A living icon of consciousness expansion and creative transformation, Shakti Gawain has been kindling spiritual light and helping others discover the wisdom within since 1978. With more than six million readers worldwide, her message has found a deep resonance with a global audience. Two of her many works, Creative Visualization and Living in the Light, are among a handful of classics in the personal development field. The remarkable longevity of Living in the Light is now being celebrated with a special 25th anniversary edition.

Shakti’s considerable contribution has been to empower multitudes of people to listen to their own guidance and make use of the inner knowing that already resides within. She is a seasoned practitioner of the protocols in her work, both through testing them in her own life and with others. One of the major insights she has shared is ancient in its knowing, to notice what brings more aliveness and continue moving in this direction.

Not only has Shakti been a seminal voice of personal transformation through both writing and speaking, she co-founded New World Library Publishing Company with Marc Allen. Now a publisher of books on transformation with some of the most highly-regarded thought leaders in the field, New World will reach its 35th anniversary in 2012. Shakti has been shedding light on timeless wisdom and bringing it to the forefront for more than three decades. Most assuredly, she is a sage with staying power.

Awareness: How did you see your book 25 years ago when it was first published?

Shakti: That is a great question. By the time I wrote Living in the Light it was seven years since Creative Visualization, so I didn’t just jump into writing a book after my first one. At that point I had been learning a lot about listening to my intuition and inner guidance, so that’s what I focused on. It gave me great joy to be able to share those ideas and tools because I knew how powerful they were in my own life. So I think I was just feeling really happy I finally got it done and it was going out in the world to do its thing.

Awareness: And now, how does it feel to have a living, creative, expression that’s been shared for 25 years?

Shakti: It really feels wonderful. I never ever would have dreamed that I would do what I ended up doing here in life. It’s just unfolded in such an amazing way. I feel like I’ve been blessed with the opportunity to learn things myself, to pass them on and to see how helpful they can be to people. It’s very gratifying that the book is still around and doing well at 25 years. It’s kind of like these books are my kids and I’m just watching them do what they do. These books have an energy of their own.

Awareness: Let me ask you about intuition. It is really important, but in some ways a very elusive quality in our lives.

Shakti: Well, to me I feel that we all have an inner intuitive sense that’s connected to the deepest part of ourselves. And we need to learn to really pay attention to it and listen or feel it. We just have to practice using it and working with it.

Awareness: What would you say is most important in developing a practice?

Shakti: The most important thing is that you feel light energy with aliveness when doing it. So it doesn’t really matter particularly how often you do it or don’t. That’s a real individual thing. For some people it’s really important to do it every day and in general we encourage people to do that. But if it begins to feel like a task or doesn’t feel quite right for some reason, then I support people in finding a different way of working with it.

Awareness:  I know you made a comment that you appreciate even more now how important it is to shine the light of consciousness into our disowned or shadowed aspects. Could you talk about that?

Shakti: Yes. A lot of my work these days focuses on getting in touch with and getting to know all the different selves within us, and I’ve included more about that in the new edition of the book. Basically there are certain parts of ourselves that we’re comfortable with — that we’ve kind of identified with. Let’s say I’m a very responsible person so that’s one self that’s big in my life.

There are also, as you mentioned, disowned selves. The primary selves are the ones we identify with. The disowned selves are the ones we’re usually afraid of or don’t feel okay about. It’s been conveyed to us that it’s not okay to be like this or we shouldn’t have these kinds of feelings. And anytime you have that, you’ll have what we call the shadow side or the disowned side — which we sometimes feel uncomfortable with or afraid of.

In fact, it’s really just a necessary part of us — we aren’t trying to get rid of anything. We’re trying to embrace more and more of who we are, and as we do that, things fall into place. So it is about learning to hold a balance between the parts of yourself that you’re already identified with and the parts that may be more hidden. It doesn’t have to be any big scary thing; we just have to learn to get more comfortable with our hidden parts. Because the point of all this is to be as fully complete as we can.

Awareness: As kind of a segue from that, I’d ask you to say more about your statement that in being true to yourself and feeling more alive, you may also feel more uncomfortable in risking change…

Shakti: As we become aware of something that we weren’t conscious of before, which happens as we go through our life — it can be initially a little scary. The status quo is the safest. At least it feels like it’s the safest. It probably isn’t always. So we do have to be willing to take a little bit of risk.

It doesn’t have to be a lot. I mean, it’s fine to go step by small step. As people who are interested in developing and growing and making a contribution to our lives and our world, it’s definitely a necessity to take steps.

Awareness: I really do value what you’re saying and I felt it really clearly in this reading of the book. An amazing alchemy can happen by just taking steps to become more aware and to take some action. I think you give a lot of really grounded but caring encouragement to do just that. In anybody’s life, if they take one step and they keep going, they can realize major change over time.

Shakti: Yes, life has a way of finding the exact way to push you on, and to help you get where you’re going.

Awareness: In terms of becoming more in our light, here I’m quoting you, “We create our own experience of reality and we need to learn how to take responsibility for doing so.”

Shakti: Yeah. I think it’s important to understand what that really means. Of course my experience of reality is a little different then your experience of reality. Some people take it to feel sort of guilty — like, ‘Oh, my gosh, I created my reality
and because I didn’t create it perfectly, is there something wrong with me?’ It’s an ongoing process of co-creation between all of the beings on this planet. So it is really learning to take responsibility for how we handle the experiences we have in life. I think that is a better way to describe it.

Awareness: Okay. I’ll relate it to something else from your book. Often when we think about creating our own reality as you’ve made a reference to, it feels very heavy to many people. You had made a point at the beginning of the book about your experience that is on the other end of the spectrum, “that the universe wants me to have everything I truly want.”
So can you talk about how that’s been for you, because I think you are shining some important laser light on helping people realize that it’s not about just facing heaviness to quote, ‘be responsible.’  We have to take responsibility and part of being responsible is to claim that there are incredible opportunities for expansion and fulfillment and a sense of blessing, which is one of the comments you made in the beginning of this interview. So could you talk about some of our own experiences with that?

Shakti: Well, the process of discovering your own truth is really biased by how alive you feel in the moment when you are doing whatever you’re doing. That’s a wonderful thing. Sometimes people say, well, how do you know? And you don’t. You have to learn how. Letting that guidance move you gives more of a sense of aliveness.

If what I’m doing right now makes me feel more alive, it may also be a little scary — I don’t want to say scary because I want to tell people, it’s really not scary, but it’s a little challenging. That’s a barometer you can use to know if you’re kind of going in the right direction or things are right. If you feel kind of deadened by something then it’s probably not quite where you need to be, so it’s really kind of a call to find out what makes you truly alive.
 
What makes you feel that way on a daily basis? I do this by just checking into how I’m feeling, what I’m aware of, and what I need to do for myself right now. I have this real simple little technique; it’s a little meditation to connect with your inner guidance that I teach people. It’s so simple that anybody can use it.

Basically it’s just having somebody get in a meditative space and then go deep inside and ask for whatever it is you have a question about or a need for. Then you just listen to that, or feel into that, and you feel it guiding you to a sense of greater aliveness.

You just ask in the meditation for whatever it is you need to be more aware of or need in your life, and then you let go and go about your life. Then very often something comes up that’s a reflection of what you got in the meditative space. It’s sort of showing you the next step.

Awareness: Well, that leads me into another area. I really enjoyed your descriptions of both your awareness of spirit and the awareness of human form. In one chapter you describe how spirit tends to be more expansive versus form, which tends to be more about security for instance. Would you talk a about integrating these two forms of consciousness? I really love that.

Shakti: The main thing is you really need to include everything. Every part of us is important, valuable, and needed. So really we can spend our lives essentially developing the different aspects of ourselves as fully as possible. That for me is the greatest thing.

Awareness: What would you say if somebody is sacrificing one over the other in his or her lives? How to balance that out?

Shakti: Well, most of us are trying to do that. And that’s why we have a lot of internal conflict. Everything that’s in us is a part of who we are and a part of who we need to be. So we need to learn to embrace all of that. And each part of us has its own job to do. There’s a part of me that I mentioned earlier that is very, very responsible. So I’ll absolutely make sure to get everything done that can possibly get done in any given situation.

That’s wonderful. It’s a good quality that helps me be a successful person in my life, but if it’s too out of balance or I’m working too much or pushing too hard or being too responsible for things, then it won’t work or it won’t feel good. So we have to pay attention to that and sort of feel into what would be an opposite part of that. Well, for me, the opposite of super responsible is kind of carefree. Playful.

I used to be a super serious person. It felt like I had the whole weight of the world on my shoulders. But I’ve learned to embrace that more carefree, lighthearted part, because I need it for balance. I feel much better now that I have both sides. You don’t give up anything, you just — develop more of it.

Awareness: Is there anything you would say about this universal creative element of light that you have found remarkable or would like to share? I mean you’re a major spokesperson for the light in people’s lives.

Shakti: And the dark. I say sort of half jokingly that I’m a spokesman for the light and the dark because I feel like my main message at this point is about being able to pause and to dialogue with the different parts of yourself until you really get to know them, until you really can appreciate all parts. So my main message these days is that all parts of us are valuable. Even the ones that don’t seem like they are.

Awareness: I really get it. My last question is about the bigger transformation that’s happening. I’ll give you two examples that have been drawing my attention. For me, I feel like the real food movements and now Occupy Wall Street are showing that there’s some incredible resonance happening with light sparking to light. Those are examples I would use, and I wanted to ask for your perspective on the big transformation that you have indicated is happening.

Shakti: I think all of us feel this sense that the world is getting shaken up. This is the sense I have, and it can be very difficult to cope with. Yet I feel like it’s just in our own personal processes. If you want to grow and learn, you have to be open to finding new ways, and I feel like what’s happening right now is all the stuff we’ve swept under the rug because we didn’t know or want to deal with it, is coming out in these recent years.

It just feels like again, it’s just a — I don’t want to say really dark. Its just some things are coming forth — coming to light, and we’re all looking at it going, oh, my gosh! These things have been functioning this way for a long time but nobody paid any attention. It’s just how everybody did things, but now really we are looking at doing things in a new way and we don’t know exactly what that is.

I do think it’s a very powerful and important time. A lot is happening and it may look like it’s wrong or bad to see things that are happening. Of course they do sometimes involve a certain amount of suffering for people, and that’s hard. I do feel though that we’re really on quite a journey. I don’t know what’s going to happen, but I do have a feeling that we really are changing and growing and we’re going to be doing more and more of that.

Awareness: I like what you’re saying about this on the bigger scale, that just as we know from our own personal process even if it feels hair raising and scary at times, that by doing what you need to do, amazing things can happen. So there’s an opening in that.

Shakti: Very well said . . . put that in the article.

To find out more about Shakti’s 25th anniversary edition of “Living in the Light” or her other books and events, go to www.newworldlibrary.com or www.shaktigawain.com

Donna Strong is a writer and author of “Coming Home to Calm, Awakening to Divine Intelligence.” She works as a spiritual and creative catalyst to help people live in a soul-aligned manner. www.donnastrong.com