The Shadow Side of Living an Intentional Life

The Shadow Side of Living an Intentional Life (for me) is this...🌓
- feeling exhausted from all your #innerwork
- seeing your unconscious tendencies for what they are
- owning your projections and stories
- taking radical responsibility for yourself, your feelings, your needs
- no more hiding or spiritual bypassing, being seen 🙈
- inviting in and sitting with all your emotions 🙇🏻‍♀️
- being honest, anxious, lonely, afraid, angry, frustrated, sad, empty
- losing your way and forgetting who you are
- working 3-10x as hard as those who took the prescribed path (not fact checked, just a feeling)
- not having enough time or energy for all the things, ever
- recognizing your limitations and that you're not in control
- constantly forgiving yourself for not being perfect
- being vulnerable, squishy, soft
- practicing love sometimes gracefully, sometimes not
- begging for mercy, surrendering to the One

The list goes on. I write this, not to create a sob story, whine or throw a pity party for myself 🥳 but rather to be real about what’s behind the mask. There’s always more to the story than what we see on social media or even when we meet face to face.

One spiritual teacher said, “if people really knew what the path of truth entailed, they wouldn’t do it”. Because it’s not all roses 🌹, there’s hella thorns. Ego death is a painful process and anyway, for me, it seems to just reassert itself and dress up in new clothes 👗👘👖. And yet as my past love said, “it’s a one way ticket to wholeness, we can take pauses along the way but this is it.”

In Buddhism, dukkha (suffering) is seen as a fundamental part of the monotony of life, it's a given, and yet I also want to paint a full picture and give it up to the great nectar of life 🍑, Divine Love 💗 in all its sweetness. Sometimes it’s hard to see but it’s always there in everything, our pain is our medicine, our triggers are our teachers, our conflicts are our healing. We are complete.

So here I am, human and divine, visible and invisible, beauty and beast, in all my imperfection, all my flaws...trying to make sense of this thing called life 🤷🏻‍♀️.

People say I’m wise but I’m not sure I have a clue...I just keep walking until I come to love my light and my shadow, my mud and my lotus, until perhaps there is no me at all 🌑.

Much love + respect for y’all on the path ✊🏽. It ain’t always easy to live in #truth #yearofdivinelove #shadow #realness #itwasalladream

Lotus