Black+Moon+A+Guide+to+Healing+the+Shadow+Side

unconscious expression of the personality seeking dominance and
protection in order to hide vulnerability.
All of this is controlled by the part of the brain that scientists
have labeled the “old brain,” “reptilian brain,” or “R-complex.” The
reptilian brain keeps us alive on the most primitive levels. The reptilian
brain is responsible for feelings of rage and flight-or-flight responses that
cause unpredictable behavior. It overrides normal, rational responses
when we feel threatened in some way. When the primary fear of our
shadow side is triggered, the reptilian brain engages and we react from an
instinctual level.
Since we are reacting from our most primitive side, we usually
overreact. When we respond from the perspective of fear, we set off a
chain reaction of repetitive behavior. We initiate a cycle that we duplicate
every time our primary fear is pushed. Generally, we become angry or
passively aggressive and project our feelings onto someone else. We then
invoke a poor coping skill to regain a sense of self-control and
equilibrium. It is a process that keeps us stalled in a robotic and
dysfunctional system of stimulus and response: “X” button gets pushed
and “Y” reaction follows. This is not the way sentient beings should live.
To understand what is really going on, we need to examine the
root cause of our primary fears. The answer is quite simple but takes time
to fully integrate. Fear is the result of one basic thing: the feeling of
separation from our spiritual source. Fears are spiritual issues. Incarnating
as a physical being produces a by-product of feeling separated or cut off
from All That Is or Oneness. The archetypal themes of the Black Moon
reinforce this because the planet Tiamat itself was blown out of existence.
As spiritual beings, we innately feel that we have lost this connection to
Oneness because the density of our physical reality is profoundly different
from our true nature. Most of us have forgotten that we are part of
something much grander than ourselves and are never truly separate.
When we drift from this truth and lose our way, our shadow side
dominates and we engage the world from our darkest side.
But we can reconcile the shadow side and move back into a
higher state of consciousness when we become intimately familiar with
the Black Moon. We can learn which primary fear we manifest and the
specific interpersonal issues that are related to it. As we work with this
information, we learn to identify when we are reacting from the fear of
our shadow side and transcend it by remembering that it is really a result
of feeling disconnected from Source and is not an inherent flaw on our
part. We can consciously re-wire our brains to overrule the reptilian brain
when our fears are engaged. We can interrupt the circuit by choosing to
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