Curses vs Shadow work #IntoTheShadows

For this #owc I would like to share why cursing & hexing don't make any sense to me + my love of shadow work. At the end I'll share my favorite new shadow work exercise.

First, my standard disclaimers:

1. These are my current best understandings and subject to future revision as I learn more.

2. I hold no disrespect or judgment of other people’s paths and choices. It’s all choice and it’s all learning.

Hexes & curses don’t make sense to me because they presuppose that there is such a thing called an “Other” — someone or something that is not You. If ultimately All Is One then there aren’t really any other people to curse!

This means that if you’re cursing someone you’re only ever ultimately cursing yourself.

“Wait a minute, other people seem pretty real to me,” you might say. Yes, we can make the distinction between Ultimate Truth/Ultimate Reality being Oneness and Relative Truth/Relative Reality being the *appearance* of separateness. But even on a mundane level, the level at which it appears that there are other people, I am reminded of something said by activist Julia Butterfly Hill regarding trash: “When you throw something away… where is away?”

In the shamanic path I follow it is taught that there is only one Human, just like there’s only one Bear that all the bears imprinted off of and are reflections of, there’s only one Eagle, etc. We’re like cells in the one Human’s body. what we call a cell that starts attacking other cells in the body: cancer.

It is also taught that all energy returns to its origin. This isn’t taught as a belief, it is taught as an observation of the metaphysical laws of reality—i.e. just the way things work.

Whether on a magickal or a mundane level, harming one’s Self by harming others results in the necessity to go through a process of atonement, or at-one-ment, meaning the process of coming back to oneness. In serious cases, such as murder, this can take lifetimes. So just because you think you avoided the consequences of your actions in this lifetime doesn’t necessarily mean that you have. This isn’t a punishment, it’s just the natural consequence of actions that deeply presuppose the opposite of oneness.

In Amazonian shamanism (and other parts of South America), this kind of manipulative magick is called brujeria (Spanish for witchcraft) vs curanderismo (traditional healing). An interesting side note regarding brujeria vs curanderismo: brujeria is the low hanging fruit of the spiritual world. One can become an effective brujo in about 6 months. Becoming an effective healer takes years and lifetimes.

One of the we use for manipulative magick is “playing with the mirror.” The outer world that we experience with our senses is the mirror — it reflects back to us our own state of consciousness.

Have you ever noticed the way whether you’re in a good mood or a bad mood as an effect on how the world shows up, even how strangers treat you? Have you ever had the experience of making a change inside yourself and having the world change in response?

Conversely, have you ever tried to fix your hair by brushing your mirror? How about putting makeup on your mirror? Doesn’t work! Playing with the mirror misses the real point of magick, which is to change your own consciousness.

And that is why shadow work is so important. The outer world is always mirroring our whole selves back to us, including the parts of ourselves in our shadow that we can’t see. By bringing our shadow into conscious awareness we gain more power to choose what we emit and thus what experiences get reflected back to us.

What is the shadow really? One way to think of it is as the opposite of enlightenment. Enlightenment is the realization of Oneness, and the ability to identify with everyone and everything as Self. Conversely, the shadow consists of all the aspects of ourselves that we have disowned or disidentified from. Consciously we think we are NOT like “that,” whatever “that” is. Unconsciously we have shoved the aspects of ourselves that are exactly like “that” into the shadow.

When we do this, the outer world still mirrors those aspects off ourselves back to us. We see the reflection, but we think it’s “out there” in someone or something else. This is called projection.

The more you understand projection, the more you’ll be able to see how the things people are upset with in the world are really things they’re upset with in themselves.

This also means the things you’re upset with other people about are really things you’re upset with yourself about.

A quick note here: this does not mean that we allow injustice to continue in the relative world, or that we blame victims for their perpetrator’s actions. When we see someone harming another, it’s appropriate to stop it.

I’ll give a very personal example of the way changing our shadow can change the way the world reflects back to us: when I did some deep work to heal the unconscious belief I had that I was “not OK” — that there was something fundamentally wrong with me — suddenly way hotter people started hitting on me on dating apps. I hadn’t changed my profile or picture, and it wasn’t a change in behavior because the change included people who were messaging me first. It shocked me at the time but it was proof that what we emit, even unconsciously, gets reflected back to us. AND, any upset I had about “people don’t find me attractive” was really just a reflection that I didn’t find myself attractive.

This is also why cursing doesn’t make sense to me: it’s procrastination & distraction. If I’m upset enough with someone to want to curse them, then I need to be looking at myself and what I need to transform inside me. Time & energy spent cursing another is time & energy one could have spent doing one’s own inner work.

A sidebar here about teacher plants: shadow work is something most people don’t understand about how these plants work. They sign up for an ayahuasca ceremony expecting a psychedelic roller coaster ride and instead they get shown their own shit and they don’t like it. Same thing with mushrooms, those little guys tend to take a person right to exactly what you don’t want to look at but most need to right now. When people aren’t prepared for that it can be brutal. I’ve heard people say that mushrooms can be “mean” but only a child mistakes tough love for meanness. When it comes to these ancient teachers we are children and it’s helpful to have someone more advanced along the path to help you learn.

Luckily we can do shadow work without ingesting mind altering plants and fungi :-)

My favorite new shadow work exercises comes from tantra. I believe the person who taught it to me said it comes from Leslie Temple-Thurston’s book The Marriage of Spirit: Enlightened Living in Today’s World, but don’t hold me to that.

1. Fold a piece of paper in half so you have two columns.

2. Think of a person who irks you. They just get on your nerves or under your skin.

3. In the first column, write down everything about them that bugs you or makes you angry. Especially write down the things you just don’t understand.

4. In the second column, next to each item from the first column, write down the opposite behavior or way of being. So, if someone is “always putting on a show” the opposite might be “acts authentically & transparently.”

5. Notice any projection in the first column — in what ways do you do the things that upset you in another? When I first did this exercise, this step was horrifying. View the horror, accept the past, and then make a different choice for the future.

6. Look over both lists and notice how each of these sets of opposites is creating polarity inside you. We contain all of it. We are all of it.

If you got this far, thanks for reading and I hope you do the exercise. I’d love it if you share anything about your experience with the exercise in the comments.