A
Conversation with

Debbie Ford

(Click image above
to order book)

“Most of us set out on the path to personal growth because at some point the burden of our pain becomes too much to bear. The Dark Side of the Light Chasers is about unmasking that aspect of ourselves which destroys our relationships, kills our spirit, and keeps us from fulfilling our dreams. It is what the psychologist Carl Jung called the shadow. It contains all the parts of ourselves that we have tried to hide or deny. It contains those dark aspects that we believe are not acceptable to our family, friends, and most importantly, ourselves. The dark side is stuffed deeply within our consciousness, hidden from ourselves and others. The message we get from this hidden place is simple: there is something wrong with me. I’m not okay. I’m not lovable. I’m not deserving. I’m not worthy.

Instead of trying to suppress our shadows we need to unconceal, [acknowledge] and embrace the very things we are most afraid of facing. ‘It is the shadow that holds the clues,’ says the spiritual teacher and author Lazaris. ‘The shadow also holds the secret of change, change that can affect you on a cellular level, change that can affect your very DNA.’ Our shadows hold the essence of who we are. They hold our most treasured gifts….”

— from The Dark Side of the Light Chasers by Debbie Ford

The Monthly Aspectarian: Debbie, I think one of the things that puts people off about examining the “dark side” is that most people think only bad things are hidden there. But the fact is, there are good things hidden there as well. Debbie Ford: Absolutely. In fact, most of the things people are looking for are hidden in the dark. As we allow both sides to come up, both those things that we’ve denied and hidden that we’re ashamed of, and those things that we’ve denied and hidden that we desire but think we don’t have . . . what happens is amazing. Light comes up. As dark as you can go is as light as you can go.

TMA: How would you describe the difference between the dark shadow and the light shadow?

DF: We all want our light shadow; most of us don’t want to have anything to do with our dark shadow. Our light shadow is probably what we would consider positive qualities and the dark shadow is probably what we’d consider negative qualities.

TMA: Then what’s in our light shadow are things that we have that we think we don’t have but actually do?.

DF: Either that or that we don’t have access to their use. Once again, we want to have choice. Some of us were told it’s not okay to be sexy or it’s not okay to speak up or it’s not okay to be rich. We put those parts of ourselves in the shadow. I like the metaphor of the castle: that within each of us there’s this beautiful, magnificent castle and for every room in the castle there’s a quality that exists within ourselves. As we grow up, depending on which home and which set of parents . . . if they said it’s not okay to be lazy or it’s not okay to speak up or it’s not okay to speak nicely about yourself . . . whatever you were told, you close those rooms in your castle. Then we get to the point where we think we’re a two bedroom house that needs work instead of a giant, magnificent castle. We want to go in and open all these doors so that we can allow these parts of ourselves.

TMA: Would you say that everybody possesses all the qualities?

DF: Absolutely. There’s nothing that we fear, can see or conceive that we are not. It’s a holographic universe, and within each of us is an imprint of all that ever was or will be. It’s only that model of the universe that will allow you to embrace your entire shadow. Understanding that we’re a microcosm of the macrocosm; that we’re not in the world, the world is within us; and if we can love this internal world, then we’ll be able to love the external world.

TMA: How did you come to be involved in all of this yourself?

DF: My sister said that I got to lead the shadow workshops because I had the biggest shadow in America. I suffered from a lot of sadness, anxiety, worrying, fear. For my whole life, as far back as I can remember, I felt really insecure, like I didn’t belong, didn’t fit in. Facilitating workshops wasn’t what I was looking to do with my life, it just came out of doing my own healing work and spending five years and too much money chasing the light: saying affirmations, reading hundreds of books and meditating for weeks on end trying to find wholeness. Although I had changed my life dramatically and my friends had changed and my desires had changed, I realized in my meditation that I still hated parts of myself.

TMA: You make an important point: you’re not saying that you didn’t get anything out of chasing the light. You got a lot out of it, but you just didn’t get everything that you needed.

DF: Yes, or everything I wanted. My life was good, but I wanted it to be great . . and so I wasn’t willing to stop there. In a business seminar that I took, we had to get up and say what we were committed to in the world. At the time, I wanted to bring self esteem into the school systems. There were about 25 people there and I was being videotaped. In the middle of my talk, the facilitator hollered out, “You know, you’re a bitch!” I thought, “I know that; how does she know?” After all, I had just spent five years and $50,000 covering up this part of myself, creating a whole new spiritual, sweet persona in order to hide this part and here it was exposed. I was totally humiliated. Then she asked me a couple of questions that literally changed my life.

She asked what’s good about being a bitch, and of course I couldn’t find anything at that moment. Then she said, “Let me ask you something. If you were remodeling a house and you were $20,000 over budget and five weeks late, do you think it might help you to be a little bitchy?” I said, “Hmm, absolutely!” Then she said, “As a retailer, if someone wants to return merchandise and you don’t want to take it, does it help you to be a little bitchy or forceful? Once again I said, “Absolutely!” All of a sudden this light went on that this part of myself that I hated so much, that I had done everything to try to get rid of – which I didn’t, of course – had a gift, was trying to give me something.

Then she said, “Either you’re going to use it or it’s going to use you. Anything you don’t embrace about yourself gets to use you.” It was at that moment that I felt like a physical release; like I had let go of this hundred pound weight that I had been carrying around my whole life, the shame of having these unwanted parts. I realized that if I could just find the gift of each and every part, then they would become healthy parts of my psyche. Then I would get to choose whether I wanted to use that part or not. Mostly, I had no choice.

What I see as I lead seminars all over the country, is that people just don’t have any choice. It’s not that they don’t know that sometimes it’s good to be able to lie or protect themselves, to be a little forceful — but that they don’t have any choice.

The shadow, as I explain in the book, is like a beach ball. Imagine holding a beach ball under water. You have to expend a lot of your internal energy trying to keep that part of you down. Then the minute you take your attention off holding it down, it pops up and hits you in the face. That’s why it’s so important that people deal with this — because the shadow is the part that keeps coming up that stops you from creating the relationship you want, or the amount of money you want, or the health that you desire.

TMA: Would you say there are some things in the shadow that you really do need to keep there? As a male, there are some things in my shadow that would only be appropriate in war situations, places that I don’t expect ever to be in this lifetime.

DF: I think the only time we need to fear the shadow is when it’s hidden. I think that when humans are whole, when we’re integrated, we always take the highest evolutionary choice. We will always choose the highest behavior. So to be able to know that we could be that hateful, that we could kill, is a good thing. We don’t want to get rid of that part, but to understand it and have compassion and thank God that we have it – because if you needed to protect yourself, you could.

TMA: I wasn’t saying to hide it, but to not use it. You can’t use some of these things unless you are in appropriate situations.

DF: Yes, but if you know that you have it and you’re not hiding it, it’s not in the shadow. It’s only in the shadow if it’s something that you’re ashamed of, the person you’d rather not be, the thing that you wouldn’t want said about you in the newspaper.

TMA: Or something that you’re trying to deny to yourself.

DF: Exactly. The outer world is a mirror of our inner world. If I’m loving my inner world and I have compassion and respect for my own inner world, then that’s how I will be in the outer world. That’s what will show up in my life. That’s what people don’t understand. You know, if you have people showing up in your life that are lying or cheating or hateful, they’re just mirroring some disowned aspect of yourself. It’s important that we learn to have compassion for these parts and integrate them into our psyche so that we don’t have to keep creating people in order to show us up.

TMA: How would you recommend that people begin to identify what they’re been hiding from themselves?

DF: In the book, there’s an exercise that I love. You write down the three people that you least like, then you write down the three qualities about them that you hate. You’ll get nine qualities of your shadow. Now it’s important that if you write down a rapist or a murderer or a pedophile that you break it down. You ask what kind of person would be a murderer or a rapist. That’s an important question when you’re dealing with the shadow: what kind of person would do that? Oftentimes we keep ourselves separate, different. Our ego says “Oh, I would never do that. I’ve never done that.” So if we break it down and find out what kind of person, then we can relate.

The same goes for the light shadow. If you write down the three people that you admire the most, that you’re in the most awe of, and write down three of the qualities that you see in them, then you’ll have nine of the qualities of your light shadow, qualities that are there that you probably need to give attention to so that they can be birthed to a greater degree.

TMA: People seem to have various levels of innate intelligence that they’re born with. Might there not be qualities that a person may or may not have, based on how naturally bright they are?

DF: I don’t think so. I think they have them. Deepak Chopra says, “It’s in the seeds of our karma,” the part that we’re going to come in with. It’s not that we don’t have all of these, but each of us is going to come in with different issues that we need to deal with. I was a person who grew up always thinking I was stupid, so of course I had to marry someone I thought was brilliant. I wanted that part. That’s what we do – we try to surround ourselves with people who will mirror back the parts we think we don’t have. It was in doing that that I actually found my own brilliance. It was important that although I didn’t do well in school, I am excelling now in my life, everywhere. But it’s not because I have what some people would call great academic skills or the kind of brilliance that does well in school. Everyone’s got a different level they can manifest. The important thing for each individual to know is that if you see something you love out there, it’s because you possess that level. If you see something that shows up as greatness or excitement or humor and that’s what you’re attracted to, you want to go after those qualities because those are the qualities that will lead you to create the life you love. To create yourself at your fullest potential.

TMA: So a person realizes that they have their dark shadow and their light shadow. How then do they work to access that which has been cut off from them?

DF: First, we have to see what we have been trying to hide, deny or suppress. The second step is owning it, which in a psychological model would be accepting it, seeing when you’ve been that or how you could have that. And then the third step, which I believe is the step that will transform your life, is to embrace it, to see the gift of it. I have people do that by going inside, because the answers are within. We’ve all heard that before but we’re a society that keeps trying to get the answers from the outer world. We want to read books or listen to tapes or go to seminars . . . but if we go inside and dialog with these aspects of ourselves, we can learn what they’re trying to teach us. We can learn what they need so as to come forth.

TMA: What would be the gift of a negative trait? Let’s say it’s lying. That comes in handy if you’re hiding Jews from the Nazis.

DF: Exactly.

TMA: What’s another negative that one would have a hard time finding a gift in?

DF: Everything! Because if your parents had it and you decide, “I don’t want to have that” . . .you know, everybody’s got a list of traits that they find totally offensive. People cannot see themselves, but the universe is so magically designed that we can see ourselves in others. If you are emotionally affected by another human being, pointing your finger, judging, upset, charged up – or on the positive side loving them, thinking they’re so fabulous . . . if there’s any kind of energy going on, it’s a projection of an aspect of yourself.

TMA: Debbie, do you have a statement of essence?

DF: My favorite quote is from the poet Rumi. He said “Like God, when you see your beauty, you’ll be the idol of yourself.” I think our beauty is the totality of ourselves, the light and the dark. We need to find the beauty in every aspect of ourselves.

Debbie Ford has been conducting seminars for several years at the Chopra Center for Well Being in La Jolla, California, where she is a consultant and teacher. She is currently leading “Shadow Process” workshops nationwide and is a featured speaker at the Whole Life Expo at the Rosemont Center in October.