KAJAMA.COM NEWSLETTER

February 27 through March 5, 2023

Monday and Tuesday are days for important conversations and dynamic ideas as the Moon speeds through Gemini and accelerates our intellect and negotiation skills. Brainstorming and working with a team is the way to productive outcomes. It’s also a good time to get things off your chest or share your feelings more openly to create better understanding between you and others. Once the Moon moves into Cancer on Wednesday things seem to stall and followed by Mercury’s move into Pisces on Thursday, things could get a bit blurry. Mercury doesn’t always do well in water signs, so practice extra caution with your words as well as your actions. The remainder of the week glows brightly under the Leo Moon, and though we may not get much done, we’ll celebrate the wonder of our lives on a much deeper soul level.

Healing the 3 Faces of Our Shadow through Deep Dreaming, by Linda Yael Schiller

(Article originally published in The Llewellyn Journal.)

Our Light and Dark Sides
Our Shadow side, in our dreams and in our lives, is the counterpart or counterbalance to the Light. We need both to be whole. Shadow, a Jungian term, refers to those parts of ourselves that we wish to bury or disallow or not acknowledge. We unconsciously make invisible or dissociate from the parts that we are embarrassed of, of our hidden or forbidden desires, or even the strengths we have that we have not yet owned or lived up to. Jung tells us that, "People will do anything, no matter how absurd, in order to avoid facing their own souls. One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious." We need to honor and recognize both sides to be fully whole and learn to make our darkness both conscious and healed or befriended.

When parts of ourselves or our history are not allowed expression or are unresolved, they can show up in our dreams as a monster: as a dark or evil force, as something that is chasing us or endangering us. Those lurking dark figures, those creepy slithering beasts, those masked men or women—all can be a sign of our shadow. Literature and myth are full of these figures, from Medusa the snaky-haired Gorgon to Darth Vader (later challenged by his son, Luke Skywalker, using the Lightsaber as his weapon in a historic battle between good and evil.) There was an old radio show called "The Shadow," whose creepy weekly tagline was, "Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men? The Shadow knows!"

The Three Faces of Shadow in our Lives
What has not been widely talked about are the three faces of our shadow in our dreams and in our lives. It is mostly thought of at the personal layer with our personal challenges, traumas, and demons. What are less widely known are the ancestral and world shadows that can also show up in our dreams. From the science of epigenetics, we are learning that more than eye color and height can be inherited: the vicissitudes of life that our parents, our grandparents and even our more distant ancestors lived through can show up and effect our lives and our dreams. What is occurring in the world around us, what Jung called our collective unconscious, can also seep into our dreamscapes and we can dream of worldwide events that are not part of our personal history.

At the first layer, the personal layer, our shadow consists of the unhealed or unacknowledged parts of ourselves. The old hurts or traumas, or our own greedy or envious or foot-dragging parts can be here. For example, my client Samantha had a woman in her dreams blocking her path who moved ever so slowly and kept stopping and keeping her from getting out of the hole she was stuck in. Her Shadow side was the "Slow Woman" who kept her stuck in indecision and prevented her from action in her life.

To understand the second layer, the ancestral layer, we need only look at the nature/nurture paradigm. Some parts of our selves are governed by our genetic overlay, and some by the environment in which we have grown up. I think this is a false dichotomy, however, as we are parented by caretakers who have their own histories, for better and for worse, as did their parents, and so on and so on. One client of mine, Helene, was told by her mother that it was dangerous to be beautiful or visible since that could attract violence against her. Helene had lived her life suppressing her feminine strengths because of this fear. In investigating her family history, she discovered that her grandmother had been sexually assaulted as a child and passed this fear on to her daughter, who in turn passed it on to Helene. Neither Helene nor her mother had personally been assaulted, yet they behaved in life as if they had and feared most men as dangerous. Once Helene realized that she was carrying a family story that was not her own, she was able to do the work of divesting herself of it and come more fully into her own power. (Mark Wolyn's book, It Didn't Start With You: How Inherited Family Trauma Shapes Who We Are and How to End the Cycle, explains this concept in great detail.)

Finally, to understand how the world shadow may show up in our dreams, the most recent and common world dream shadow can be exemplified by the plethora of pandemic dreams we have been experiencing worldwide. As the Covid pandemic progresses and morphs, our dreams have shifted with it—themes of bugs, infections, being sequestered, and vaccine hopes. (Deidre Barret chronicaled this in her book Pandemic Dreams.) War, famine, refugee status, and climate change, to name a few, can also show up as world shadows in our personal dreams. We can dream for ourselves, we can dream for our family, and we can dream for our community and our land. Dreaming for the land can show up in our dreams in any form of a ravaged or endangered landscape, and many native and indigenous peoples have been urging us for centuries to dream these dreams forward with healing intentions, ceremonies, and actions to restore our lands. This can be part of our healing and redemption as well, for what we do at one level of action or consciousness affects all others.

Confronting the Vampire
For twenty years, my friend Jason had been followed around by a dark Shadow figure in his dreams that seemed to embody all three parts of this shadow. In the most recent of these dreams, a vampire figure showed up for him in a glass coffin, calling to him to join him on the dark side. Below we will look specifically at what this recurring dream had come to tell him and how it became resolved.

In working with his dream using the GAIA method of Guided Active Imagination Approach, along with hypnotherapy and journeying practices, he was able to identify and resolve all three faces of the shadow in his vampire-in-a-coffin dream mentioned above. Jason has been on a journey in his personal life to conquer addiction and his pull to the dark side of spirit, and to come into his own as a good and powerful man. At one level, the en-coffined vampire calling out to him was the face of his own personal history: needing to be watchful of and aware of his own dark side. Jason also related to me that his father had a history of alcoholism, so there was a family legacy piece as well. On the larger world spiritual and multiverse level, Jason was once told by a shamanic practitioner that there was a curse on his family, and that the men would be "Tragic Men" because of grave misdeeds in the past.

As we worked with his dream, his first inclination was to enter the room not only with the protection of the mentors and the bubble of light he had gathered up during Part 1 of the GAIA method (before entering the dreamscape to enhance safety and protection), but with guns blazing to do away with the vampire once and for all. I encouraged him to slow down and not demolish the vampire before finding out if there was a message or a gift for him hidden in the coffin or the dead-yet-alive man. This is important when we work with dark figures on our dreams: Don't just react to our gut instinct to kill them off; first find out, from a vantage point of safety, who they are and why they are there, and what their message is for you When Jason was able to do this, he could find within his safety net his own heart of compassion and get closer to the figure to really see who he was and what he wanted.

Then, when he peered into the glass coffin, low and behold he found an aspect of himself that needed further healing: both his current "me" and the long ancestral line of men who had come before him. He then climbed into the coffin with the vampire, held him close, and the terrifying vampire turned to ash in his arms. The final action step from this dream was to take some of the ash into his own heart, and then take the remainder and give it a proper burial. Later that day he created a ceremony whereby he wrote out the words Vampire and Dark Man on a piece of paper, burned it, and buried the ashes out in his yard in his pet cemetery. What a nice way to put an end to the old year and bring in the new, as we did this work the first day of the new year. The curse was broken.

To learn more about healing your Shadow and the GAIA method, you can read PTSDreams: Transforming your Nightmares from Trauma through Healing Dreamwork and Modern Dreamwork: New Tools for Decoding Your Soul's Wisdom.

Bibliography:
Barrett, Deidre, ed. Trauma and Dreams, Harvard University Press, 2001, 1986
_______________Pandemic Dreams, Oneiroi Press, 2020
Bosnak, Robert, Tracks in the Wilderness of Dreaming, Delacourte Press, 1996
Dannu, Ayala, Ancestral Dreaming and Why it Needs to be a Part of the Dream Studies Conversation, Dreamtime, Fall 2019
Dunlea, Marion, BodyDreaming in the Treatment of Developmental Trauma, Routledge, Press, 2019
Herman, Judith, Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence-From Domestic Abuse to Political Terror, New York, Basic Books, 1992
Jesamine, "The Shadow: What You Do Behind Your Own Back," blogpost www.counselinginzurich.com
Perry, Christopher, "Shadow," www.webarchiveofthesocietyofanalyticalpsychology, 2020
Schiller, Linda, Modern Dreamwork: New Tools for Decoding Your Soul's Wisdom, Llewellyn Worldwide Publishing, 2019
__________, PTSDreams: Transforming your Nightmares form Trauma through Healing Dreamwork, Llewellyn Worldwide Publishing, Sept. 2022
Wolynn, Mark, It Didn't Start With You: How Inherited Family Trauma Shapes Who We Are and How to End the Cycle, Viking Random House Press, 2016

Article originally published in The Llewellyn Journal. Copyright Llewellyn Worldwide, 2022. All rights reserved.

In order to feel safe at night, I have to close every door in my apartment: closets, kitchen cabinets, the doors of rooms, all except the door of one bathroom that has a wall and door of mirrors. I feel there is a presence that will come to me if I leave the doors open. Sometimes I feel it inside the kitchen cabinets, or the office, laundry room, etc., but most often I feel it inside my bedroom. In fact, I've been sleeping in the living room for months due to my fear. I am not afraid during the day, which puzzles me. For this reason, I thought I was paranoid, but recently I read something about shadows, and it helped me understand that I can in fact have fear only in the dark and not in the light. However, something else doesn't make sense: if my fears are not due to a mental illness, and there is in fact a presence in my home, why would it help to close the doors? Can't a spirit go through doors anyway? I've left the doors open many times, trying to face my fears, and I either can't sleep because I'm panicked and praying for protection, or I fall sleep and have terrible nightmares of someone very negative and powerful standing next to me or walking through my house. If this entity is real and it's so powerful, how can I be protected simply by closing the doors? I don't think I can lock a spirit inside a room - or can I? Needless to say, I will arrange to see a psychiatrist, but I can't deny what I've experienced, and I'm almost sure it's caused by a real entity.

I.

Susyn:

Even though entities may be able to pass through doors with ease, when you close your doors on them, you send them a direct message. This is not so much about what spirits can and cannot do as it is about the energetic dynamics involved. The closing of a door is an act you take to protect yourself and to send unseen entities a warning that they are not welcome. Closing doors to a troublesome entity is like setting an alarm system for a potential burglar: most criminals will keep moving until they find an easier target.

I am curious to know if this problem has followed you throughout your life, or just since you moved into the place you are now living. I suspect the latter is true, because if this spirit was personally attached to you, it would not be so easy to shut it out.

Because you tend to sense this spirit in certain living spaces in your home (the kitchen cabinets, office, laundry room) where a previous tenant might have spent a lot of time, it is most likely the ghost of someone who lived and died in the home prior to your moving in. The details you offered suggest a residual haunting, where a spirit moves about the house, repeating the activities they performed when they were alive. Your ability to block the anxiety you feel by simply shutting the doors at night confirms this, for this entity is not seeking you out but randomly roaming about the house as though going about a daily routine.

One of the reasons we tend to have more fear at night and less during the day has to do with the nature of our second sight. When we move through our days, our physical vision is clear, and the bright light surrounding us tends to erase shadowy entities. In the dark, our second sight kicks in and is able to pick up on apparitions and energetic movement we would not normally see. Because we are depending on our instincts more heavily in the dark, we pick up on more paranormal activity.

I do not believe you need to see a psychiatrist. It would be more productive to invite a psychic or exorcist into your home to attempt to contact this entity to see if they can get it to clear out. Calling in spiritual professional to speak to a spirit can be more powerful than you might imagine. You may assume that spirits can just read your mind or that you can just tell them to go away and they will listen. However, having a third party address an unwelcome spirit is often more powerful, for it's sort of like calling in the authorities. Whether this spirit has been there for years or is newly-ensconced in the house, this is your best line of defense to rid yourself of it once and for all.

*****

Oceania:

I'm sorry for your suffering, and I'm glad you wrote to us. I commend you for giving this issue thoughtful consideration, and for your willingness to seek psychiatric help, if necessary. I think such a visit would be helpful if only to discuss medications that may temporarily help you manage your symptoms.

While you're exploring the root cause of your fears, anti-anxiety medication would help you remain calm, and a sleeping aid would help you catch up on your rest. Anti-depressant medication can help ease the symptoms of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD.) You might meet the criteria for that diagnosis if you're plagued by thoughts and behaviors you can't control.

Rituals like hand-washing, rearranging things or checking (did I close every door?) can provide temporary relief from worrisome thoughts. It may be easier for you to believe there's a spirit hiding in your home than it is to acknowledge painful feelings hiding in your body and mind. We all resist facing upsetting memories and emotions sometimes, but with loving support, we can uncover, feel and process them. This is less painful in the long run than continuing to suppress them. If there is no one to hear and support us during difficult childhood experiences, we can store feelings of fear, sadness and anger in the cabinets and closets of our inner world.

I would be happy to work with you in Live Chat on releasing the past so you can live more fully in the present. In the meantime, you might do some journaling or talk to a counselor about your early life. Is there a parent or other family member who felt negative and powerful? Many of us replay our childhood trauma by getting involved with someone who is similar to one or both of our parents.

You don't mention a mate, but if you usually sleep next to a partner and now find yourself on the couch, it may be that you're angry with your partner. The entity could be a convenient, unconscious excuse for you to leave the bed! This spirit may actually be your own anger, and your door-closing rituals the way you push it back down. You've been out of your bedroom for several months, so think back to what happened in your emotional world when this started. Is there an unresolved issue that came up around then?

Anger arises when something is hurting us. Anger is an energetic gift we can draw upon to seek a creative solution, which might involve a change in perspective, a constructive conversation, or leaving a situation that is not good for us. I encourange you to welcome and get to know the spirit you've been resisting so that you can resolve your past and present pain!

Astrea:

Many times in life we hear, "You will always have what you NEED, but not necessarily what you WANT." Your spirit must have needed to experience the feeling of leaving your human body, and the suggestion in the next chapter of Sylvia Brown's book was all it took to get you there.

Even though you hadn't read it yet, your SOUL recognized the title of that chapter as something it had been seeking, and your soul, knowing that you had that reference to read after your experience, got with it and out you went!

While I don't usually recommend her books, Sylvia Brown has a wide reaching and powerful effect on lots of people. A Gemini like you would be able to relate easily to her writing and put it to good use. Synchronicity - you gotta love it!

I like your description of "getting caught." That's exactly what it feels like, isn't it? One minute you're free and hovering above the room, and the next minute, ZAP! back down into your corporeal form you go!

As a little kid, I loved that "feeling of return." With practice, most of the time we can control that event, but sometimes, when our physical ears hear a distracting noise or something else occurs to knock us back into reality, back we go. With practice you will be able to control your return better.

I find it interesting that you were visiting your mother-in-law and not someone in your own genetic family. Evidently, you and your husband got married for reasons that are even deeper than love. His family's interest in "psychic stuff" will nurture your children in such matters and help them to grow into their own abilities.

You'll never have to be concerned that when your daughter visits them, she'll be discouraged from exploring her own psychic life and power. My parents encouraged me to develop my psychic senses in a time when it wasn't nice to even discuss such things in public. Heck, it's STILL not considered a great topic at the dinner table in some families!

Your kids will get to talk about it ALL and ask questions and read and study. This is going to give them such an edge in life! Talk with your husband about how you want to present this to your kiddos, so that you are united in your approach and ready to tell them their experiences are all natural and okay.

A word or two of warning: Geminis often have difficulty staying grounded in REAL LIFE. Don't get so strung out on your ASTRAL life that you neglect what you're doing here on Earth.

You are at the beginning of a long journey to learn where your power really lies. Try to be patient with this process and take your time.