Shadow Work and Law of Attraction - On Spiritual Bypassing and the War Between Shadow Workers and Love and Light-ers

There's a sort of war in the spiritual world between those who believe in doing shadow work and those people who they refer to as "Spiritual By-passers" or "New Age Bullshit" who try to go straight to the light.

I've had one foot in both of these worlds deeply for several years, and I would like to offer my insight and attempt to reconcile the two.

I don't think either of these are wrong.

This article is a long time in the making. I've been working my way through it and trying to articulate it for a very long time. And I know there's still more learning to come.

There are many schools of thought that encourage digging into our shadows and wounds in order to transcend them, heal them, overcome them.

I've been a patient of Network Chiropractic for five years now. Network Chiropractic is the backbone (ha ha) of my entire life. It is the most healing and liberating thing I have ever come across. The 12 Stages of Healing is sort of the how-to guide for navigating your way through your healing in this practice. Since I started going to my Chiropractor I at once felt more peaceful and wonderful and alive than ever and also started having some major shit come up. Often it's debilitating, although it gets less so as I heal more and more, and I am becoming a pro at navigating my way through these wounds that come up.

The pattern is: I get all the way to the top of the healing spiral - feeling blissful and alive and eager and full of light...... and then a wound comes up. I resist it and say, no. Not right now, wound. Everything is going so well. Please, can we just keep this upward momentum going? And then before I know it I have crashed down.

Recently I found myself in bed thinking the most awful thoughts about myself. And I was fine with it. One day I slept until 1pm... 13 hours in bed. I was tired of my life and just didn't want to do it anymore. As you read this, you might feel absolute terror for me. But please don't. There's this weird sort of magic that happens with places like this. You see, there's a difference between someone who hasn't experienced and navigated their way through a shit-ton of healing like I have, and me. I carry enough light and power that while these stages do debilitate me, I'm sort of an old hat about it, and there's a detachment about it. I've been through it enough times to know how to start working up the emotional scale, or in Donny Epstein's terms in Network Chiropractic, up the healing spiral. There's a level of hope in these states. From experience I know that there's a transendence that happens through them that makes me stronger and more alive and whole.

But the reason I'm writing this is: do they? You see, every time I go into one of these states the world around me falls to shit. It's simple: the world around you will reflect the world within you. So what to do? Abraham Hicks is one of my most trusted teachers. In my three years being a student of theirs I have been testing and testing their solutions in my own life, and I have always found every one of them to be true.

Abraham Hicks does not encourage what we call clearing our wounds and traumas. As they said, these are black holes. They're done. They only live on in our imaginations. When we delve into them, they go on and on and on..... until we decide to come out.

However, these wounds are alive in more than our imaginations. They're recorded in patterns in our bodies. The energy is trapped and blocked. When it's noticed, it's time for it to move. After you've been through it as many times as I have you know that these wounds have a timeline of their own, and they move when they're ready.

For three years I've been trying to reconcile these seemingly opposing viewpoints in our healing and the creation of our lives. Donny Epstein and Abraham Hicks are both two of my most trusted teachers.

There are many stories in The Twelve Stages of Healing of people who had debilitating and dangerous health problems who one day connected with their pain that presented itself to them. And in connecting with that pain, their health problem was healed for good. My favorite example is a man who had a heart condition. His father had died several years prior, and instead of dealing with the immense pain, he worked and worked and distracted himself from it. Then one day he was alone at home and all of these extremely intense feelings about his father passing came up. There was terrible pain in his chest, and he was in misery, making so many sounds that if his wife was home she would have called the ambulance. But this man allowed it to come. And it passed. In connecting with this extremely deep pain, he was liberated from it, and his heart healed fully.

Don't you love that story?

I'm sure that Abraham Hicks' teachings andDonny Epstein's aren't really add odds, and for these three years, I have been trying to figure out the nuances between both.

I think that my knowledge of the Law of Attraction put me in a state of resistance of being in these healing states, and that resistance may be what keeps me in it longer than is necessary and also causes my outside world around me to go to temporary shit.

It's clear to me that as our vibrations rise, our blocks and limitations become conscious to us so we can work through them.Abraham Hicks would simply encourage you to soothe yourself and find a better feeling place. And ultimately, this is how you start moving up the emotional scale / healing spiral.

In conclusion, there does seem to be a need to feel our locked-up pain. Abraham Hicks would say that in focusing on it we only make it bigger. I think it's true in the short term, but not necessarily in the long term. There have been wounds that appear to me in a different variation. For example, there are variations of shame and self loathing. A different layer will appear to me at a different time.

The truth is, our traumas and insecurities have a hold of us. I can study the Law of Attraction all day. I can study mindfulness and Thich Nhat Hahn's beautiful teachings about kindness to ourselves and surrender, but our insecurities make us behave in ways that we abhor. And we don't understand why we keep repeating the same patterns when we know better. We know we are valuable. We know that. But we have traumas and insecurities that say that we aren't. And those are damn powerful. I have so much compassion for people because of this understanding. Nobody wants to be shitty. Nobody wants to do stupid shit and explode in anger and be out of control and be in harmful relationships or be in poverty or live in a state of fear.

Learning about the Law of Attraction is infinitely helpful. And the principles we learn fromAbraham Hicks' teachings are ultimately what can assist you in these shadow periods.

I'm coming out of one now, and the reason I'm writing this is to help you get out of your shadow period, or your depression, or whatever you want to call it.

You have connected with a part of you that you hate. It's not really you, it's just an experience. But nonetheless. Just give it some love and acceptance. It suffers so much. And you reject it. Just love it and soothe it and care for it and talk to it like you would a little wounded child who is so sad.

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Welcome this part of you home to yourself. Tell it that you're not going anywhere without it again. And don't go anywhere without it again. Keep it with you and soothe it when it comes to you and tells you it's sad or angry.

Which brings me to my next point. Your traumas and wounds and insecurities may move up the emotional scale. It may first appear to you as depressed and hopeless, and later it may appear to you angry. Here is the emotional scale for reference.

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(Notice that the twelve stages of healing is a spiral, and so is the emotional scale)

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To use one ofAbraham Hicks' terms, your resistance is what keeps you from healing and moving forward. Don't resist your resistance if it comes up, though. :)

The key to all of life is to accept it seems. Accept your shadow state. Accept the shadow itself.

Another key is not to wallow. Grief is grief. Accept it and be with it. If you can try to be connected with your Inner Being while you're in it (which Abraham-Hicks would say is not possible) you can move through it in a more enlightened and truly healing way. It's a very slippery slope, and if we're mindful of the emotional scale, I suspect we can be more on top of it and make sure we don't get into bad territory.

We have to be ever so mindful and aware when we're in these states and stages of shadow healing. They can really grab a hold of us and take us down. The momentum is really strong. This is a part of you that's ruling your life, and you're not really aware of it. So when you tap into it, momentum is going to send you spinning downward fast.

And then you're going to have to start going up the spiral when you have all this momentum pulling you downward. This is a familiar downward spiral. Again, there's so much momentum behind it. But. If you'e been raising your vibration for a while, you also have a lot of upward momentum that you're just currently resisting. So. It just starts with the decision that now it's time to move up the scale. You have to start small with gentle soothing. The rising of your vibration will feel tiny at first. You're very vulnerable at this stage, and you have to be completely dedicated and diligent to raising your vibration. You can't do anything that will lower it, and that especially includes talking about the problem of the state you're coming out of. Now you need to focus on where you're going, not where you were. But you're still there, and that's fine. Just don't talk about it now. You're very fragile. :) Now, the momentum is picking up. It will take a few days. Know that tomorrow when you wake up you're going to be in a better place. Once you get to a certain place, now you're tapped into the momentum of the higher vibration for your overall life. And then you will find that this momentum is really strong. At a certain point it will grab you, and you're sort of home free.

It seems that the higher your vibration gets, and the more healed you become, the deeper and more agonizing shadows will appear to you. We're better equipped to handle them. My Chiropractor told me that things come up for healing as they're ready. In the Chiropractic world we call this Innate Intelligence. There's an intelligence that runs our bodies without our conscious awareness. This intelligence knows how to heal us, and we can surrender to it.

In order to be healthy in the 21st century, I think we all have to be educated in these two worlds. All of us are wounded and all of us are going to deal with our pain. You need to know about shadow work so you can help yourself in these times. People in the shadow work side, your shadows will control your life if you don't learn about the Law of Attraction and how to get yourself back to the light.

I propose that these two worlds go hand in hand, and in order to be whole and healthy we must ride between the two, learn from both, and incorporate both into our lives.

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After I finished this piece, I came across the quote that links this all together. It's an Abraham-Hicks quote. "When you create a new desire, law of attraction will bring up any beliefs that you hold that are contrary to this new desire so that you can work through them."

Our beliefs dictate what we attract. In this process of awareness and sinking and healing, these beliefs come fully into our awareness and we merge with them. Things will go to shit in this process. But at least it's swifter than attracting from them spread out over your life. As Abraham says, "Hang on, it'll be over in a minute!"