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What's Good About Apathy?
Why allowing yourself to experience apathy can sometimes be healing
Recently I held an online mini workshop on Shadow work.
(To give some context: Our shadows are the parts of us we have suppressed out of shame and fear of rejection and are now for the most part not conscious of. Hence, we like to project them onto others. And just like the YinYang symbol teaches us, each shadow trait has also a hidden medicine inside of it, a lesson that wants to be embraced.)
So naturally the question from one of the participants arose: What's the medicine in apathy? I hate myself lying on the couch for example, feeling disconnected and numbed out. I can't see anything good about that.
And I totally get it. I mean, who does? It's quite easy to reject that part of ourselves, that just wants to switch off and not feel.
Especially in a world when our personal transformation, healing, spiritual and new age gurus tell us to feel it all! Quite naturally do we then feel ashamed of not being able to find that capacity within ourselves to even want to feel.
Because for me that's the definition of apathy: rather than reaching towards feeling, my being reaches towards the void. The absence of everything. It's the ultimate contraction.
