Monthly Archives: December 2024

Soul Denial and Fear’s Projection

Photo by Ashley Batz on Unsplash

People will do anything, no matter how absurd, to avoid facing their own soul. One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light but by making the darkness conscious.

Carl Jung (goodreads.com)

We are living in increasingly absurd times due to our refusal to understand ourselves as embodied souls. From a mystical vertical perspective, denial represents an energy of contraction away from life and the timeless beauty of our existence. For many, our conscious identity forms around a limited, wounded version of ourselves. This identity must significantly diminish for us to hear our soul and its constant expansion guiding our body, heart, and mind.

When we come together to perceive, feel, and articulate the identity within us, we illuminate the soul’s light upon our wounded humanity. We have been conditioned to overlook life’s suffering as a way of life. We now do this through increasingly sophisticated and disguised means. Our life energy is expended to construct an illusory existence rooted in our collective denial of suffering, where suffering becomes a “no-go zone” in our shared psyche, as Jung describes. Soul contact does not disconnect from suffering.

Fear is projected onto the world around us when it goes unacknowledged. Unintegrated fear collects clutter in our collective living space. Please make no mistake: fear is a fierce competitor for our attention. Fear acts like yeast, growing until it is nurtured. It is, therefore, a relentless survival energy that we should befriend and understand. If we do not, every decision I make will be tinged with it. I will lead a life shaped by fear rather than love. Einstein referred to the most important decision we make in life as whether or not the world is a friendly place.

Projected, unowned fear creates a distinctly unfriendly world. It builds as a vast fear shadow within our collective and ancestral energy. Its presence restricts access to the inner depths of our hearts and souls. Without contact with our inner soul home, we try to create an external sanctuary that shields us from confronting our inner fears. We are discovering that this backward approach to life does not work—individually and collectively. As Betty Kovačs states in her (highly recommended) 2024 Anthony Chene interview, when we perceive ourselves as separate from life, we feel the need to control it (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ALFrYW5mgZw).

I love working with small groups drawn to responsible relationships of shadow exploration. When we slow down together to witness and embody the massive, unintegrated fear shadows within us, new inner worlds emerge. Before we know it, we create new outer worlds through our increased trust in life as it is. We can feel hopeful and uplifted for no apparent external reason. We seem to understand that life has more dimensions to her than we realized. We discover that we can trust life even when the going gets tough and becomes even tougher.

The accumulated trash bin of discarded shadows is now everybody’s business because our collective living room is becoming intolerable. Denial of this responsibility also denies the life within us. Projecting our denied fear onto specific populations or individuals or leaving it for the next generation denies access to the oneness intelligence of our soul. Whether we like it or not, our soul is here for all of life—wounded and beautiful. Meeting fear with curiosity paradoxically awakens the timeless, unconditioned soul-love waiting to be discovered within our body, heart, and mind.

When my death time arrives, it will be a life transition. I hope to slip away easily, knowing that I have served life through my God-given determination to be present for the transcendent and inclusive nature of soul love: that timeless, unconditional life-belonging that meets unintegrated fear with tender understanding. When the soul is no longer denied by our unintegrated fear projections, death simply dissolves into life, and life is restored to love.