We live in a world of polarities. Black and white. Strength and weakness. Freedom and confinement. Peace and terror. These opposites exist interdependently. They are two ends of the same spectrum. To know one, we need to know the other. Silence emerges in the absence of noise. Light breaks darkness. We wouldn’t know happiness if we didn’t know sadness.
We are beings of polarities, too. And we are each of the polarities. Both brave and fearful, active and passive, good and bad. We can’t be one unless we were the other.
But the problem is that we believe that to be whole and at peace, we need to find perfection. We need to be always right and never wrong, kind but never mean, selfless not selfish.
We learn this in childhood, when we are told off and sometimes, worse, shamed for what we do. If we break something, lie, throw a tantrum, we are told that these behaviours are unacceptable. We learn that there’s something wrong with us for what we do and who we are, and so we adapt by hiding and suppressing parts of ourselves. This is our survival mechanism at play—teaching us to find acceptance and love in the best way we know, because as children we are dependent on our caregivers.
But the thing is, each of the polarities we contain, and we contain them all, serves a function. There are moments in life when it helps to be weak, fearful, or forceful. There are times when it serves us and others to be confrontational, avoidant, or assertive.
There are also characteristics that we as society have deemed undesirable that are actually more beneficial than we acknowledge. Selfishness is one example. Being selfish helps us to establish healthy boundaries, take care of ourselves, and be honest with ourselves and others.
We deny our selfish impulses because we believe we’ll be judged negatively for them, but in reality being selfish is actually a very selfless thing to do because a) the extent to which we take care of ourselves is the extent to which we can be there for other people; b) stepping into selfishness requires us to be aware and responsible about what really serves us and those around us, and c) it requires us to transcend the societal and our own judgement we feel when we put ourselves first which isn’t easy to do.
The characteristics we judge, deny and disown are what psychologist Carl Jung called the shadow. Our shadow is the person we don’t want to be—our dark side, all we think is unacceptable about us.
We are raised to believe that to be the best version of ourselves we need to hide or get rid of our shadow. In fact, the opposite is true. To step into the essence of who really are, to be our most peaceful, powerful and healthy self, we need to integrate our shadow. Unless we do it’s our shadow rather than us that’s in charge of our life.
We contain everything we see in the world around us. We are a microcosm of the universe—one expression of currently about 8 billion others of all that life is. And every facet, every characteristic, every side serves a purpose. When we stop resisting our true nature and embrace ourselves for all that we are, we step into the most liberated, abundant and loving version of ourselves.