Something I’ve learned on my Shadow Work journey is that just because you moved on from something doesn’t mean you necessarily found healing.
My husband & I moved away from my home town for about 7 years. I mentioned it previously, but I grew up in a pretty strict religious household that caused me a lot of religious trauma. While we were away, I truly thought I moved on from everything in the past. I never dwelled on it or felt like I was carrying weight from it. But the year we moved back, it hit me like a ton of bricks on a deep subconscious level.
Last year when we moved back, for months I had dreams relating to my traumas growing up. It all started with a dream where a dream character asked if I wanted to be blessed. Of course I said yes, who wouldn’t want to be blessed? But when she blessed me, it was like she expanded my awareness & my perception shifted inward. I could see & feel this intense dark cloud of icky energy inside me, & from the inside out I could hear myself screaming.
I woke up from that dream & after that I could feel that icky cloud of energy stuck in my Solar Plexus Chakra, I had awful intrusive thoughts for awhile & often felt like I needed to throw up to purge the energy. I don’t think the dream character put that dark energy there, I think she just made me conscious of what was always there & I had finally grown enough on my journey to be able to start healing it, so that dream brought that energy to the surface for easier release.
Over the next several months I had other dreams that all were connected to this process. I talked with my mom about it & the resentment I had towards my dad for religion related things that really hurt me in my upbringing. She said some things that really spoke to my inner child that I needed to hear, & it helped me purge a lot of trapped emotional energy.
EFT Tapping was something that helped to bring about a breakthrough moment as well. I did one specifically for inner child healing and this helped tremendously and caused a shift. It was like I could perceive myself as two different energies residing in one body; my child self, & my present self.
After 9 months of regular shadow work & a reiki session, I feel like I’ve finally & truly resolved that aspect of my life & feel at peace with the past, that was finalized with a dream & a release ritual.
In this dream, I was standing in an open field on a cliff, just exploring, & I saw a beautiful butterfly fluttering towards me. It landed on me and stayed with me & I was so excited, it was like I made a new friend. I kept exploring with it, & there were moments it flew away & I was afraid I lost it, but it always came back to me & never left for long. I brought the butterfly to show my parents, & they both admired it. It sat on my hands, opened its wings & displayed it’s unique colors; red on the top, white underneath. But then my father looked away, as though he were distracted by something & his awareness was elsewhere. While he was unaware, he grabbed the butterfly & crushed it like it was a piece of paper. This killed the butterfly, & I was so angry at my father for killing it. I told him I hated him for it. I don’t remember any more of the dream, but when I woke up from it I realized what I needed to do.
I needed to forgive my father for what happened in the past, for killing that aspect of inner child, because he never intended to hurt me. That was apparent in the dream. His awareness was a elsewhere, religion made him blind to a lot and he is not able to see the damage it has caused. I was bitter about it for a long time but I realize now that religion really does blind people. They can have the best intentions, but once religion takes hold of one’s mind, it becomes a shackle & people don’t see clearly anymore, they only see through the lens of religion. This realization softened me, & part of me mourns for my father, because of how much religion has robbed from his life & his time with family.
So I made a butterfly that looked like the one in my dream, & on the underside I wrote down everything I was ready to release, & burned it. I forgave my father for the past, took the ashes outside, & buried them. Then I created a brand new butterfly, representing the start of a new journey of exploration myself & my inner child will now explore together. This experience was a metamorphosis, necessary preparation for the start of a new era.
This is how I’ve come to learn that just because we move on from something doesn’t mean we have healed from the pain or released it. A lot of times we just repress & forget about it. I think spirit removes layers of repression when we finally reach a place in our journey & consciousness that we’re ready to handle those things resurfacing.
Shadow work is one of the most painful but rewarding experiences. It’s a journey of going inward, into the darkness & bringing the light back in.
