Judgment

The Awareness of Our Shadow

Awareness doesn’t instantly snap into perception. It rises slow, from the abyss, walking through thorn bushes, in order reach the summit to view the sunrise. My Judgement moment was when I finally saw how deep the control, manipulation, and domestication by my family of origin and social propaganda had been used to keep me small and insignificant.

The realization became painful and liberating. I saw how my imagination was being silenced. The mystic inside me dismissed. My writing reduced to a childhood hobby rather than recognized as the sacred practice of reintegration and communication with the self.

It had always been about my writing. The way my imagination shaped energy into form. How with words I created fantastic worlds, people, and situations. Mirrors that symbolized my real-world experience worked out through a waking dream.

I remembered me as a boy, staring outside the window of the family station wagon on long road trips to Disneyland and Ocean Shores. I would get lost in the passing landscape, fueling my imagination, my spirit. The boy that played with train sets, Legos, and wrote lines of code to play simple games, a creator. The boy who found wonder in solitude as he metabolized the days abuse.

He was still there. And he was waiting for me to remember him and accept him.

Through the eyes of awareness, I saw the ways I had been judged, kept small. The language of my father, mother, and sister was meant to corral me back into obedience. My docility wasn’t a virtue. It was their conditioning. Society rewarded my agreeableness, my silence, my usefulness, while punishing my imagination, sensitivity, and depth with ridicule and fear of abandonment.

I was now awake.

I saw how others attempted to impose their own domestication upon me, urging me back into the herd. I no longer belonged there. I had taken the steps and followed my path, leaving the familiar behind. I had to forgive myself for going and found myself grieving the fantasy of a family, a reality that never existed.

Forgiveness became my sacred work.

It was through forgiveness that my passion for mysticism took root. My writing became an act of meditation. In the mornings, I wrote in communion with my consciousness, automatic writing that poured through me in waves. Thoughts rose and crashed like the tide, each one threatening to drown me before receding into silence again. It was exhausting, ecstatic, and deeply healing.

It was through this process that I met my Ally, Oblivion. He is part of me, my higher self that had been watching me all along, waiting to be remembered. I had to face my fear of how others might see my brewing awareness. I feared the judgment, the labels of being strange, “woo-woo,” crazy. The very words society uses to strip the magic away from us all.

Through conversations with my wife, Jessica and her students, I began to reclaim the parts of me I’d abandoned. The part that imagines, dreams, and speaks in the language of Spirit. The part that knows healing doesn’t come from logic but from unconditional love.

Forgiveness also meant releasing my shame of needing distance. I had to let go of my parents, sisters, and friends who still lived within a family system which demanded my submission in order to survive. I retreated into solitude, built a cocoon around my soul where I could meet with my Shadow and understand him rather than ignore him out of fear.

Inside myself, I began to burn the parts of me that resisted change and forgave them. They were my protectors. Their role was to keep me safe while I was a little one, but their tactics were no longer necessary. Every defense, every coping mechanism, every false identity was born from the Shadow’s desire to survive. I needed to find them in the abyss of my body, listen to them, and integrate them back into myself, my awareness.

In my work with adults who have traumatic brain injuries, I had always taught self-reliance. I realized this was a reflection of my own childhood survival. I enjoyed teaching others what I had needed to learn myself, self-reliance. I wanted my daughters to know that same independence. I remember my youngest, Emily, learning to ride her bike. She refused my help, falling again and again, determined to master it alone. Watching her, I saw me, as the boy who had learned that needing help was dangerous. The man who built a life centered around self-sufficiency.

Judgement asked me to see the cycle, not condemn it.

When I began facilitating conversations through tarot, I noticed a new awareness in the people I read for. I was no longer interpreting cards. I was helping them listen to their own Shadow and Spirit, holding space for their own self-recognition.

This awareness deepened in the men’s group I ran, where we explored the ways, we’d been domesticated as men. The message to suppress emotion, vulnerability, and curiosity in exchange for power, control, and performance. I witnessed men reclaim their humanity by challenging those old narratives.

That is the essence of Judgement where we awaken without drowning in shame.

Awareness doesn’t come from perfection, it comes from remembering. I remembered the dreamer, the writer, the mystic, the man who chooses to see rather than submit.

Through the Fool’s journey, I’ve been struck by lightning, faced my demons, met death, walked through moonlight, and finally stood in the sun. Judgement is the moment of our awareness. It is where you began to hear your soul speak.

I am not who I was told to be. I am who I remember myself to be.

Jessica had shared with me a dream she had before starting on her journey to The Tower. In her vision she stood at a crossroad in a lush forest. The trail to her right displayed a wooden sign that read, “In the Doing the Being is Done.” While another marker, pointed to her left, “In the Being the Doing is Done.”

She chose to walk down the path of “Being,” and the forest sang in an angelic chorus. In the being the doing is done, a crescendo of voices, magic, and an understanding that it didn’t matter which path she had taken.

They both were correct.

Practical Application

These reflections can help you experience your own Judgement moment:

Witness, Don’t Condemn Spend ten quiet minutes listing the patterns or beliefs you’ve inherited from family, culture, or religion. Instead of judging them, simply witness how they shaped you. Which ones still serve me, and which are asking to be released?

Forgive Yourself for Survival Every coping mechanism, every avoidance, every silence was all a way to keep you safe. Write a letter to one version of yourself you once condemned (the pleaser, the fighter, the dreamer, the addict) and thank them for protecting you. Then release them with love.

Reclaim Your Imagination Do something your “adult” self would call impractical or childish. This is the time to play, draw, dance, build, and daydream. Reconnect to the child inside you who knows how to create worlds from nothing. Your imagination is not a distraction or unreal. It’s your direct line to the divine. It is your power.

Answer the Call Notice what themes keep returning in your thoughts. What is calling to you? Teaching, healing, writing, creating, guiding. That’s your trumpet blast. You don’t have to quit your job or move across the world to answer it. Just take one step toward what your soul keeps whispering. Mine is reading tarot, diving into mysticism, and creating a community in which you’re welcome.

Practice Compassionate Awareness As you awaken, resist the urge to “wake up” others by force. Awareness expressed through kindness is far more powerful than awareness used as proof of superiority. Let your peace be your message.

If Judgement shows up in your reading or in your life, it’s not asking for guilt. It’s offering graduation.

You are being called to rise from the old coffin of your story, stretch into your new awareness, and live with purpose. Then the trumpet stops sounding because the call has ended, you’ve finally picked the path of “Being” or “Doing.”

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