Poetry: The Fully Integrated Shadow

Art by Srimati

The Fully Integrated Shadow

There is nothing more liberating to me than talking about my traumas, pain, and suffering because these things do not have a hold on me.

As I speak them, I break through the prison of shame and self-hate,

the fear others will judge me as being less conscious, more tied to my stories,

and married to my pain

like its my beloved.

The fear that I am just too much or too sad or too everything bad.

And my stories will destroy me.

And I will crumble beneath the weight of them, my light dying.

I step into the story of my history and no longer quiver and shake at my own lived experience.

I can hear the voices of others, shouting at me with disgust that I would dare breathe or utter those words,

but I will turn my head and smile at them wryly.

"Fine, fine, human",

I smile baring my teeth at the humorous display of pride and disgust.

Those people standing with their polished appearance,

telling me like this I am anything but.

Small and lowly. A peasant living in a shack.

Will you ever rise to glory here?

They shake their head, tsking me.

Acting as though riches, beauty, and status are the crowning glory of God.

I laugh because I know God loves to hide in humble places,

where the heart dwells beating one with the Earth and the stars,

free from all the entangled disillusion of greed and Earth's destruction.

She calls me home and invites me to unlock myself.

Unleash myself from the burning fakeness of the modern cage and open myself to the furnace of the earth's soil,

where death and dying nurture budding sprouts.

I laugh because I'm not speaking my stories to reaffirm myself or to torcher myself with my own suffering.

I can simply look at myself and my history and the pain I've birthed through,

the grief I've moved through,

and there is not a drop of disgust left for it.

I see the glory of my birth.

This me that is now soverign and standing in the ruins of myself like a warrior on the battlefield.

Birthed through a tumultuous fire that catapulted me into advanced territory I'd never thought I'd find myself.

Here in these ancient ruins of myself, there is only self awareness.

Myself within it, without it, in the moment in time.

As if I'm gazing at it from the center of wisdom: a primordial space existing in my body.

My origin reflected in the crumbling buildings of the past.

Oh that trouble making past.

I don't feel it keeping me down in darkness.

For me, the dawn is on the horizon and I am stepping into the light with all of it,

holding onto it like a world all its own,

smiling, knowing I have absolutely nothing to fear within myself.

Because I've faced the absolute darkest shit and self loathing within me.

I had my night in the chamber.

And my patterns do not make me shudder and shake and fall apart with incapability,

they do not torture my inner self, calling it damaged and damned and broken.

I'm not holding myself together with plastic philosophies and smiles,

taping other people's words to myself, turning myself into a mutilated word clone

of other people's stories and ideas of who I ought to be,

while the me inside dies a slow death.

I know there is still so much of myself to refine. To work on.

So much relating that needs correction.

So many mes still needing to be welcomed back home.

The difference is, I am not trying to force myself into greatness.

Rather I'm allowing the greatness in me to reveal itself,

one glamorous peak a boo at a time.

Glimmering at me beneath the surface of these demons.

Oh there she is!

This is me. Hello world.