by Karen Williams

Created on: April 23, 2010

Some heavy-hitters in the spiritual/personal growth movement will soon release a new book, The Shadow Effect. The book is written by Debbie Ford, Marianne Williamson, and Deepak Chopra. Oprah is promoting exploration into "the shadow" by offering pod casts and book excerpts in her Oprah.com newsletter.  It could become a phenomenon akin to Eckhart Tolle and The Power of Now, thanks to Oprah's influence.

Here's how Debbie Ford, author of best-selling books, including several about "the shadow," describes that phenomenon:

"Our shadow, formed long ago, contains all the parts of ourselves that we have tried to hide or deny, the parts we believe are not acceptable to our family, friends and, most importantly, ourselves. It is made up of everything that annoys, horrifies or disgusts us about other people or about ourselves. It holds all that we try to hide from those we love and all that we don't want other people to think about us or find out about us. As the great Swiss psychologist C.G. Jung says, our shadow is the person we would rather not be.

"From its invisible home deep within our psyche, the shadow wields enormous power over our life. It determines what we can and cannot do, what we will be irresistibly drawn toward, and what we will do almost anything to avoid. It dictates our attractions and our repulsions and determines what we will love and what we will judge and criticize. Our shadow controls how much success we're entitled to create or how much failure we're doomed to experience. The shadow is an oracle that predicts all of our behaviors, driving the way we treat those around us—and how we treat ourselves."  -quoted on Oprah.com

How do we unmask and tame this powerful saboteur? By identifying its components and loving it. To that end, Debbie offers "The 21 -Day Consciousness Cleanse" through Oprah.com and in book form. The cleanse aims to help a person bring into full consciousness the awful things about themselves and the world that they were heretofore refusing to acknowledge. No more denial. It's time to face the facts about who we are and where we've been and, in the process, release the demons that bind us financially, socially, and otherwise.

I've seen two of Debbie's movies on this subject, The Dark Side of the Light Chasers and the more recent one that shares its title with the soon-to-be-released book.

It would all seem like a rather creative mix of New Age spirituality and resurrected Jungian/Freudian psychoanalytic

• 1
• 2
• Next Page >>