Killer Squad

We all have shadows. That dark side. The parts of ourselves that we have repressed, judged, and shunned, to be accepted by society. And it is, for the most part, unconscious, until we have put it into light and integrated it.

  It’s funny how the Universe set them up on my path. I would have never chosen them to be my friends. Each was different, but each belonged in a category that my ego stubbornly refused to identify with, but that which my shadow kept on projecting. In a twist of fate, they became my batch-mates in medical training.

  AJ –

When I was in fourth grade, I came home happily with great news. I was Top 4 in our class! But instead of the praise I was expecting, my mom told me to study harder. I had to beat Luis, the son of her boss, who was the Top 1. There popped my bubble, and there came my shadow. The one who’s never enough. AJ is the achiever that I thought I could never be. Smart, responsible, always top of the class in the most prestigious of schools, always the class president. While I had always been at the above-average level, I never felt comfortable hanging out with the superhumans. And AJ was a superhuman.

Gene –

Gene would have to be the darkest of all my shadows – sexual repression. Gene eats dirty jokes for breakfast. He thrives on profanity. He is rowdy and vulgar, and if I would have met him anywhere else, my conservative upbringing would have screamed to stay away from him. As I had no recourse, I mirrored his obscenity. Repression of my sexual instincts turned into projection. And I enjoyed it. Having spent most of my life in a conservative family and exclusive, religious schools, I shunned my sexuality and sensuality like something to be ashamed of. Like it was bad to have sexual desires before you were married. As a child, I imagined things that unknowingly gave me sexual pleasure. It stopped when I reached school-age, only to reawaken in high school. I felt guilty during those times that I couldn’t fight the urges. As my awareness grew, I realised that there was a lot of shame, guilt, and negative beliefs about sex in the culture I grew up in. I veered away from religion and found myself drawn to spiritual paths that celebrate sex as both human and divine. The act itself is a spiritual practice and a creative expression. I was enticed by the idea of spiritual sex and cosmic orgasm – something that went beyond the physical and on a deeper, soul level. As I explored further, I resonated with beliefs that honour sexual instincts as part of the body’s energy systems. Sexual desires are but energies that need to flow freely. Self-pleasure wasn’t bad, but a gateway for awareness and self-love.

Laura –

I wondered why I was always hesitant to voice out my opinions, especially those that were contrary to popular belief. In school, I was reluctant to be called for recitation and avoided it at all costs. Most of the time, I kept quiet and went along with the crowd. I was awarded the Most Disciplined Award not because I was a saint, but because I was quiet and kept away from conflict of any kind. Growing up, I was told to follow rules but not to question them. Talking back was punished with a spank of a belt. Not that I would say it was right to talk back to your parents, but just that maybe, I wasn’t completely wrong, and that I was just a kid who wanted to be heard. Nonetheless, my subconscious apparently interpreted voicing out my opinions and emotions as something unsafe. Well, Laura is an activist. The one with the tattoos. The one who joined rallies in college. The one who fearlessly gives an opinion about the government and just about anything else. Laura is my inner rebel.

Lyn and Rian –

The pretty girls. I remember as a child, I loved wearing my mom’s high-heeled shoes and ramping around. I loved crossing my legs like some beautiful, adult lady. In first grade, I had long, shiny hair that I liked to comb as I waited for first class to start. My shadow probably came out when I decided to cut that long, shiny hair. I ended up blaming the haircutter, who also happened to be our manicurist, for the resulting dry, frizzy, short hair. My mom told me my hair was ugly, which my subconscious probably interpreted as I am ugly. We tried to tame the frizzy hair with coconut oil, which, by the way, was also used to lighten my dark underarms and nape. My insecurities surfaced. I was a fat kid, and as far back as I can remember, it was around fourth grade that I started shying away from the pretty girls. The It girls. The thin, fair-skinned, attractive, popular girls with long, shiny hair. I was a wallflower, and I envied their popularity. My shadow left me with a secret desire to be a runway model. I fantasized to be a Victoria’s Secret model in my next lifetime. Not that Lyn and Rian were models, but they had all the works – make-up, fashion, designer bags, gossip – you name it.

Killer Squad –

That’s what we called ourselves. Had they not been my batch-mates in my medical specialty training, they wouldn’t have been my friends. But as fate would have it, they not only turned out to be my friends but my soul family.

In many spiritual traditions, it is believed that we choose the physical body and the family we are born into, the people we meet, and the experiences we have in our lifetime. It is said that before we are born, we enter into soul contracts to learn the lessons we need to expand, grow, and evolve. Our soul group, or soul family, are people that help us in this journey. Maybe it was not so much as a twist of fate that I met these five people, but a fulfilment of soul contracts I made with them in another dimension. 

This is how I met my shadows. I internalized their characteristics and found myself integrating the parts of myself that I have denied. In accepting them as they are, I accepted my shadows, too. Then, maybe, these strangers who became my friends weren’t strangers in the first place, but only parts of myself that I have forgotten and now have found.