There is no shadow.

If you consider your negativity, your anger, your hatred, your condescension your “shadow” and work hard to eradicate all of it from your own personality, you will never be enlightened. You will just become a very spiritual, insufferable person who secretly thinks he is the God’s gift to the world and an example for how everyone else must strive to be. There are many people like that, and some are teaching spirituality.

Your anger will just hide from you. You will be angry at angry people. Your hatred will hide from you. You will hate the haters. Your condescension will hide from you. You will despise the arrogant from the position of your superior humility.

You will know no love, only hubris.

The only way to eradicate your “shadow” is not to treat it as a shadow but love all of yourself, for all that you are, for all of it is you. You must allow yourself your anger, your hatred, your vanity. This is hard, that’s a little bit more than unpleasant. Which is why authentic enlightenment is so rare.

We are afraid that if we allow ourselves our negativity, we will do something terrible. But the reality is the opposite - by suppressing our negativity and carrying it with us wherever we go, it ultimately breaks away and we do pretty nasty things, often times without even noticing, unconsciously. We become passive aggressive, judging everyone, evaluating everyone, this time on how non-judgmental they are, or how small their shadow is. Nice trick, shadow! Hehehe.

There’s no need to express the negativity, it’s almost never called for, but the negativity itself as an emotional experience has to be accepted, surrendered to. You cannot let go of what you still have the taste for. For as long as the mind still enjoys anger, you will feel anger. Only when the mind is completely exhausted of anger, it will no longer come.

The naturally still mind of equanimity is not a mind who learned a trick of how to get rid of all the bad stuff. It’s a mind which has had so much of it, that it’s lost its taste for it, it became empty. The distinction between good emotion and bad emotion evaporated. Only stillness and acceptance remained.

Only by accepting yourself you can learn to love yourself. For as long as you’re working on your own shadow, you are feeding your shadow.