"Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate."
~ Carl Jung
Every single thing that exists in our reality is a manifestation of our own will - whether conscious or unconscious. The problem is, most of us have a will that is extremely divided between our conscious and unconscious selves. Doing the work of making our unconscious conscious is the work of unifying our will, stepping into our power as magical manifestors of whatever we want, and performing the highest level of spiritual alchemy. Join Chelsea Cora in today's episode as she dives deeper into this subject and provides tangible ways that we can unify our will by bringing our shadow parts into the light.
Resource Mentioned:
Ready to unify your own conscious and unconscious selves? Check out Chelsea's offerings: https://www.chelseacora.com/
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Follow The Soulful Self Podcast on Instagram:
https://www.instagram.com/thesoulfulselfpodcast/
Follow Chelsea Cora on Instagram:
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Watch the video version of this episode on YouTube: https://youtu.be/kQJw38WBYNg
"Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate."
~ Carl Jung
Every single thing that exists in our reality is a manifestation of our own will - whether conscious or unconscious. The problem is, most of us have a will that is extremely divided between our conscious and unconscious selves. Doing the work of making our unconscious conscious is the work of unifying our will, stepping into our power as magical manifestors of whatever we want, and performing the highest level of spiritual alchemy. Join Chelsea Cora in today's episode as she dives deeper into this subject and provides tangible ways that we can unify our will by bringing our shadow parts into the light.
Resource Mentioned:
Ready to unify your own conscious and unconscious selves? Check out Chelsea's offerings: https://www.chelseacora.com/
The Soulful Self Podcast feedback survey: https://forms.gle/c6H56bns8QzS56Rp9
Follow The Soulful Self Podcast on Instagram:
https://www.instagram.com/thesoulfulselfpodcast/
Follow Chelsea Cora on Instagram:
https://www.instagram.com/iamchelseacora/
Watch the video version of this episode on YouTube: https://youtu.be/kQJw38WBYNg
Hello and welcome to the soulful self podcast. I'm your host, Chelsea Cora. This podcast is a resource for all spiritual beings to grow personally, heal emotionally, and align with our highest spiritual evolvement. No matter what this human experience throws our way. Thank you so much for being here. Now let's get started. Hello, and welcome to episode 85 of the soulful self podcast. I am your host, Chelsea Cora. And I'm so excited to have everybody here today because we are talking about a truly transformative topic, which is the topic of making the unconscious conscious aka performing spiritual alchemy. Making the unconscious conscious is the single most transformative thing that we can do to change our own personal realities, as well as our collective reality. And this is precisely what we're diving into in today's episode. And I want to start things off by a quote from the renowned psychologist Carl Jung. He says, Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate. I love this quote, because it proposes the very real idea that everything in our life, our job, our relationships, the possessions that we have the home that we're living in our lived reality, the experience that we are moving through, is a result of our own unconscious, our deep seated belief systems, parts of our personality that we are not even aware of, that are controlling the events of our life, and we don't even realize it. Another way that I like to think of this is that we are an energetic match for everything that's already in our lives. You know, when we think about manifestation and the law of attraction, we're always trying to think positive thoughts use affirmations or visualization to create a reality that is different from the life that we're already living in. However, the life that we're already living in is something that has magnetized to us through the law of attraction already. It's just that the parts of us that are an energetic match to this life, are the parts of us that are unconscious that we are not consciously aware of. When we think about our own self image, our own way of perceiving ourselves, it can be compared to a tip of an iceberg. There's that little small 5%, that is above water that is visible to us. And then there is the 95% that is below the water that is submerged, that we don't even know about. And that is the part that is dictating all of the events and circumstances in our lives. And so many of us get so frustrated, because we find ourselves engaged in repeated cycles of undesirable behaviors and thought patterns of self sabotage of toxic relationships, and so on. And we are living in this this loop of experiencing the same people, places and things may be showing up in the form of a different manifested person or place, but it's the same life themes happening over and over and over again. And no matter what we do, we can't seem to change them. No matter how hard we work, we seem to always make the same amount of income. No matter how many self help books we read, we seem to continue to attract to us emotionally unavailable people or continue to manifest the same unhealthy or undesirable dynamics in our relationships. Yet, we desperately want something better. And this is why the law of attraction and manifestation has become so popularized and such a shiny thing to reach for such an enticing idea because we do want to transform our lives. We do want to be able to access bigger and better things, especially when all of the things that we're doing in the physical world, all of the work we're putting in all of the steps that we are taking are not getting us there. We want to believe that we can just go within ourselves and visualize or change our energy quote unquote, and become step into the life that we've always wanted to live. And this is absolutely possible the Law of Attraction manifestation all of that is so real. However, in order to make it work for us, in order to become efficient and effective manifest errs, we have to unify our conscious and subconscious or unconscious, we have to be able to close the gap between who we are underneath that submerged layer of iceberg. And that small percentage that we are displaying to the world, we have to become comfortable in essence, with what Carl Jung describes, or did describe as our shadow, the shadow part of the psyche, the part of us that we are not aware of that is submerged that has all of these unconscious desires and tendencies that result for better or worse in the life that we are currently living. Now if you're interested in hearing a more in depth discussion and explanation of what the human shadow is, then I recommend checking out episode 34 of this podcast in which I do a deep dive explicitly into the shadow and shadow work. But I will say that the shadow is something that Carl Jung described as the thing a person has no wish to be at represents the unknown dark side of the personality or of society at large, we have the individual and then the collective shadow, it represents unknown or little known qualities of the ego or the personality. These can be inferiority that we all have, but typically prefer not to confront. These are attributes that might seem weak, socially unacceptable, or even sinister, or evil. And the shadow can become most visible when somebody is in the throes of difficult emotions like anger, anxiety, or depression, or even when they are under the influence of alcohol or other substances. And this is something that I can relate to on a personal example, because basically, the shadow is all of the things within us that we are not aware of that we have unconsciously, or consciously decided to reject and deny throughout our whole lives. Because, you know, we learned somewhere along the way that it's not safe to display these qualities or that these qualities are somehow wrong. And so they fester in the shadow and then they start to come out in uncontrollable ways. For example, whenever I have been in relationships in the past, not anymore, not since doing my shadow integration work. But in the past, when I was constantly attracting to me sort of toxic codependent styles of relating to people and relationships. Basically, there will come times in romantic relationships in which I would become very volatile and reactive, because I would be triggered and I would feel like my partner was doing something to me, that was unfair. And I would react in a burst of anger or name calling, or maybe yelling, or even breaking something. And these are not qualities that I saw myself as having I didn't see myself as a mean volatile or even abusive person at all, and I will end I'd never wanted to portray that to the world. And so when these outbursts would come out of me almost, seemingly involuntarily, it would be really dysfunctional, it would be really hard to deal with both for myself and whoever was on the receiving end of that emotional discharge. And until I was willing to own and open up to the side of myself that was angry, abusive, volatile, etc. And actually integrate that part of myself into the hole instead of continuously stuffing it into this category of who I am not who I do not want to associate with and what I do not want to be or be seen as in the world, when I stopped putting it in that category and separating myself from it. And I brought it into the Light of Consciousness of my unconscious awareness, it was able to integrate and therefore when I made the conscious the unconscious conscious, it stopped ruling or directing my life in such a way. So this is one example of how the shadow can manifest. Another thing that Carl Jung states when he talks about the shadow Is that when an individual makes an attempt to see his shadow he becomes aware of and often ashamed of those qualities and impulses he denies in himself but can plainly see in others, such things as egotism, mental laziness, and sloppiness, unreal fantasies, schemes and plots, carelessness and cowardice, in ordinate, love of money and possessions, etc. So you can see that these qualities are pretty negative carelessness, laziness, sloppiness, egotism. These are all things that collectively and individually we have associated as bad and wrong, unacceptable, undesirable character traits. And so collectively and individually, we have shoved these things into the shadow, and I made a conscious decision to dis identify with them. However, these things exist in the world, they exist in us, they exist in others, they exist in our collective reality. And this is one of the ways that we can start to become aware of our shadow is to notice when we are projecting our own unconscious character traits onto somebody else. And this can come along when somebody else's behavior elicits within us a strong emotional response. For example, when we see a character trait that we might describe as lazy or careless, it will give us some type of emotional reaction such as annoyance or frustration. And in our own internal world, we might be going on and on, oh, my God, that person is so lazy, I can't believe they're doing this. Why would they do that they're a bad person, I would never do something like that I could never see myself acting in that way. When we start having an emotional response to somebody else's behavior in that way, it is an indicator that they are displaying an unknown part of our own shadow, our own unconscious self. And so what we can then do is, realize what's happening be the observer of these thoughts and of this reactivity going on in our internal world. And we can say, Okay, I am noticing that somebody is watching TV all day, in their underwear and not being productive at all. And so I am associating that with the character trait of lazy, and it's making me frustrated, it's causing me to have a very cynical judgment, judgmental, negative, emotional reaction to them. So what I'm going to do is, even though I don't do that, I don't do that specific behavior of sitting in my underwear all day and watching TV, I'm going to allow myself to be the observer, as I move through my life and see where I am acting out in ways that I might describe as lazy. Because oftentimes, when we are displaying these character traits within our own lives, we tend to write it off, as Oh, this is just a one time thing, I'm not usually like this. Or we just somehow maneuver our conscious awareness around it in a way where we're not actually consciously aware of what we're doing. So I might realize that I like to cut corners at work. And when something is asked of me, instead of doing it in a thorough way, instead of doing it the right way, I find ways to do it a lazy way, where I'm massively cutting a corner. And even though it's not getting done, the way it should be getting done, it's still getting done. To the degree that I can say that it's done. That's just a random example. So if I'm willing to apply this character trait of laziness, and see where it might be manifesting in my own life, I can come to the realization that okay, this is how this unclaimed shadow aspect that I was projecting onto somebody else that was making me so infuriated or annoyed, is manifesting in my own life. And then what I can do is I can choose to look at that with love. And this is the process of shadow integration. It's one of the processes, there's so many out there, but this is one of them, where once I've become aware of this, how it's manifesting in my life, I might at first feel a lot of shame around it and be like, Wow, I didn't I didn't perceive this to be my self image. I didn't think that I was associated with laziness, but actually, now that I'm open to seeing myself more clearly I see that yes, I do engage in lazy behavior. And what I can do is I can make it okay rather than punishing myself. She meaning myself. And in fact, rejecting that part of myself further sending it deeper into the shadows, I can love that part of myself I can open up to learning how to love and accept that part of myself and through Love is the only way that we can integrate the unconscious parts of ourselves so that they stop ruling our conscious reality. So it's very multi layered, because on one hand, we can explore our shadow through our own projections. And on the other hand, we can explore our shadow through looking at every dynamic situation, person, place, or thing that is currently manifested in our reality, we can look at these things around us and we can say, okay, all of these things are here, because they are an energetic match to my own shadow to my own unconscious self. And when we are able to look at it like that, we can do the very important work of shadow integration, that will propel our ability to manifest the things that we consciously want to call into our lives tenfold. It will make us incredible at manifesting very quickly. And this is a realization that I came to very recently when I started reading the book, existential kink. unmask your shadow and embrace your power by Carolyn Elliott. This book woke me up to a lot of things when it comes to how to effectively manifest the life that we want. And in this book, the author talks about something very profound. She says that the basic formula for profound alchemical change, Alchemy alchemical change, is solvate at coagula, which means to dissolve, and coagulate, to first utterly dissolve an existing form and then carefully bring the dissolved and purified elements together again, and a whole new, more potent, and finally organized permutation. And she talks about an example of caterpillars, who actually when they go into their cocoon, they completely dissolve. And they become this gooey substance, and then come back together again, and emerge or re coagulate as butterflies. And so this is how this formula of alchemy Solvay, Ed coagula, appears in nature. But it's also a formula that is fundamental and paramount for the human psyche for us to effectively transform our lives. And in this book, existential kink, she talks about how mainstream popular culture manifestation and Law of Attraction rhetoric are hyper emphasizing the coagula part of this formula, which is coming together in a whole new way. And they are doing this through promoting the use of affirmations and visualizations, and the basic law of attraction techniques, spellcasting casting, all of the things meditation in order to attract to you the life that you want to live all the things that you desire. However, without first engaging in the Solvay portion of this equation of this profound process of alchemical change, we are not able to effectively complete the formula. And so this is why these manifestation techniques don't work for so many people. And people are getting so frustrated by it because they haven't first done the Solvay work to dissolve their original psychic form, basically, or dissolve the unconscious patterns in their lives, the shadow parts, bring them into the light which naturally causes them to dissolve, in order to be able to re coagulate in the life that we consciously desire, if that makes sense. So when I first read this, I was so fascinated by it, I had never heard about this formula Solvay Ed coagula before but when she talked about it, it made so much sense because in my own life I have been so obsessed with the law of attraction for at least 10 years now. And I remember when I first watched the movie, The Secret, I thought it was so incredible how I could just sit down and visualize and make all these things happen in my life. But when I tried it, it didn't work. And I kept believing that it would work. At least I wanted to believe it. And I think that my desire and believing that it would work was really just pacifying me, or creating some sort of escapism for me because I was thinking, Okay, well, I'm going to accept all of these current undesirable conditions that are in my life, the abusive relationship, the inability to make the money that I wanted, having unfulfilling unsatisfying jobs, and friendships, and so on. Because if I sit down and meditate for 20 minutes a day and I imagined things to be different, then it's going to work. And it did not work. Things that I wanted to call in didn't come to me for years. And then when I reached the point of desperation, in my journey after getting sober and after going to therapy, and after working with life coaches, just to try to feel okay, because my personal history is riddled with things like mood disorders and addictions and absolutely cycles of self sabotage, when I was reaching for these modalities such as therapy, life coaching, and 12 step recovery, and they weren't working to cause some type of emotional stability in my life to unify myself. And what I didn't realize were all of my unconscious desires, tendencies and personality traits that were wreaking havoc in my life. Then I was very magically paired up with a shamanic healer, who took me on this incredible journey of investigating my own shadow of healing my childhood wounding inner child work, by the way, is another form of shadow work, of going into my own psyche and dissolving doing the Solvay work, rearranging things, feeling my feelings actually being one, with all of the the things in my life that I had previously been in direct opposition to, when I was able to dissolve the opposition within myself, then all of a sudden, all of these same manifestation techniques that I had been trying for years started to work, and my life began to drastically change for the better. And today, I do have access to so many beautiful things, being able to work towards building a career that is actually in alignment with my own gifts. And that makes me feel fulfilled and overjoyed having a relationship with a partner who is so much fun. So spiritually advanced, and in which we treat each other consistently with so much respect, love and admiration, a level of partnership that I previously didn't know existed, and having in very beautiful friendships, and so on. And none of this would be possible if I didn't complete the full version of this formula for profound alchemical change, Solvay at coagula, dissolve, and coagulate. And what happens when we are just trying to use affirmations and visualizations, and the manifestation techniques 101 without first doing that Solvay work is that when we the more light that we shine on ourselves, the darker the shadow becomes. So we might be doing things to quote unquote, raise our vibration, and to focus our attention positively on the things that we do want versus the things that we don't want. All of those things that we consciously don't want, are still in the unconscious, and no amount of positive thinking or affirmations, can make them go away. They're not just going to go away, the more that we try to make them go away, the more that we oppose them and reject them. The thicker and denser the shadow gets, so to speak, the more that they stay there and are magnified, what we resist will persist. And some examples of some of these shadowy, unconscious patterns that direct our lives until we make them conscious by the way are as follows. Being stuck in relationships, careers Are mindsets that are simply not working. only being able to earn a certain amount of income every month, no matter how hard you work, always attracting the same low vibrational relationships over and over again, no matter what you do, being paralyzed by the idea of not doing something right. AKA not taking action because of perfectionism. Escapism through overeating, overspending over indulging in alcohol, drugs, TV shows, social media, etc. Not being happy with yourself or your body, no matter what your size or shape, living in a perpetual state of victimhood, feeling like your life would be perfect if only other people such as your boss, coworkers, friends, family, the government, politicians, etc. would behave differently, having big goals and aspirations but never taking the concrete steps to achieve them. Being sensitive and taking everything personally, constantly seeking approval from others. And so is it people pleasing, creating turbulence in your romantic relationship just when things start to get really good, and so on, and so forth. These are all results of our unconscious desires and manifestations and personality traits. And until we are willing to do that Solvay work, to bring them into the light of our conscious awareness until we are able to embrace these things. They will continue to exist in our lives, they will continue to create and facilitate all of the outcomes and events in our lives. And we will simply refer to it as fate. So what I love so much about shadow work, among many things, is that it gives us the ability to take our fate into our own hands. It gives us the ability to directly disrupt, and dissolve all patterns that keep us stuck and blocked from manifesting the life that we truly want to live. And there are many ways of doing this work. But what Carolyn Elliott talks about in her book, existential kink is a way that I'm really enjoying lately. It's something that I've started to practice. And it's been so inspiring to me that I'm sharing the basic outline of it with you today. Which so the reason why she named this book existential kink, because at first it sounds like some BDSM book that somebody might want to read, who's trying to learn more about kink itself. And clearly it has very little to do with that because it's all about unmasking and integrating the shadow part of your psyche. But the reason why she named it that is because once she started on her spiritual philosophical journey in life, which also involves healing from some pretty deep stuff like sexual molestation and addiction to heroin, she started to realize that, that this world is a creation of God, right. And God is supposed to be this beautiful cosmic lifeforce that is love, and consciousness on a grand scale is experiencing itself over and over again through incarnating into this physical reality as humans or maybe a blade of grass or an animal, it's all part of one divine consciousness. But when we are trapped in this human body, having all of these very limited experiences experiencing the whole spectrum of human emotion, which so many of us have decided is wrong and bad, right to to experience certain emotions that we have been conditioned to believe are negative or undesirable, then we start to feel suffering in this human life. And when she is having this sort of existential epiphany when she's thinking about, Okay, well, God created this world, and there's a lot of messed up stuff going on in this world. And she said, If I'm a part of God, then maybe I am really messed up to or I have these really crazy messed up desires, you know, because when you look at the world, there's beauty and there's miracles happening every single day, but there's also war, poverty, abuse, and really terrible things happening every day as well. And the idea is that these are all manifestations of consciousness, and that these dark side in all of our collective world, are a manifestation of our collective shadow. And in order to make anything better in this world, we must be willing to shine light on the shadow, we must be willing to make the unconscious conscious. And so with existential kink, she so she is somebody who does like bedroom kink as well, BDSM and that sort of thing. And in that world of kink, there is all kinds of non traditional things happening. This is this is a world where people are finding orgasmic pleasure from things that people don't normally associate with being pleasurable, for example, being touched aggressively through flogging, or spanking, or whipping or hitting, or creating these scenarios that might involve things like rape or incest, these are all things that happen in the kink community. And so people who have bedroom kink are basically embracing these shadowy desires that have otherwise been rejected and denied by society at large, and they're embracing them. And they're allowing themselves to feel pleasure from them. And so what she realized somewhere along the way, in her journey, is that she did not just have bedroom kink, but she also had existential kink. Basically, all of the things that she didn't actually want to happen to her in real life, are happening to her in real life on in the level of existence. And so what she proposes as a way to integrate our shadow, integrate our unconscious desires, and will, is to start opening ourselves up to receive pleasure, from all of the things that exist in our life currently, that we don't like patterns that we just wish would go away on their own. And the way that she does this is she asks us to get into a meditative state. And recall the thing that we don't like or don't like situation, whether it's, I don't like that I'm not making enough money per month, I don't like that I am single, and can't seem to find a good partner, or whatever the case may be. And we start to allow ourselves to feel and welcome all of the emotions that that don't like situation brings up within ourselves in our bodies, and we start to feel them openly. And we start to open ourselves up to experiencing some type of pleasure, or enjoyment with those feelings. And we start to realize that some unconscious part of us our shadow self, actually wanted this, that having is evidence of wanting, even if that wanting is unconscious. And so we start to change our view towards these things. And we start to celebrate them wholeheartedly and say, Wow, I congratulate my shadow, so for getting exactly what she wanted, and I'm going to stop perfet pretending that some part of me isn't taking some very beautiful, fun, kinky delight out of this situation. And then when we can embrace our shadow desires, our unconsciousness, we are then turning it conscious and allowing that Solvay work to happen, that dissolving. And she talks a lot more about this, obviously, in so much more detail in her book, existential kink, which I'm going to link to in the show notes of this episode. So if you're interested in diving deeper into her work and her methodology, then I highly suggest that you do because this is one very transformative way of embracing our shadow and really transforming our lives on a deep spiritually alchemical level. Additionally, one of the things that I love that she talks about in this book is that we are all God we are all consciousness, and we are all one. However, the reason why polarity exists in this 3d Physical Realm is because it gives consciousness the ability to experience itself through the other, you know, if we're just walking around through life, and we don't have any mirror, or we don't have anything to interact with, then we will never see ourselves, we will never know ourselves. It can be likened to the example of what is the sound of one hand clapping. There is no sound. But when you have two hands clapping, there becomes a sound. And that's the essence of polarity there becomes an experience there becomes something other than nothing. So, basically, we're all in this experiment of consciousness experiencing itself. And therefore, we can start to open up to the idea that our cosmic all powerful self, which is God, You are God, and I am God. And everyone else is God. We all have divinity within us, that our cosmic self incarnated into this life, this very life that we're living right now, with all of our human conditions, limitations and problems, in order to have an experience in order to be able to experience polarity in order to be able to experience something other than just being this all powerful, cosmic, blissful, loving, lifeforce of oneness. And so when we can remember that, or at least embrace the idea of it, if it doesn't feel like an actual memory, then we can start to play with that idea that I came here with purpose, I came here because my soul wanted to know what it was like, to feel jealousy, to feel anger, to feel hate, to feel limitation, to feel scarcity, to feel lack. And when we embrace it, and we celebrate the fact that we are here doing exactly what we came here to do, then we can start being in opposition to it, and it will naturally dissolve and transform. So I invite you to try some of this in your own life, I invite you to view your problems and all of the undesired, quote unquote, outcomes and events in your life from a different lens from the lens of love, love being the inclusion of all things, to open yourself up to embracing the parts of your character that you're not even possibly aware of, but that you can see so clearly in other people. So this is just food for thought. This is something that has inspired me in recent days and weeks, and I love sharing on this podcast, things that move me and inspire me. So I hope that somewhere along this episode, you too are feeling inspired and maybe want to try something different in your life moving forward. But either way, I do hope that you enjoyed this episode. I hope that you got value out of it. If you did, I will invite you as always to leave a rating and review. Wherever you get your podcasts, continue sharing with a friend or on social media. And be sure to tune in two weeks from now to the next episode of the soulful self podcast. Thank you so much for listening. Have a blessed day.