Me and My Shadow

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

Over the course of their conscious life a modern person forms a character, that is, gives value and significance to certain socially conditioned qualities, events, actions. From a set of such conditionings, which secure the position “I’m fine”, “Everything’s great with me”, the personality builds, like a picture from coloured puzzle pieces, an image of itself.

Today this identification of the personality with a socially approved position is usually called the “Ego”. The Ego creates destiny. Is it the one you wanted and waited for?

The Ego begins to form 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, in order to match their ideas about the world and survive.

The Ego is a false personality. 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 Ego. However, the habit of adjusting to the principles of those around us has already become character!

” …The state I keep striving for all the time is a state “on the edge”, on the edge of tears of grief and of joy, on the edge where I am unable to do anything, and I can do everything. And when nothing is happening, when I don’t feel that sharpness, I die… I am bored, the time I live through is empty. The meanings of my existence slip away. I need that sharpness. And what frightens me most is the monotony and measuredness of life, what I only hear about all around me and think that I need it too… After all, it is so normal – to want peace and stability!..

These contradictions give me no peace. I think that there are not as many people who want a life like mine as there are those who strive for stability, and I am afraid to show them my craziness. Why? I don’t know, fear… Of losing. What?”

**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 conform, in order to be accepted and get love
• to defend – to close up, justify yourself, attack, criticise, argue.
• to control safety, the actions of others, your image

The Ego dictates certain strategies of behaviour – always the same ones! It generates situations – always the same ones! Our “favourite rakes” cannot talk the Ego round. A set of conditioned reflexes, a matrix of automatic behaviours, 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 around 180 degrees and shake my insides so much that I would be putting myself back together from some spare parts, like a wizard-surgeon from an Eastern fairy tale. And I like what I put together as I never have before: in childhood, in youth. This is a really great Me! “

However, the personality’s qualities that are valuable (from the Ego’s point of view) wear out, burn out, and no longer bring the former effect. And the reactions that are “unpacked”, stored in the subconscious and adequate to the moment, atrophy. This is how a person cuts themselves off from their resources, shortens the time and the quality of their life and obstructs their own evolution. And instead of living, they fence off the entrance to new realities.

In time these suppressed realities will 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 looking stupid (and is!), a rich one of looking poor, a brave one of looking cowardly, a beautiful one of looking ugly. So it turns out that you cannot hide your true nature: the secret becomes obvious one way or another, the false image bursts at the seams, and from under the “glamorous princess” a “vile demon” crawls out.

What is the name of your shadow? What you hide from the “light”? What you are afraid to give your social circle access to? Maybe it is “Swanky Stinker”? Or “Snooty Brat”? Or “Mother Bitch”? Or perhaps “Sex Bomb”, or “Thick-skulled Tyrant”? And what will happen if the shadow is revealed? Surely the same thing that happens to an ordinary shadow – brought into the light, it disappears?

It turns out that the Anti-ego holds a huge resource – it is encapsulated energy, and the forces spent on guarding the Shadow, and the brilliant strategies of our success. You only have to allow yourself to unite the Ego with its Shadow – and you will be convinced: the power 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 go beyond slavery must meet their shadow.

There are two paths: the path of the slave and the path of the hero. There is no third!

Our mystery is for those who have matured to the decision to move along the path of the Hero and allow themselves victory over the power of the Ego and its Shadow.
Here, in the snowy Carpathians, in a cottage specially created for holding mysteries and training laboratories of human development – alternating the extreme of lonely mountains with the cosiness of a fireplace, adventure and learning, challenge and enjoyment – 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 neither they nor I, in general, were satisfied with the way things were. Meeting my shadow was not easy at all… Now my world has doubled. And now I no longer need my halves – I am whole! Of course I will go on growing and developing, building relationships – living, only now as a whole – healthy being (without the idea of my painful inferiority). I feel that I am ready to meet a whole person!”

In the mystery “Me and My Shadow” you can expect:

• An exploration of the Ego and the revealing of your Shadow
• The chance to live for a week as the self I do not yet know
• Deep relaxation of the personality – the chance to rest from your Ego, and to let the Ego rest from you.
• A unique necessity: to be aware 24 hours a day
• Meditations: dynamic and static
• Holotropic processes and other breathing practices
• A battle with the shadow and the victory of the aware “I” over the lying entity “Ego”
• Thanatotherapy, a meeting with birth and death
• Spontaneity, surprise and other surprises
• Reprogramming of the emotional, motor and vegetative mind

  

The mystery is based on original technologies and the practices of Eastern monasteries:

• Vipassanas from the world of Gurdjieff
• A retreat of local silence
• Blind days

Bonuses:

• A personal retreat: individual stalking practices inspired by the world of Castaneda
• A space of sound: Tuvan-Altai traditions
• Protection from psychic viruses (such as “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

“Take the blue pill — and the fairy tale is over. You will wake up in your bed and believe that it was a dream. Take the red pill — and you will enter Wonderland. I will show you how deep the rabbit hole goes”

( Morpheus. “The Matrix”)

“…And he showed us… The one who was Morpheus to us all nine days of the training. Who, probably, almost never sleeps or gets tired. Who has a completely childlike smile together with an incredible masculine charisma. The one I now relate to not just with love, but the way one can relate to a vital organ that has been implanted in me, and has become for me a source of strength and a fountain of energy… Ed, thank you! Edmund Shchebalsky, also known as Ezra, also known as Lim, also known as the one with thousands of names and an even greater number of talents.

Thank you for the Mastery, for the ability to lead and feel a group, for the desire to live yourself and to teach others to do it. All nine days of the training I was scared. Terribly interested: when would I break down and go back – into the “Matrix”? They didn’t let me, the rascals!:))) I know – it is all you, Lim, and she who named herself this time the One Who Connects Talents (Natasha Valitskaya), and with whom you worked together splendidly in this event! Still, two Masters, two polar energies, two worlds and two views of life act at a completely different level than one!”

The nine-day adventure is created for you by: the authors of the mysteries “The Hero’s Path”, “The Slave and His Master”, “Circle of Life”, “Initiation: the Path to Man and Woman”, Edmund Shchebalsky and Natalia Valitskaya.