Reclaiming

What drives the work I am here to offer is deeply rooted in helping us all heal through reclaiming our whole selves - the parts that are the easiest to celebrate and love, and the parts of ourselves that have been exiled. 

Cultural narratives, caregiver and educator expectations and the wounds and beliefs our peers and loved ones are holding become so formative in the way that we understand what parts of ourselves are safe to embrace and share with others and what parts of ourselves get rejected and discarded. 

Healing is reuniting the light with what has been relegated to the shadow, coming into embracing our whole, entire selves and recognizing the highest octave expression of all of it. So much of what we see in ourselves coloured by shame and guilt is only so as a result of having hidden it. Brought back out from the far corners of our psyches, invited back in to be seen completely and appreciated, these elements of ourselves no longer do us harm. In the light we can see what the highest expression of this aspect of ourselves is and how it is a much needed part of the whole of who we are. In shadow, the most innocuous traits become poisonous simply because of the way that rejection hinders our perception from seeing how they could contribute to our wholeness and our particular way of being of service in the world. 

As an example, say you are someone who is inconsistently motivated, which the distinct majority of us are. This trait is far from prized in our cultural narratives around success. In the shadow this starts to manifest as beliefs about how this makes us somehow ‘lesser’ or ‘not enough’ as we are. This in turn becomes self-sabotaging behaviours that derail us from riding our natural ebbs and flows and accomplishing what we are actually meant to. 

In contrast, go in and investigate that shadow, see the highest expression of that inconsistent motivation and you start to recognize the incredible potential that most of us hold to be in the quiet dark, the liminal space between bursts of motivation where we are meant to be cultivating our creative, intuitive understandings so that when we do get a wave of motivation to ride, we can fully bloom into what has been gestating in the space between. 

Invitation: What are the parts of yourself that have been exiled or rejected? And if you were to reclaim them, what would integration of that part really look and feel like? How do those traits show up in their highest expression when loved and embraced?