Me and the SHADOW in CRIMEA, 22–30 November

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

This seminar was gestated for 4 years, and for 6 years now it has been held in places far from the city, and each time with new force. Either People come more and more advanced,

or the theme is gathering momentum, or the time has come for the integration of the SHADOW.
Every time nature and the place give us synchronicities of unseen wonder! In the Crimean mystery “Me and the Shadow”, on the last day, during the jumps into the abyss, this gift in 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 Blesses us to continue this tradition.

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

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

Over the course of conscious life, modern man forms a character, that is, he 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 assembles, like coloured puzzle pieces, 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 kind you wanted and waited for?

****The Egobegins to take shape 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 parents and other adults, in order 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 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 adjusting to the principles of others has already become character!

The mystery is based on original technologies and on 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-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

“…With my eyes closed I saw clearly. In my “life” I was doing what I despised and hated. I have a feeling 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 that I would be praised, accepted, noticed…

Now, being honest with myself, I recognise and accept the real me, I begin to live. I have stopped playing a role and building myself a monument not made by hands, a frozen, ideal, lifeless statue. My path lies towards the real and living me, free in my expression and manifestation of myself, pushing off 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 basis of my interaction with reality. Life is boundlessly generous, and it depends on me how I receive these gifts, what I create from them. What is my degree of acceptance and interaction and co-creation with the world. I rejoice in my insights. I celebrate LIFE! I see and feel my reality in a new way. Life is a stream, an unceasing 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…”

WHAT AWAITS US at the “SHADOW”:

• Mountain climbs – as the basis of great achievements. Exploring the Ego and revealing your Shadow
• The chance to live for a week the self I don’t yet know
• Deep relaxation of the personality – a chance to rest from your Ego, and to let the 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

“Now I know what clothes feel when they are turned inside out, recut and sewn anew, filled with new content and shown to the world as a new and perfectly beautiful product of creativity! :) After the mystery I FELL IN LOVE, 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 RENOUNCES ME……MOTHER UNIVERSE, I HAVE ENOUGH RESOURCE TO FIND MY PLACE IN THE EMPTINESS AND FIND PEACE THERE. and also: IF I WAS NOT UNDERSTOOD, NOT LOVED ENOUGH, NOT ACKNOWLEDGED, NOT APPRECIATED…. – IT DOESN’T MEAN THERE WAS NO REASON.IT JUST HAD TO BE SO.NOT EVERYONE IS AS STRONG AS I AM, TO BE ABLE TO LIVE THROUGH UNBEARABLE FEELINGS”.

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

Functions of the Ego:

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

However, valuable (from the Ego’s point of view) personality qualities wear out, burn out, and no longer bring the former effect. And the “unpacked” reactions that are stored in the subconscious and are adequate to the moment atrophy. This is how a person cuts themselves off from their resources, shortens the time and quality of life and hinders their own evolution. And instead of living, fences off the entrance to new realities. In time these pushed-out realities will make up the Anti-ego, or Shadow. …certain strategies of behaviour – the same ones! It generates situations – the same ones! “Favourite rakes” cannot convince the Ego otherwise. A set of conditioned reflexes, a matrix of behavioural automatisms, or character – is the Ego’s stable resistance to a change of strategy.

The Anti-ego is the direct opposite of what a person demonstrates. Specialists in people easily read the essence from a vivid, exaggerated positioning: for example, someone excessively clever is afraid of seeming stupid (and is so!), 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 a “vile demon“.

What is your shadow called? What you hide from the “light”? What you are afraid to let your social circle see? Perhaps “Posh Stinker”? Or “Pompous Trash?” Or “Bitch-Mother?” Or maybe “Sex Bomb”, or “Dim-witted Tyrant”? And what will happen if the shadow is revealed? Surely the same as with an ordinary shadow – brought into the light, it disappears?

It turns out that the Anti-ego holds an enormous resource – 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 are convinced: the power of the whole is incredibly more effective than the struggle of disconnected halves!

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

• Everyone who wants to step beyond slavery must meet their shadow. This Mystery is for those who have matured to the decision to move towards Life and to allow themselves victory over the power of the Ego and its Shadow. Here, in Prushch, in a place created specially for holding fairy-tale mysteries and developmental laboratories of a person’s enlightenment – alternating the extreme of overnights 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, a 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 on the whole they didn’t suit me, just as I didn’t suit myself. Meeting my shadow – that was not at all easy… Now my world has doubled in size”.

**“**Wishes come true! This mystery became the starting point of my allowing myself 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. Wonderful metamorphoses happened to my loved ones when I arrived. 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 despite the fact that I don’t say a word to him about my wishes. My world is much gentler than I fantasised…”

The seminar is led by: Natalia Valitskaya.

Details of participation here:

+38 099 5022834 Alla

+38 066 910373 Elena