Thanks to the Shadows

briefly thanking the "dark"

I’ll let you in on my neuroticism, shame and shadows if you promise to be as kind as the ocean-whisperers I kept talking about last week. Actually, I’ll let everyone in on all of me, forever, regardless of what anyone promises, because that’s the best way I see to light the world up — create connection — with my consciousness.

I’ll start by letting you in on the origin of this mysterious blog-turned-genre-bending-… what? Docureality series… what have you… reality epic.

Light & Shadows was a fomenting sober thought that was first voiced as a high thought on a “shadow podcast” I did with a friend under fake names from 2020 to 2024. I recorded 42 episodes and many more hours of my friends and I shooting the shit, almost aways high, before hanging up my shadowy bullshitting shoes this September. When I voiced the idea for Light & Shadows in February 2021, I didn’t expect L&S to unearth my deepest neuroticism and shame upon becoming real a few years later. I didn’t expect it to bring light to the shadows within me and within our team as a whole, but having chosen the name I did, I can’t act surprised. I’ve invoked a terrifying unveiling, an illumination of dark spaces previously unseen.

A space of my mind constantly seeks the right word and shuns less-preferred words. I realize that I favor “good” words at the bookends of whatever I say, thus trying to begin and end my writing with words like “light” rather than words like “shadows.” I exhaustively try to get the words right to compensate for some deep insecurity. A part of me still hopes that what I create “out there” can resolve everything “in here,” though as I wrote last week, I know it won’t. At most, it’ll be a wave worth riding that changes nothing about the essence of who I am.

My heart is still coming to know pure light, and that light still casts shadows through the parts of me who’ve felt deeply wounded, inadequate, untrustworthy, unworthy. Even and perhaps especially in this pursuit of bringing light’s consciousness to the world, my shadows have whispered that I’m in over my head and I’ll fail.

I know I’m touching light when fear emerges and I feel it, and since L&S has become real, I follow that feeling of fearful aliveness. Still, my straightness and confidence on the path ebb and flow, faith unearthing layers of doubt as light unearths layers of shadows. Before even being able to voice “Light & Shadows,” I remember the inspiration (and fear, shadows, “stuff”) percolating as I did mushrooms with my girlfriend in 2020. Outside in our backyard, I realized that we all present as “the light” in our different forms, and in a (unifying) sense, light is what we all are in how we predominantly perceive the world of form, visually. I tried to excitedly articulate my thoughts to my girlfriend, then heard myself say “we’re all light!! Don’t you see?!” and felt like an idiot. My girlfriend appeared disinterested, the neighbors cranked up the volume of their drunken rager, I felt wispy and weak in my voice and I let go of the inspiration, returning to a familiar home of shame.

Shame is like a root fake-vegetable beneath the soil of most dysfunctional patterns the mind sprouts. We feel inclined to hide what feels shameful, and so shame comes to define many of our decisions about which parts of ourselves we present and which parts we hide. Shame also feeds the hiding, reinforcing the emotional state that makes it feel necessary, worthwhile or maybe even possible. I might be especially or even wishful-thinkingly tapped into it here in Vilcabamba, but I feel a growing sense that we’re moving into a phase of human consciousness where hiding our feelings isn’t really possible anymore. As we learn to see and feel into others, we come to see the truth on most people’s sleeves. The perceptible truth isn’t the whole truth, yet at the same time any given piece of our truth could emerge to become perceptible at any time. If we want to regenerate the soil of our minds, living with the multitudes that we all are, we have to uproot the shame.

I suppose everyone has their own unique path through shame and shadows, and none of us can know the path of another better than that other. Everyone’s personal shadow-path to unity consciousness must look different if everyone is different, though perceived difference wouldn’t matter once arrived. My personal path meant doing the shadow podcast to keep my creativity alive as Redeeming Disorder was dormant and L&S was still just a twinkle in my eye. I grew comfortable in the shadows, feeling a refreshing freedom in being able to say whatever I felt like saying under a fake name. So, I continued shooting shit and editing audio in the creative dark, to the point that it didn’t matter what I was recording. I just checked the 4-5 unreleased episodes I left sitting on my desktop, and they’re a pretty even mix of random calls and barely-intelligible monologue. They also feature missed calls, bouts of coughing and surprises, like the time I ate mushrooms that I thought were cannabis edibles and recorded myself slowly figuring out why I felt so terrible.

I could definitely turn all this content into something interesting, but is it worth my time? As I found myself avoiding L&S work to endlessly record my shadowy slithering through darkness, I realized that the shadow podcast was no longer necessary. The realization felt similar to the realization that I need not edit a dozen or so unused Redeeming Disorder interviews, despite how great many guests were. Now it’s time to embrace my real creation, to share a voice less filtered than that of Redeeming Disorder yet more focused than that of the shadow podcast. After growing up in a world of media so polished and politically correct, it may have been necessary to stare exclusively into the abyss for a few years, but now it’s necessary to balance the nonsense with the light of what I’m actually inspired to do.

Reality epic.

We’ll continue releasing videos — sometimes short and polished (next week), sometimes long-form conversations (the week after) — as we build up to telling an epic story over time. I’ll create that story thanks to a spark that never quite died, thanks to the shadows in which the spark could stay alive.