Shadow

"Each person has certain qualities or presences in their heart that are awkward, disturbing and negative.   One of your sacred duties is to exercise kindness toward them.    In a sense, you are called to be a loving parent to your delinquent qualities.   Your kindness will slowly poultice their negativity, alleviate their fear and help them to see that your soul is a home where there is no judgment or febrile hunger or fixed or limited identity.   The negative threatens us so powerfully precisely because it is an invitation to an art of compassion and self-enlargement that our small thinking utterly resists."   John O' Donahue