When Our Shadow Meets World Shadow: Healing Opportunities Across Time and Space

“People will do anything…to avoid facing their own souls. One does not become enlightened by imaging figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious.” C. Jung

Welcome to spring, dreamers,

Healing opportunities might not be the first thing we think of when we consider our pain, our wounds, or the darkness and pain of the world. But when we struggle with our nightmares, if we can remember that they are the Life Force pushing us forward, then we can be curious rather than simply despairing or frightened. Here’s how:

“Just-before-spring” is my favorite season. I call it green-shoots-season; when the first memories of our winter-buried bulbs recall that they are still alive and push up through the dark soil to the sunlight. From one day to the next, where there was just plain dark earth, we see these magic fingers of green emerge from their winter slumber. I sometimes forget that they were even there, or at least where in the garden they were, a metaphor for many of our buried hurts. I recently learned that our aversion of the dark may have begun because, unlike some other animals, we do not have night vision and can’t see our way in the dark. Therefore, the dark is scarier for us humans.

Waking or sleeping nightmares come to remind us that emotions, events, or traumas that we thought were long gone or buried are still available to us for healing. A little warmth and light gets them going towards tikkun – repair (or blossom). Most of the darkness that we encounter on the world stage – war, oppression, racism, antisemitism, violence, bullying – are the inflated versions of the unresolved individual shadows of our own psyche. “Hurt people hurt people” is a truth; but it is explanation, not excuse.

Recently I have been having dreams about ancestors. They have been varied, but all have to do with being in contact with them in present time. One had to do with making bortsch, a hardy Ukrainian beet soup often served with sour cream.

My grandfather was born in Kiev. He and his family left the Ukraine when he was three to escape the pogroms at the turn of the 20^th century, in about 1905. This is my personal bit of ancestral trauma. Just as a dream has many simultaneously true layers, I wonder how much of my heart beating faster when I walk alone on dark streets is a remnant of ancestral trauma, how much is neuro-biological encoding, how much is the personal level of an attempted assault when I was in my 20’s, and how much is cultural- a woman walking alone at night and the relative safety or lack thereof in our society.

Fast forward almost 120 years from ancestors to now, and over 40 from that time in my 20’s. The war currently waging in the Ukraine was initiated by Russia, ironically with the expressed initial purpose of “de-nazifying” the country. I have recently been in contact with the head of a relief organization and an American aid volunteer in the Ukraine about using my work from PTSDreams to assist the Ukrainians under attack in healing from their nightmares and trauma. Full circle – I get to pay it forward and hopefully make a difference now in a country that once persecuted my ancestors.

This opportunity for healing in my shadow of ancestral trauma may make a difference on a larger scale in the present. Personal shadow meets world shadow and the opportunity of tikkun olam, repair of the world.

With many blessings,

Linda Yael