but rather she was proud that her little five year old daughter wasn’t afraid of HER. And that was powerful.

I then called back the aspects of my little one who had fractured off during the trauma.  There were quite a few little girls who had splintered off. This memory was the starting point for all the negative qualities that the reversed Knights directed.  There was also a fractured self that identified with my mom and it was then that I began being careless and dismissive about my own feelings.  I began downplaying my feelings and finding myself to be overly sensitive.  I brought all of those little girls home to be one whole girl.  This bringing home the fractures neutralizes the heat of the fractures and is super important and healing.

That was a very good Shadow session that lead to a Completion Process.  Fantastic!  But there is a very interesting twist… In that dining room… Resting silently in the corner… Was a statue that used to scare me when I was a kid. Take a guess at what it was!

Well, before I tell you, I first want to say that I had totally forgotten about that statue and I didn’t even see it in the memory until after my little one and I had healed! We were turning around and examining the scene, getting ready to deactivate the memory when all of a sudden a bit of our fractured self emerged from the corner. We turned our attention to the fracture and saw that she was emerging from behind this statue.

Have you guessed what it was?

It was the statue of a knight! A knight made of plaster, painted white with dark black shadows behind the helmet.  He was mysterious and weird and he was a part of my psyche. I never liked that knight and here he was showing up in this Shadow session…And of course making an appearance BIG TIME in the reading that lead me to this intricate and powerful memory.

If you’re wondering why I’m doing so much Shadow Work, it’s because I am following the natural cycles of the universe. 2016 is a 9 year and this represents the end of a cycle. I am heeding my internal navigation system and letting go of what no longer serves me. Going to extremes no longer serves me.  My Inner Children want freedom and I am giving it to them. I am giving it to myself. Free at last, free at last. Thank God Almighty, I am free at last. There’s more to this last statement because of another huge epiphany that I just had before writing this post. It is huge and life-altering… And awesome. I am going to sit with it in silence and maybe write about it tomorrow. I will see.

You can book yourself in for Completion Process with me directly.  If you want Spiritual Empowerment Coaching or want to learn more about Shadow Work, then book yourself in for Discovery Session with me and we can discuss the best way to move forward.