Connecting the Dots, Sunday Series: Shadow Work

What are you birthing now?

Do you have a sense of it?

Let me know if you do…

Photo Credit: Darius Bashar

I forget sometimes, that I am precocious when it comes to many things, one of them being astrological events. For instance, if Mercury is going retrograde in 2 weeks, I will start experiencing it a least a week before most people will, sometimes even 2 weeks before the actual event. What can I say, some of us are just extra lucky?

The cool thing is, I dive right in, hunker down, and get my hands dirty. I analyze, (cry, rage, or despair – sometimes simultaneously), because I am interested in retuning to balance. Basically, I go through the lake of emotion, because I trust that there is an opposite shore, (even if I can’t see, or even, sense it). Whatever I need to do to embrace the issue, so I can process and move through it, I do. Sometimes this can happen quickly, and sometimes it takes longer to shift patterns.

I knew from a young age that my energy field was, if not vast… then powerful. I did not recognize this from an ego perspective. More like it was a sacred duty to hold space for the earth and her denizens. It was like I recognized a calling (at a time when I did not know of such things). One, that if I allowed my head to ruminate on – it would have rejected the possibility or affirmation of. It would have scoffed, and condemned, and not allowed me to honor this calling.

In my heart, there was a certainty of my path, and my purpose, that for many decades, my head was not prepared to deal with. And part of that had been my emotional body as well. I had to heal a lot of cracks, chinks and worn thin spots in my being before I could begin to integrate into the vessel I was meant to be.

This led to me, at 12, to choose to stop reading the newspaper. It also led me to walk out of the room whenever family or friends were watching the news. I was conscious of these things bringing my vibration down, and I knew it was more important for me to maintain a different kind of energy than carrying the one that exposing myself to the news generated in me.

It was as if I received a message, and that message conveyed to me a sense of having a part in the job steadying the energy around me.

I recognized that I had an effect. And also, that this effect was most powerful, when I stayed in a certain vibration. One that originated from my heart solar plexus area.

Back in the 70’s this was not a popular practice, and coupled with my dyslexia, contributed to my sense of not fitting in. My awareness of energy definitely isolated me. And the fact that this theme that was so consistent in my life, when I looked back after many decades, seemed significant.

The effect in my life, of this repeated isolation, was quite distinct. The constant moving, always being the new kid in school after school, town after town. Not having my step dad accept me as his own, the dyslexia preventing me from experiencing success in so many pivotal areas of my life (and then add my strange perspective on life… brought on by all the things I could feel or see that others could not…), even down to not being able to have children…
All of this isolated me, forced me to make my internal connections strong, because I did not get solace or connection in the human world.

But I did from the natural world…

As I look back at the snaking river of my life, I see very clearly how perfectly guided I was, to become precisely who I am today. Shaped as a vessel to attract, hold, carry and bring forth the things that I am capable of bringing forth (which are quite interesting if I do say so myself!)

We each are different….  We harm ourselves and each other when we expect homogenous-ness.    That is abhorrent in nature.  

I think it’s time we started listening to nature in new ways. Nature as guidance, as opposed to just something to be brought to heel. Now that we have actually started exploring intelligence in nature, we have discovered so much evidence of intelligence and human like qualities is species as diverse as single celled slime molds, pigeons, bees and even plants!

I share my findings, many of which I’m betting will blow your mind, in my book Connecting the Dots: Ancient Wisdom, Modern Science.

Check out Chapter 6, “The Earth and Us”, Ch.7, “Plants” and Ch. 8, “Our Fellow Inhabitants” for a lot of cool information on these subjects. 

It’s available on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and my website. PM me if you want the links.

Exploring Connecting the Dots: Shadow Work

Photo Credit: Christian Holzing

Have you ever had some one walk out of your life with no warning?

Relationships with people are not easy, especially if one or more of the parties is not being honest about what their needs or boundaries are.

That is a sure way to doom any relationship.  It is again one of the reasons this work is so important.

The work I am referring to is shadow work that can touch the living core of our fears. These fears can be about our value (or lack of), what we deserve, our rights to boundaries, nurturing, respect, and more.  It can be about our own boundaries with others and how we communicate our emotions and our needs. Anger, grief, rage, fear, all of these can be expressed in ways that facilitate healing, or bring about further wounding.

I talk about this in my book Connecting the Dots: Ancient Wisdom, Modern Science, a lot, but in particular chapter 10, “Feelings”.

Whatever is inside of us, got there because we survived experiencing it.  It did not get there by itself, and it cannot harm us any further than we were harmed when we went through it the first time (even though it can feel like it can sometimes)
You got this.

Touching it is raw, but if we keep in mind that by sitting with it, quietly, we can move through the feelings and out the other side.  While you are in there, be creative about your thoughts.  Rub golden healing salve on raw wounds, hold the wounds, or yourself at whatever age you were when you were wounded. Like a baby, these things need our time and attention. We need our time and attention, no less than anyone else in our lives does…

Shadow work can also encompass traumas that we have stored in our bodies, ones that were so painful that we have chosen to lock them away inside us, and to look away.  We invest so much in not having to see them, but they still affect us, and how we behave towards others. The truth is, we will carry them in us, unless we work to divest ourselves of their influence by neutralizing their charge, to our graves, and perhaps beyond.

Touching the living core of anything can be “shocking”.  It is experienced intensely, even something pleasant at that level of intensity can be almost or downright painful.  Imagine then something unwanted experienced at that level. Not fun!  Yet…  This is the work we are meant to do. It is why the very planets in the heavens stop spinning and then reverse the direction of their spin ( this opposite spin, called “retrograde” pulls the feelings of these things we have not yet mastered out of us, and makes them manifest in our lives.)

It is why every thirty years each human goes through what is referred to as their “Saturn return”.  And for that entire year you will be hit again and again with issues that stem from these parts of ourselves that we relegate to the shadows.
Shadow work demands that we look at our pain and we determine what we have practiced that, at the very least, invited those energies into our space, or, they could be things we are directly causing.

I heard a great saying yesterday, what we are experiencing is a Birth Quake! What is yours on a Richter Scale of 1 – 10?

 It can be very helpful to get support for this work. I urge you to find others also seeking to heal and grow. Be kind to yourself in at least one small way a day. Tune into your body on a daily basis and ask it what it needs. Don’t be afraid of changing old patterns and doing something new. Be afraid of staying stuck in old ones, remember nothing new will come from old patterns. Become curious. Ask for help. Ask for support.

Copyright: Lia Russ 2022

The Earth Is Flat

Exploring Connecting The Dots

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Today I would like to share with you an excerpt from the Introduction of my book Connecting the Dots Ancient Wisdom Modern Science. 

The Earth is Flat 

Hi. I’m here to tell you the world is flat.  Oops — wrong paradigm! Paradigms are accepted ways of looking at and understanding our world.  Put another way, paradigms form frameworks of accepted thought that govern a society’s view of anything, from physics to geography, even the concepts of good and bad.  I find paradigms fascinating because they reveal so much about where a culture stands. 

People can be comforted by paradigms because they give the illusion that the corners of our world are tacked down, safe, predictable. They can also give us a sense of belonging; if we believe in the same paradigm, we seem connected.  Maybe you even feel “safe” to me, or like you are a “good” person, just because you believe the same things I do.  Conversely, people with beliefs outside our paradigm can seem foreign, even scary. 

The problem with belief systems is that we often stop “seeing” things that exist outside those systems, even if they are right in front of our faces.  They can also lead to complacency, especially if they encourage people not to think for themselves, exactly what our current paradigm teaches. 

If you would like to learn more, my book is available on Amazon.

To receive updates and follow what I’m up to, please join my list or like our Facebook page.

Photo Credit: Tim Foster

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COPYRIGHT 2022 LIA RUSS