RECLAMATION

Radical Self-Love: The Reclamation and the Return

‘And in the end they decided, it was safer to dive deeper into their own depths,
than to drown in a world that others had created...’

There is a world within us that we do not see. It exists before thought. It echoes behind our words. It remembers long before we have the language to name what was lost, or the safety to feel what was never allowed. It lives and calls out in the darkness of the shadow self, a hidden world that holds within it - 'truth'.

Beneath the surface of our conscious reality lies an abyss with depths inconceivable to our waking awareness. Invisible on the surface of our awareness, it is our vast unconscious, and it defines the landscape of our lives. It holds the ultimate power to shape our desires, reactions, and the relationships we seek or push away. Our modern culture insists that we should seek and stay ‘in the light’, but ironically it is within the darkness of the self that all is revealed in truth. Carl Jung explains, ‘One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious.’

The majority of us move through life under the false illusion that we are primarily conscious beings: that our choices are rational, our beliefs well-formed, our actions deliberate. We believe that the mind which generates our thoughts, the part that narrates, plans, organises, and explains, is who we are. This ‘conscious’ layer we experience is but a thin veneer, a reflective surface on the dark waters of the self. To achieve awareness, and what many have professed as ‘enlightenment’, we must first dive deep within ourselves and navigate our depths in order to find the light. Our daily lives are blinded by the promise of knowledge, love, and happiness. We have been conditioned by society and by our ancestral lineages to suppress the darkness in order to remain in the light. Yet this tainted reality we have long been sold fails to recognise the polarity of life and the wholeness of truth.

There is no light without darkness and shadow. No homecoming without exile. And no real healing without first seeing and experiencing what was once hidden, shamed, or feared. In trauma, this personal exile often begins very early in life, before memory, before language. Core aspects of the self were ‘cast out in darkness’ quickly in order to attach, bond, and survive. And so, the process of healing and becoming whole is not about becoming perfect, but about becoming true. This is enlightenment, this is truth, and this is the expansion of human consciousness experienced within. It is the version of the self that holds space for all that resides in the darkness, rather than only what was once understood as wanted.

As we navigate through the dark world of the self, there is only one pathway that offers us safe return. It is the gateway of love, not romantic storybook love, but one far more heroic and revolutionary at its core. Radical self-love, and the sacred, compassionate return with authenticity and truth. Not a cliché, not a self-help slogan, nor an act of covert narcissism, but a revolution of human expansion. A courageous act of reclaiming all aspects of the self as whole, whatever and however they present themselves. It is the embodied declaration that ‘all is worthy, and all is loved’, distinctly devoid of judgement and self-abandonment. This is the only way we can navigate the darkness of the self and alchemise it into light, through the reclamation of the self, and the restoration of all that is hidden and suppressed.

In this act of inclusion and truth, where radical self-love delivers us light in the darkness. Here it holds the power to interrupt our inherited legacies of shame, fear, abandonment, and our internalised control we experience as limitation and punishment. This is how one achieves 'enlightenment'. The answers we seek live in our shadows, hidden within the darkness of the self. Here in a radical act of true internal freedom, we liberate the self, as we set ourselves free from the heavy burdens of the human experience that once suppressed and dominated us. 

This is light in the darkness of the self.
And this... is a revolution in the evolution of love.