Following your bliss // your golden shadow

I had a memorable dreamtime experience recently. The dream itself was a dull and mildly stressful one where my bag was stolen. As I was about to angrily run after the thief, my limited sense of ‘I’ expanded quite significantly and the thought arose:

This is a very boring dream. I’m going to wake up and have a different one.

And I woke up, smiling to myself at the delightful simplicity of it all, and fell back to sleep, dreaming another dream.

You’ve probably had similar experiences of becoming lucid in your nighttime dreams - of waking up in the dream. It’s that marvelous realization of consciousness, fully aware of its true nature and agency as the dreamer of the dream. And as diverse Mystery traditions from around the world have pointed to, this is what we are at our most fundamental level, the dreamer of the whole dream of existence - what C G Jung referred to as the Self, with a capital ‘S’.

Life is but a dream // fishing for carp, taken on Inle Lake in Myanmar, 2016.

The only difference is that, in our so-called ‘waking reality’, it’s not always that simple to awaken from a dull dream and decide to have another one, primarily because our souls have decided to incarnate into bodies in this dimension of space + time, density + gravity - and most importantly, duality + relativity.

The morning after this dreamtime lucidity, Joseph Campbell’s words “Follow your bliss” dropped into my open crown chakra.

Eureka and by Jove! Of course.

But let me elaborate.

First of all, it’s worth bearing in mind that we are, like Nature, always following our bliss. And secondly, that the bliss that Campbell was referring to doesn’t mean a perpetual state of disassociated and toxic positivity, or of always being ‘blissed out’, which is lovely but unsustainable. Rather, it’s the experience of being rooted and stabilized in the authenticity of our Being, our wholeness, and to allow our activity and doing in the world to emerge from there.

It’s also worth considering that we can only ever follow our bliss from the state of consciousness that we’re in, and more specifically the state of consciousness that the dominant culture has mandated as the only acceptable reality.

Following my bliss when I’m identified with my unintegrated ego - that illusory sense of self that has been colonized into believing itself to be separate from all-that-is, and therefore perpetually in a state of lack and deficiency - will lead to suffering, what the ancient Indian Upanishads and Buddhist texts refer to as dukkha.

Suffering is usually a sign that we’re in violation of Nature - in this instance, operating from the belief that we’re lacking, unworthy and deficient.

When I’ve ‘followed my bliss’ from this place, as I did during my teens and twenties, it has led to addiction, Self abandonment, alienation, pain, inauthenticity, inflammation…in short, all sorts of dukkha.

​(Also notice how deeply generous and non-judgmental the Universe is: bliss is ours to follow regardless of where we are in our personal evolution. There are no puritanical imperatives of deservingness and worthiness because we’re all inherently whole, worthy and deserving. Ultimately, we’ll re-member this indigenous wisdom, whether in this lifetime or another, and begin following our bliss from this Truth.)

To emphasize - the fundamental dis-ease of the unintegrated ego is that it believes that it/we are essentially deficient, lacking + separate (leading to both inferiority and superiority complexes.)

Following our bliss from this sense of deficiency leads to greed, manipulation, oppression, control, exploitation, etc.

We can see how this has been playing out for millennia: the collective dream of the world being dreamt from collective consciousness stuck in the illusion of separateness, deficiency and dis-ease.

Meanwhile, the truth is that we are already whole, complete and unconditionally worthy - like Nature.

Imagine what the world + our relationships to ourselves, each other and the Earth would be like if we lived from the Nature-aligned truth of sovereign, Self-actualized wholeness and sufficiency?

Imagine if we followed our bliss - individually + collectively - from this Self responsible, Self regulating state of consciousness?

This would be akin to being awake in the dream.

One of the ways to begin exploring and establishing this in our psyches and bodies is through meeting and integrating our “golden shadow,” as C G Jung called it: those more brilliant aspects of our inherent wholeness + worthiness that we have rejected and disidentified from.

There are myriad reasons that we’ve done this - most of them stemming from having to survive by hiding our too-muchness/not enoughness - projected onto us by people + culture similarly disconnected from their wholeness.

One of the biggest fears that I’ve encountered with clients when we first begin this work of meeting and integrating their golden shadow is that they’ll become arrogant or narcissistic.

In truth, it’s quite the opposite.

Arrogance and narcissism also come from the wound of believing the lie that we’re unworthy and lacking.

When we become rooted in the authenticity of our wholeness, including the more brilliant aspects of it, things actually stop being about us all the time. We stop taking things personally - whether complimentary or otherwise - because we begin to see + feel how this is falling asleep in the dream, how this disconnects us from the naturalness of the ground of our Being and binds us to a false + flimsy sense of selfhood.

We understand that this is not where true liberation lies - for ourselves and all beings.

Rooted in our innate wholeness + worthiness, we’re able to receive, enjoy and be nourished by external validation without chasing it and becoming identified with it; and tend to the parts of us that are triggered by the sting of rejection and disapproval, without being identified with them.

We're able to become ourselves more fully, and authentically share the unique flavor of our medicine.

More capacity for the natural ebbs and flows of life opens up, more capacity for a genuine intimacy with life, more capacity for playfulness unmired in perfectionism.

When this journey of awakening is skillfully engaged in through the body, through sensations - the language of the body - this becomes an embodied experience, which is far more transformative than mere intellectualizing, in my experience.

It becomes natural and intuitive; we’re able to feel when we’re out of alignment with the light + shadow of our wholeness, when we’re following our bliss from an inauthentic place. And most importantly, we’re able to start compassionately relating to our unintegrated ego parts through our bodies, giving them the space and time to resolve and evolve.

This is the art of pivoting to a new dream in the dimension of time + space, density + gravity, duality + relativity, through honoring the divine timing of our nervous systems.