Me and My SHADOW, 11–18 May, seminar-mystery, the Carpathians

Who would have thought that the mystery “Me and My Shadow” would turn my brain round by 180 degrees and shake my insides so much that I would be putting myself together afresh from some spare parts, like the wizard-surgeon in an eastern fairy tale. And what I have put together I like as I never did before: in childhood, in youth. This is a truly cool Me!

An extreme laboratory – a training quest in the CARPATHIANS. A mystery of one more life inside a destiny.

In the East they say: “Sow an action, reap a character. Sow a character, reap a destiny.”

Over the course of their conscious life, modern people form a character, that is, they give value and significance to certain socially conditioned qualities, events, actions. Out of a set of such condit

ionings, which secure the position “I’m fine”, “Everything’s great with me”, the personality puts together, like a coloured jigsaw, an image of itself. Today this identification of the personality with a socially approved position is usually called by the word “Ego”. The Ego creates destiny. Is it the one you wanted and waited for?

****The Ego begins to take shape back in childhood, and its aim is to satisfy the child’s basic needs for love, parental attention, bodily comfort and safety. The artificial superstructure of the Ego makes the child adjust their behaviour to the formal reactions and social expectations of their parents and other adults, so as to fit their picture of the world and to survive. The Ego is a false personality that mimics its environment. It is created to ensure survival and the conditions for the development of individuality. And no more than that! In adulthood, when the personality becomes strong and can survive without parents and other adults, there is no need for the false Ego. However, the habit of adapting to the principles of those around us has already become character!

“…With my eyes closed I saw clearly. In my “life” I did what I despised and hated. I have a sense of the ideal, a striving for perfection. What drove me on this path? The wish to seem better, to meet the generally accepted standards of “goodness”, so as to be praised, accepted, noticed… Now, being honest with myself, I recognise and accept the real me, I begin to live. I have stopped building a monument not made by hands out of myself and for myself, a frozen, ideal, lifeless statue. My path lies towards the real and living me, free in my expression and manifestation of myself, setting out from my own I want and my own I can and I will. A thought clothed in feeling and expressed in reality gives completeness and wholeness to my life. Trust in myself and in the world is the foundation of my interaction with reality. Life is boundlessly generous, and it depends on me how I accept these gifts, what I create out of them. What my degree of acceptance, of interaction and co-creation with the world is. I rejoice in my insights. I celebrate LIFE! I see and feel my reality in a new way. Life is a flow, ceaseless movement, in which I bathe and come alive. This is only a small part of the discoveries I made in the mystery, meeting my shadow, meeting the real me…”

“Now I know what clothes feel when they are turned inside out, recut and restitched, filled with new content and shown to the world as a new and absolutely beautiful product of creativity! 🙂 After going through the mystery I FELL IN LOVE, fell in love with Life, with people, with nature, I felt every cell of my body and my soul! Have I become different? – Yes, I have become REAL! ”

“EVEN IF THE WHOLE WORLD DISOWNS ME…… MOTHER UNIVERSE, I HAVE ENOUGH RESOURCE TO FIND MY PLACE IN THE VOID AND FIND PEACE THERE. And also: IF I HAVE NOT BEEN UNDERSTOOD, NOT LOVED ENOUGH, NOT RECOGNISED, NOT APPRECIATED…. – IT DOESN’T MEAN THAT THERE WAS NOTHING TO APPRECIATE. IT JUST HAD TO BE SO. NOT EVERYONE IS AS STRONG AS I AM, ABLE TO LIVE THROUGH UNBEARABLE FEELINGS”.

The Ego is not individuality. The Ego strives for stability. Individuality lives in the flow and thirsts for evolution.

The functions of the Ego:

• to fit in, so as to be accepted and receive love
• to defend – to close up, justify itself, attack, criticise, argue.
• to control safety, other people’s actions, its image

The Ego dictates certain strategies of behaviour – always the same ones! It generates situations – always the same ones! “Favourite rakes” cannot change the Ego’s mind. A set of conditioned reflexes, a matrix of automatic behaviour, or character – is the Ego’s steady resistance to a change of strategy. “… Who would have thought that the mystery “Me and My Shadow” in the Carpathians would turn my brain round by 180 degrees and shake my insides so much that I would be putting myself together afresh from some spare parts, like the wizard-surgeon in an eastern fairy tale. And what I have put together I like as I never did before: in childhood, in youth. This is a truly cool Me!

“ However, the valuable (from the Ego’s point of view) qualities of the personality wear out, burn out, and no longer bring the former effect. And the “unpacked” reactions, stored in the subconscious and right for the moment, atrophy. In this way a person cuts themselves off from their resources, shortens the time and quality of their life and hinders their own evolution. And instead of living, they fence off the entrance to new realities. In time these suppressed realities make up the Anti-ego, or Shadow. The Anti-ego is the direct opposite of what a person demonstrates. Specialists in people easily read the essence from a bright, exaggerated positioning: for example, someone excessively clever is afraid of seeming stupid (and is stupid!), a rich one of seeming poor, a brave one of seeming cowardly, a beautiful one of seeming ugly. And so it turns out that the true nature cannot be hidden: the secret becomes plain one way or another, the false image bursts at the seams and from under the “glammed-up princess” crawls out a “vile demon”. What is your shadow called? What you hide from the “light”? What you are afraid to let your social circle have access to? Maybe “Posh Stinker”? Or “Pompous Scum”? Or “Bitch-Mother”? Or perhaps “Sex Bomb”, or “Thick-snouted Tyrant”? And what will happen if the shadow is revealed? Surely the same as with an ordinary shadow – brought into the light, it vanishes?

It turns out that the Anti-ego holds an enormous resource – there is the encapsulated energy, and the forces spent on guarding the Shadow, and the brilliant strategies of our success. You only have to allow yourself to join the Ego with its Shadow – and you see: the might of the whole is incredibly more effective than the struggle of divided halves!

“Go to where your light casts a shadow. There you will find…” (Ezra Tngoo)

• Everyone who wants to break out beyond slavery must meet their shadow. This Mystery is for those who have ripened to the decision to move towards Life and to allow themselves victory over the power of the Ego and its Shadow. Here, in Pruschem, in a place specially created for holding fairy-tale mysteries and developmental laboratories of human enlightenment – alternating the extreme of nights in caves, climbs, and the drive of a jump into the abyss with the cosiness of an adobe house – an adventure and learning await you, challenge and delight – You can safely and boldly plunge into the energy-bearing world of your Shadow. To become whole again! “… There I understood that all my life I had been only a part of myself. And the people in my life were also somehow half-made and unfinished, and did not suit me on the whole, just as I did not suit myself. Meeting my shadow was very hard… Now my world has doubled in size”. Climbs in the winter mountains – as the foundation of great achievements. Exploring the Ego and revealing your Shadow
• The chance to live, for a week, the self I do not yet know
• Deep relaxation of the personality – the chance to rest from your Ego, and let your Ego rest from You.
• Meditations: dynamic and static
• Holotropic processes and other breathing practices
• A battle with the shadow and the victory of the conscious “I” over the false entity of the “Ego”
• Spontaneity, the unexpected and other surprises

“Wishes come true! This mystery became the starting point of my permission to Be and not to judge. How much resource I received from being in my Shadow. I was amazed at how many-sided and whole I am, how much delight and permission there is in me, how the world accepts and loves me. Amazing metamorphoses happened with my loved ones when I got back. My Beloved became the embodiment of my dream; what I had been trying to get from him for months he now does easily by himself, inspired by love for me, and this while I do not say a word to him about my wishes. People around me are drawn to me, touch me, listen to me, sniff me – it is very pleasant. I feel myself to be a great Treasure. An incredible discovery for me was the feeling that Everything Is Enough, and from here it can only get better. I have allowed myself to live without improvements, Everything is already Perfect. My world is far tenderer than I fantasised about it…”

The mystery rests on original technologies and on the practices of eastern monasteries:

• Vipassanas from the world of Gurdjieff
• A retreat of local silence
• A blind day and night

Bonuses:

• A personal retreat: individual stalking practices inspired by the world of Castaneda
• A space of sound: Tuvan and Altai traditions
• Protection from psychic viruses (like “I must…”, “They are to blame…”, “I can’t…”)
• The freedom to choose your path and move towards yourself
• The power to be accepted, loved, in demand
• The will to manage life situations

The seminar is led by: Natalia Valitskaya.

I want to share – I carried this seminar for 4 years, and for 5 years now it has been held in places far from the city and each time with new force. Whether People are coming ever more advanced, or the theme is gathering momentum, or the time has come for the integration of the SHADOW. Each time nature and the place give us synchronicities of unseen wonder! In October the 5th annual “Me and the Shadow” seminar took place. On the last day of the mystery, during the jumps into the abyss, this gift on the clouds, which you can see on the poster, became a certificate confirming the quality of the participants’ results. A miracle of nature! – as within, so without. The Earth rejoices :) and I want to carry on this tradition.

Details of how to take part here:

+38066910373 Yelena