Hard Truths

A lot of awakening practice centres around connecting with the underlying freedom, beauty, truth, and love of experience. This sounds beautiful, and it is, but often the things that stop people from accessing these things are shadows and being caught in subconscious double binds.

There’s a risk that by focusing too intently on the positive things, awakening can take you further away from the depths and truth of experience and encourage people to paper over the cracks, ignore the difficult bits, and sweep things under the carpet. Practice can easily become a place for subtle or overt toxic positivity that keeps you in an addictive loop—it ends up increasing ignorance rather than reducing it.

Embracing wholeness and including challenging stuff in experience is one of the biggest opportunities for liberation, both on an individual and collective level. This includes looking at unhealthy dynamics, which are often subconscious.

This section describes some of the underlying mechanisms of how the process of integrating shadows works, why it’s important to include an understanding of this in awakening practice, some of the common shadows you may find, and some of the possibilities for opening to a wider and more whole experience when these understandings have been integrated.

You may also like to watch this short video I recorded about the drama triangle, the empowerment triangle, and the mystical triangle and how different ways of relating to shadow and challenge can create reality bubbles that affect what people believe the world to be.