by Brett Kreiman
I think the biggest part of being human and making peace with our shadow and ego comes out of our need to feel that we are loved. Loved by others, and by ourselves. The search for love leads us down many winding paths. We are plopped down here with no clear destination and with no real idea of how we are supposed to get there even if we had somewhere we knew we wanted to go. The only real instinct we are given is that we seek out love. We don’t know how to do that or what that really entails at first, so we inevitably head down many wrong paths and make many mistakes before we even begin to figure out how to get a clue! If we are lucky we are surrounded by a loving family and group of people who help us make a little headway in the act of how to search…unfortunately for almost all of us, that is not the case! We get love from our family if we are fortunate enough to be born into a loving one, but more often than not, they mean well but they themselves usually came out of the same confusion we were born into. So we are forced to look outside of them to others, and even if our family is very loving, out of curiosity we look to others to see what they are doing and would recommend anyway…and we of course run into trouble…big trouble! It’s just the state of the world we live in to be born into this chaos and confusion and try to make sense of it all. Hell, that’s why we are here! We usually start off doing okay for ourselves for the most part, up until we hit puberty and then BAM! the world flips over on top of us and we have to wiggle our way out from underneath it.
With our instinct for seeking out love, we head out into the world high on hormones and the thrill of new experiences and we hope to find our way towards love the best we can. Once again, unfortunately that almost always requires us to go through a lot of detours and make a lot of wrong turns before we ever find our way, if we ever are lucky enough to even do so. Along those wrong turns and detours we meet a lot of interesting people trying to find their way as well, some of them are very helpful to us, and others well…let’s just say they teach us a lot about the importance of good moral character!
We often end up making lots and lots and lots of mistakes and picking up lots and lots and lots of bad habits. Unfortunately we usually carry these around with us into and throughout most of our adult lives. That’s just how it goes.
As we begin to awaken to the deeper meaning of our lives we discover a lot of inner pain and sadness. One day, we often turn around and discover that we have been being followed along the way by a very big, dark, and formidable shadow! For almost all of us, this shadow is composed of a lot of pain, anger, and sadness that we picked up on our detours to love that what we usually casually refer to as the dating/mating game.
This is the aspect of our ego and shadow that we call the Sexual Shadow. It’s not really different to or separate from the ego/shadow, but the darkness that comes from the dating/mating game tends to connect and seek out the other aspects of our shadow that it is most similar to and then clusters together. It’s sorta like naming the part of our human body that carries us around as “the legs,” they aren’t separate from the body but they do have certain properties that make them similar to each other and “different from” the rest of our body, even though they are very similar in how they work and function to other parts of our body (especially our arms in this example). If you got rid of your legs it would change your life in a drastic way, and you would become aware of their function and role they played in your life very quickly! If one day you woke up and found that you lost your legs, it would help you understand how the legs played a major function in how you lived your life as well give you new perspective to the usefulness that the role the rest of your body parts play in the overall functioning of how you choose to live your life. The same thing applies to the Sexual Shadow we have following us, except to lose this aspect of our shadow we would be benefiting ourselves a great deal more than we would if we lost the human body counterpart of the shadow which of course is our legs. To cut the legs off the overall Shadow/Ego that follows us would be a tremendous benefit in aiding our quest to “ditch” the entire Shadow once and for all!
I for one know how hard it is to get rid of the Sexual Shadow, as it was probably the biggest aspect at the root of my shadow and ego and all the problems it presented for me. The “legs” of my Shadow were like bodybuilder legs or professional bicyclist legs! My Shadow seemed to be gaining almost all its height from the length of its legs (Sexual Shadow of course!)…Thankfully once I got the legs out of the picture, I found it had a very wimpy and tiny upper body to it! But since it’s foundation was so strong and tall, the torso on upwards never needed to have to worry much about being big because it was out of reach from being touched or even to be seen from my perspective to have to worry about being removed! So to heal my inner pain, anger, and sadness that was in my shadow I have had to go very deep inside the Sexual Shadow part to heal that pain and prevent those issues from keep on continuing to surface and cause me more pain (and fuel for that fire/Ego).
I found with my own battles with my Sexual Shadow that the solution to the Sexual Shadow is the solution to all other aspects of the shadow as well. I haven’t lost the limbs of all the other body parts of my shadow completely just yet (definitely still working on that head!) but I found that getting rid of the Sexual Shadow (the legs) taught me a lot about the other aspects that were remaining in my shadow. But it helps to understand the context of where the sexual shadow comes out of to really start to heal the pain that is found within it.
The answer to our healing can ultimately involve intimate love and a proper relationship with another human being (a soul mate, if you will), and once you heal the sexual shadow, that part will just fall naturally into place if you want it to…of course at that point it won’t matter if it does or doesn’t. I have had so much difficulty with the questions of where sex and love and relationships fit into our lives that for most of my life (the last 15 years anyway, I am 27 now) it was the biggest issue holding me back. Only in the last year or two have I really begun to fully understand it all and to really get at the root of the problem.Thankfully, I think I finally got it all (or very close to it all) removed. Of course you can always keep going deeper and deeper in your understanding on this as well as anything else. But let me try to sort it all out to the best of my ability right here for you to help you on your own quest of healing and removal.
First off, I think it’s important to realize that we are our own soul mate. That the real love and acceptance we want and seek is from ourselves first and foremost. We all have been brainwashed to seek approval from others from a very young age. Disney movies and kids stories all have us convinced that finding our true love and soul mate is the ultimate goal. I think Aladdin is a good example and proof of that. Let’s look at it for a moment… Aladdin’s story is that he can have anything he wants in the world because he finds a magic lamp which will grant his wishes, everything except making someone fall in love with him. So what does Aladdin ultimately want more than anything? The one thing he can’t get…to fall in love… and on secondary level of importance, it happens to be with a beautiful PRINCESS of all people. He can have anything and he wants EVERYTHING: he wants money, power, possessions, but even magic can’t give him everything as he still needs the love from someone else who happens to be a woman who also has everything else you could possible want. That is the general mindset we are taught to seek – ego trip to the maximum. But basically the moral of the story is even if you can have everything in the world (money, fame, power), if you don’t have someone else who loves you then you still are missing out on what will make you truly happy….the love of someone else and them thinking you are the best thing in the world. So that asking a lot. That’s just the one example of our brainwashing that we are taught at an early age, but almost all stories and fairy tales involve the same theme of winning the heart of a beautiful princess or woman (who almost always is rich). But the desire to need someone else’s approval of ourselves is what is pushed upon us at the core of the stories that most of us were read or saw as a child. This same theme is then continually pushed upon us in different forms and ways as adults, but the point is still the same…you need someone else’s love and approval to be truly happy.
Now, of course there is nothing wrong with someone else loving you, especially when it’s unconditionally, but the problem is we are taught to feel we need it. That even if you can be happy without it, you won’t be AS happy as you would be if you did have it. So we are set up to seek out others approval as a major part of the end goal to leading us towards being truly happy. Basically it is the key component to the end goal, as money and power are just bait to help us make someone fall in love with us. But how are we supposed to find someone to love us when we are taught that we aren’t good enough to be truly happy without someone else’s love?
It’s an uphill battle from the start. Like I said, I struggled big time with this for basically all of my teenage years and up to my mid-twenties. I personally fell for that lie, and made it become a truth in my life. No matter what I was doing, or how good things were going for me, if I didn’t have that approval from someone else saying that I am worthy of being loved then I didn’t feel that love inside myself. Because of this I continually pushed love and relationships away. I would sabotage any relationship or friendship that could have been good and loving for me and I almost always pushed away second dates from yearning and needing their acceptance, or else I would convince myself I didn’t want a second date from fear that they wouldn’t want a second date (as a defense mechanism).
I found myself constantly trying to reassure myself because the logic that follows from believing you need someone else to love you to be truly happy means that if someone doesn’t or isn’t loving you then you must not be worth them falling in love with you because you lack what it takes to make them feel loved. Why else would someone not want to fall in love with you? If you were capable of making them feel happier than they could feel without having you and with you being able to provide that stimulation for the love and happiness to be in their lives more than they could ever have without you, why would anyone want to reject someone who could be holding the key to making their own life better? I didn’t get it. Every rejection was crushing. From this I learned that every time someone rejects your love, it’s serves to become an affirmation of weakness inside you saying you don’t have enough love already inside of you to provide love for them, because obviously, they must need love from someone else too (cause everyone “needs” to be loved by someone else to be truly happy, right?). Why else would they reject you? So you take that to mean being rejected therefore also means you must also not have enough love for loving yourself if you don’t even have enough love to give it away to someone else and to convince them to give you their love that you need from them in return. We are all taught we must be able to provide love to our significant other first and foremost before we can have love for ourselves, because without their love and acceptance we will never be as happy as we would be with it. So that makes us feel worse about ourselves and makes us feel we need someone else’s approval and love all the more.
So this conundrum causes us to go into a self-defeating cycle with our perceived amounts of love (/energy) that we have inside ourselves. Every rejection just re-affirms this belief. This is why many of us had/have issues with rejection and taking it so hard and personally. This is the root of those feelings.
Of course, when we think of a loving lifelong relationship,we are also taught and brainwashed to think that includes having children as well, which means sex is obviously involved in the equation of love, which is itself just a part of the equation of being completely happy. So the idea of falling in love, then we have children, means we must have sex to make those babies. So someone wanting to have sex with us is logically part of the equation of someone who is truly loved by someone. We are taught to believe we need to be desired sexually as well in life to be truly happy. Is it any surprise that we seek out the physical act of sex with someone, anyone, even if it’s just for a drunken few minutes behind a dumpster in an alley when we are not being given love from another person during the times when we are not in a relationship? It’s not as good as having someone loving us, but if they are willing to have sex with us, then maybe they would also be willing to find us worth loving as well, since sex and love are connected. If they accept us enough to fuck us then that’s half of the equation right there. Or so we think. Of course, it doesn’t really bring us any closer to being or feeling truly happy (which comes from being loved) but the backwards logic of it makes us feel like it’s at least bringing us a little closer to having the possibility of love being a reality in our lives…that someone finds us desirable and worthy of at least partially being lovable (since sex is a part of love in our mind) it therefore serves as proof to mean we are at least halfway capable of being worthy of giving and receiving love. So if sex from one person is a little bit of proof, then sex from a hundred people is a lot of proof! Our mind thinks if we can convince someone to submit to us sexually that we just met and we don’t even know, or get multiple partners at once, or get a hot sexy much younger partner then we must be pretty close to being lovable, right?? If enough people say we are worth at least part of what happens when you are in love, then maybe someone will actually find us worthy of the whole thing and actually love us completely and unconditionally. And on top of that the physical addiction of the drug of the chemical release of orgasm which makes us feel high and away from all our problems for a few seconds and it’s becomes no surprise that we all become big horn balls who want others to constantly validate us and make us feel good/happy (which is what we are ultimately seeking to do by being loved anyway).
Basically, sex and love, we are taught to connect as being part of the same one aspect. Seeking out sex and others to submit to our will and fuck us is basically the same as them giving us love, or at least part of the ingredients that compose love. The more we are rejected the worse we feel about our own perceived level of love inside of us to give to others and to ourselves, the more we feel the need and desire for someone else to accept us and love us, and the more we seek out substitutes and the various combinations of the partial ingredients that compose love to make us feel better about ourselves…which provides us with more energy/love/confidence to offer our love to someone else, which makes them in turn theoretically more likely to find us worthy of their love because we can give them what they are seeking, which is the same thing we are seeking.
Seeing how the cycle works (or rather, doesn’t work) helps us to understand the flaws in the logic. The reality is we can not and will not ever really find the acceptance and love of someone else without being able to offer them what they need, which of course is love from us (or so we think), but when we don’t even have enough love for ourselves, how is that even possible to give them the love they need? The obvious easy solution is to just fake it. Fake having the love for someone else and for ourselves. So people willingly and desperately get into relationship with the wrong people or get married (since this is what we are taught that people in love do), and marriage (like sex) becomes another ingredient in the equation of being in love and therefore being able to be truly happy. So if you can’t handle the energy level of seeking out sex all the time and dealing with possible continual rejection that comes with the search, you just settle for someone else who is settling for someone too and then you two get married. It’s a very easy out and a very easy trap to fall into. It seems very logical, and because we never really understood the cycle to begin with we think that maybe the love comes later down the line…and occasionally it does, but it’s doesn’t come because you got married and/or now are having sex at your ready disposal. Those are just aspects that often come from having a person who loves you and accepts you, they aren’t what creates the love to begin with. It’s just because you come to accept this reality when you get married as being as good as you are going to get, and being contractually stuck together, sometimes this assures us enough to allow us to let our guards down enough to stop seeking a continue outside source of energy (the love) and we just allow the love we already have inside us to come out, and assuming if our partners do the same, then both people find the love they always had inside themselves anyway! They in turn, see it in the other and then both people proceed to actually share it back and forth. Then of course we hear their success story and think that is how it works. So when we get married out of lack of energy to keep from having to be single and keep playing the dating/mating game of possible rejection, we think “it just wasn’t meant to be” if the love doesn’t come. Or else we think that we just must have something wrong with us that prevented our specific marriage from being one of the “lucky ones.”
In reality, the love and healing we seek is inside ourselves. It’s obvious really. The acceptance you want is one of self-acceptance. To feel and know that your life is great and that you are loved and worthy of feeling love and being happy! But believing we need someone else to accept us first, we don’t allow ourselves that “privilege” of being truly happy with ourselves and our lives until someone else loves us first. But basically that rarely ever happens and most of us end up having to settle with a constant level of insecurity and always feeling (usually which just gets denied or suppressed into secrecy) that our lives could have been better if only we just had sex with more partners before settling down, that then we would have more love to give and therefore receive back, or that our spouse/partner just doesn’t have enough love inside of them from some inherent flaw in them to truly give us all the love we need and deserve. What usually happens is that just leads to resentment and regret, which is itself usually forced into suppression and then comes out in various forms of emotional turmoil in our relationship/marriage which leads to confusion and more pain over why we aren’t happier now that we have “love”… something must be wrong with us, we must just be inherently flawed etc. Cycle continues! When we feel that way we look at what others are doing to see if we are doing it right…we then of course see other people who are almost always faking the act of being happy and in love, and then we feel worse about ourselves thinking it’s just us, that we are alone in our situation and our feelings. We don’t want the extra feeling of unhappiness that comes by accepting it could be our own fault, because we feel that even if we do accept that, we still don’t know what the solution is so why bother!? Often we just end up thinking we are just too broken to be fixed. It’s all a vicious cycle with no way out. But there is a way out…but you have to move in that direction before you will see the exit sign. The exit sign of course reads “LOVE THYSELF!”
We have to accept ourselves as being complete. We have to accept ourselves as having everything we need and could ever need, RIGHT NOW. We are already perfect and complete. We are already, at this very moment, capable of being perfectly content and happy. We are already filled with love! We are loved. We ARE love.
We have to have everything that we need already inside of us in order for the idea of loving someone else to ever really work. We want to have someone truly accept us for who we are and love us for being who we are, but if we don’t love us and accept us FIRST why should anyone else ever accept us and love us? It doesn’t make any sense. It’s asking someone to do something for you, that you, yourself wouldn’t do. You are in effect saying, “DON’T LOVE ME. I AM UNWORTHY OF RECEIVING YOUR LOVE.” Why on earth would anyone want to go ahead and love you if you don’t want them to love you? Why would someone want to give you love if you are basically saying you are incapable of even receiving their love? By not loving ourselves first, and as we are RIGHT NOW (even if we aren’t perfect and we are flawed) we are putting out to others the message that we can’t handle receiving love and giving out love because we are already showing through our action of not-loving ourselves and not-using the love we already have, that we can’t handle receiving anymore love from an outside source. It’s like running a charity foundation that claims it is going to help save the environment, but it needs more money to do so. It would be like a charity already having a large pile of cash and every day just taking the money they already have and throwing it outside onto a great big bonfire of cash that they are continually burning…and then going out and saying, “Hey! We need more money over here for our charity! We are going to use the money to save the environment!” and then wondering why on earth no one is donating to the cause. It’s obvious why no one is giving us more, we are obviously not using what we already have appropriately, and if we had anymore, why should they suspect we are going to use that appropriately either? It’s a direct contradiction of goals.
So to heal our sexual shadow, we need to love ourselves! To find our soul mate we have to love ourselves. To find our soul-mate, we have to be our own soul-mate first! By accepting us as we are, even if we aren’t “much,” we change the message we send out to the world and to others from “DO NOT LOVE ME. I AM UNWORTHY OF BEING LOVED. I BARELY HAVE ANY LOVE FOR MYSELF AND THEREFORE I DON’T HAVE LOVE TO SPARE FOR YOU.” and it switches to “IT’S OKAY TO LOVE ME. I AM WORTH GIVING LOVE TO. I HAVE PLENTY OF LOVE IN MYSELF AND I HAVE ENOUGH LOVE FOR YOU TOO.” But we need to love ourselves first before that change happens. Throw away the idea that later is going to be better. Accept that now, no matter where you are, no matter what you have or who you have or don’t have, that everything is already perfect. That we ourselves, are already perfect, because in reality we are. We are perfectly ourselves! You are the perfect you. Sure you can change yourself and make yourself even more than what you currently are, but you are still the only YOU the world has! You are the best you there ever is and ever will be. That is something worth celebrating and appreciating!
We just are pretending that we are in need. It’s all an illusion. A great big hilarious joke we have pulled on ourselves. Sure it was very painful while we forgot that it was just a joke, but now that we remember we can laugh about it. You don’t have to feel anything less than perfect if you don’t want to. You can feel less than perfect if you want to, but only you can make that choice for yourself. No one can force you to feel that way, only you can make that choice. You don’t have to feel anything less than complete and total happiness if you don’t want to. There is unlimited power at our disposal but we have to choose to use it and accept it. No one can do it for us, and no one can take it away from us. No one except ourselves.
Once you feel that your own life is already perfect and you make up your mind that you are already as happy as you could ever be or could ever want to be, then you are free and ready for others to see that you are truly worth loving. Finding someone else to be your soul mate too then becomes a fun and easy thing that will automatically just happen on its own if you want it to. It becomes effortless because you no longer push it away by yearning for it. Ironically to get what you want, you have to accept that you don’t and didn’t ever really need it to begin with because what you were seeking you always already had. AWESOME-O! So just be happy and fall in love with yourself and with life. The sexual shadow is just an offshoot of a lack of realisation that you already had all the love you could ever need and more! You never NEEDED sex or love from someone else. You can still get and have those things or anything else in the world for that matter, but to find the true love and happiness you were always seeking…it was always and will always be with us from now and to the end of time. All we ever needed to do is just be willing to step up and accept it! That is the beauty and power of us all, and it is the ultimate proof we could ever ask for, that God is inside us, an intrinsic part of us and WHO WE ARE, and will always be for all of time. Beautiful.
