Several years ago I created a painting of my Higher Self, my Shadow, and my Child.
My Higher Self represented wise mind. (Not Beginner’s Mind, which may have been helpful.) She was calm, logical, certain, and intuitive. Her boundaries were fluid to the point that she would help even when staggering under the load.
My Shadow was unpredictable, impatient, judgmental, and ready for action. Her boundaries were so sharp that brushing up against them could cut you. Swiss psychologist Carl Jung referred to the Shadow as the person we would rather not be, anything we perceive as negative or unacceptable.
My Child represented vulnerability. (The photo is me at age 7.)
In the painting the Higher Self and Shadow faced one another. Two women who appeared as opposites: one blonde, standing calmly in a flowing blue dress; one dark-haired, screeching, dressed in a frayed black dress. Standing to the side was the white-blonde-haired Child, observing.
A dream prompted the painting. In the dream I was my Higher Self, standing outside my front door on the porch, looking out at my yard that had flooded and was filled with alligators. Calm, logic, and intuition failed me. I did not know what to do and felt overwhelmed. Suddenly my Shadow rushed from the house, ran past me, and sprinted across the tops of the alligators to safety, all without a backward glance. Higher Self felt helpless as she did not know how to take the risky action accomplished by Shadow. My Shadow and my Higher Self did not speak to one another in the dream. My sense was that they each felt disdain toward the other.
I chose to paint the two women in relationship to one another, to start a conversation between these aspects of myself. The images that emerged made evident that when my Shadow wasn’t ignoring my Higher Self she was yelling at her. My Higher Self felt fear when she heard Shadow’s messages and tried to (rationally, calmly) dismiss them. Painting the two women side-by-side helped me identify the strengths that I did not claim, strengths that I tried to hide away in my Shadow including risk-taking, anger, and being direct about my needs.
One afternoon not long after the painting was complete a girlfriend and her daughter came to visit. My friend and I talked and laughed while her daughter played quietly with her toys several feet away. When they left I was stunned to discover that the little girl (who was about the same age as the child in the painting) had scratched out the Shadow figure. I don’t know what she used to accomplish the obliteration, but she was thorough.
At the time I was focused on my loss and felt upset. All these years later I wonder what she saw when she looked at the painting. What needed to be erased? Did she feel vulnerable and unsafe? Did she get to have mastery over fear by her actions? I would like to hug her, let her know the Child is safe, and the Shadow and Higher Self are amazing friends. Not always aligned, yet amazing.
Perhaps I am the one who needed to know my Child is safe and my friend’s daughter created an opening for my learning.
Thank you to Colin Macrae (Zen Mind Beginner’s Mind) for this quote:
“Consider an adult who tends to the traumas of a child: a scraped knee, spilled milk, a broken toy. As adults, we know that kids have no idea as to what constitutes a genuine problem because inexperience greatly limits their childhood perspective. Children do not yet know that the world does not revolve around them. As grownups, dare we admit to ourselves that we, too, have a collective immaturity of view? Dare we admit that our thoughts and behaviors spring from a belief that the world revolves around us?
Apparently not! Yet, evidence abounds. Part the curtains of society’s racial, ethnic, religious, national, and cultural conflicts and you will find the human ego turning the knobs and pulling the levers.
Now imagine a world in which everyone, but especially people with power and influence holds an expanded view of our place in the cosmos. With that perspective, our problems would shrink, or never appear at all - and we would celebrate our earthly differences while shunning the behavior of our predecessors who slaughtered one another because of them.” Neil DeGrasse Tyson