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Church of the Golden Shadow
Church of the Golden Shadow
This E-Ministry neither requests nor accepts donations. We suggest that you cherish your family with loving care!
It is my hope and my prayer that you will find encouragement, hope, and healing in the words I write and the songs I sing. You are not alone.
My founding charter for this e-church established in 2016, is from the Esoteric Interfaith Theological Seminary. I chose to name it The Church of the Golden Shadow. When the recovery process leads us into the very difficult shadow work required to recognize how we blame and project onto others our deepest hidden fears, the results can transmute the shadow. Fear is indeed faced best holding God’s hand. Higher Power will chase us over the cliff, surprising us with a gentle landing into the safety net of Others. Those who tread the path with us recognize that cliff. We are the tarot Fool falling into the arms of the Empress, the Holy Queen of Heaven.
Our paths are well-trodden. We become more comfortable being uncomfortable because we allow Others to walk with us. The Church of the Golden Shadow is a virtual landing place within my soul. Perhaps through my inspired art, music and writings I may touch your heart as you, unknowingly comfort mine. Glory be to the Father and to the Son and to the Holy Spirit, who was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be world without end. Amen
My recovery process is just like yours. We share the same emotions and hopes, to leave in the past those demons of desire and frustration, leading to just awful outcomes.
My recovery process began in 1988 when a friend took me to a CODA meeting. I had never heard folks speak with such honest awareness, just laying it all out for others to hear. Blew me away. I was not drinking or drugging, but was addicted to my inability to maintain healthy boundaries. I attracted a lot of alcoholics and drug addicts into my life, never understanding that I was their caretaker. Co-dependency as an illness is as damaging as drugs or alcohol.
A couple years before that meeting, I was living at my lake house in Alabama and had an awful run with alcohol, pot and tobacco. I think I just wanted to avoid the new me emerging, you know? This entire episode is detailed in the chapter called “Lady of The Lake “in my new book coming out this fall.
You see, I grew up in a family where my adults drank socially but not to excess. Alcohol was very much a part of the wonderful parties at our home...lots of laughter and fun, but no nastiness. I thought I could follow suit, but apparently not. I just cannot drink without falling asleep or acting like an idiot. Not cool. It has been over thirty years since I chose to avoid the stuff, so that’s that. I guess I was lucky that I did not continue to drink and develop the neurological pattern of alcoholism, right? But I will tell you that I feel the same as my friends who were not as fortunate. There is absolutely an addictive personality type. We just seem to overdo too much too often.
We are all addicted to something, even if it’s an addiction to not having an addiction. I recently heard at a conference in Montreal, the teacher Carolyn Myss explain that addiction is what holds our life together. Maybe we are an addict with a certain life style or food or way of thinking which allows us order in our daily lives, see?
The doctor Gabor Mate says something similar, but goes on to bemoan the heavy judgement society loads onto substance addicts, while offering help to those suffering from other “ more acceptable” diseases. Lots of opinions, you decide. Addiction can be behavioral or substance using, but co-dependency underlies it all.
You cannot share my experience with the Divine. I cannot follow you into the still deep void of God within. Those sacred paths disappear as our footsteps mark our own way. We see evidence of another's experience only when we relate it to our own, to something we already know or connect with. We know very little about this world but latch onto those facts to explain what we do not know. The label of Religious Science is applied to our attempt at applying scientific theory and testing to the subjective world of spiritual perception.
Recovery work is the cryptozoology of the psychological world. Belief in crypto creatures is a sort of religion, a hoping that mystery carries us into the arms of the Unknown god. Humans have an inherent need to believe in something other than self, something mystical.
In 12 Step work, we are asked to turn over assumed facts about our reality to an Unknown power. Those very factoids are what ego mind insists we require to remain stabilized with our addictions of choice. That Higher Power is unseen and imperceptible if chased down with the false identity of addictive logic. Cunning, conniving, patiently sinister, these addictions block the natural pathway of trinity...from Him, through me, to Them.
The greatest gift I can return to God is the turning over of my free will to Him. Thy Will, not mine, be done. So how’s that going, Zoli? Not well, not well at all. WHEN I can remove my factoid-infused will and allow His guidance to overwhelm my human destructiveness, my life goes well, very well indeed. Some days that never happens. Most days I see trickles of it from His wellspring into mine. The dam I have constructed to insist I be in control blocks that healing water.
Buddhism addresses this succinctly with the teachings on detachment and harmlessness. Every thought and action creates karma, accountability to choice. The wheel of rebirth inevitably returns to yet another life born from desire and mistakes. Does this ideal address recovery? Hell yeah. I believe that one can become only one thing, and that is more like oneself. Ones true self. We can feign behaviors, costume ourselves with hidden agendas, continue to paddle aimlessly on the surface of consciousness in lifetime after lifetime of negligence and ignorance. But later than sooner, all ensouled beings begin to feel the conscious input from their soul transform the personality into less prominence. Recovery from unconsciousness only begins when we are sick and tired of our unconsciousness.
From Him, through me, I pass it on to others. Material goods, intellectual ideas, heartfelt kindnesses, all this and more originate from the heart and mind of God. When I act only as the intermediary between Him and others, my life goes rather well. Ponder on this.
I am not biblical scholar. I neither read the bible often, nor do I feel it is 100% truth. Much has been deleted and rearranged, but that said, I find exquisite wisdom and comfort in acknowledging truth found.
This verse in John 4:1-3 addresses the necessity of discernment in who and what we believe. I found the timely message appropriate for my own challenges with discernment.
It is wise indeed to question my own questioning. As a trained mental medium, I see and hear much requiring discernment.
Am I good at telling what is valid and what is illusory? Most of the time I seem to do pretty well, but fail miserably when I desire to believe something because it leads to a more pleasant outcome.
Ouch. But I try, right? Maybe this verse speaks to you. What do you think?
I’ve been mulling over the idea of balance. It seems to be an ideal, not a reality.
Balance indicates two opposites agreeing to meet in the middle. But the reality is that balance occurs only when those opposites imperceptibly teeter-totter on the head of a pin, precariously deceptive due to the impossibility of maintaining that thing called balance.
Balance statements pervade new age thinking...walk in balance, seek balance, rest in balance, and so on. They all make me uncomfortable when I chase after the ideal of balance as a life style. That said, I do feel the occasional balance when between the phases of learning and absorbing.
There seems to be a silent holding of space, a tiny cessation of monkey mind, a respite from inner figuring how the past will fit into the future. Or not. This art piece reminds me that if I chase after something, it will return that attention with a vengeance.
Because of, you guessed it, balance. Our physical world of opposites guarantees that eternal balance is not possible. Up, down. In, out. Right, wrong. You get it.
So, what is the solution to the delusion? I figure I gotta just keep on seeking that wild child of temperance, the possibility that I can resolve opposites to live closer to each-other than in separate universes.
Sometimes it feels that distant to me. Reticence, relaxing into the journey, seeking present moments, these therapies seem to help me.
What about you?
This is a silly piece! I usually do not draw what I consciously intend to display, as my inner self runs ragged over any intellectualizing of my creativity.
I began with several interlocking circles while glancing sidelong at the design pattern of those elliptical ones. Had to use them somehow. My cat, Sophia kept bumping my hand as I traced the patterns, seemingly encouraging me to explore the elliptical silliness of imaginary creatures.
A cat-like face emerged in the center, surrounded with 12 aquatic disciples of her longing.
As I colored in the image, I began thinking about the number 12. Lots written on that arcane concept. The 12 disciples seemed to breach my mind into a pattern of connection with the 12 Steps.
Hmmmm, gotta think on that some more. Numerologically, 1+2=3. Lots written on that also. Do you find things happen for you in threes? My life seems to follow in that pattern.
How do the 12 Steps impact your daily life? Do you find yourself connecting to one particular step for a while, and then another takes precedence?
Works like that for me, but I have a loooong way to go in truly understanding and allowing those steps to nourish my life.
