by Matt Licata
8
Dancing in the Shadows
Sanctuary for the Unwanted to Return Home
Many people these days are familiar with the concept of “the shadow” and the importance of including “shadow work” in any comprehensive path of spirituality and healing. Especially when we experience scandal within a community (or ourselves) involving sex, money, narcissism, and power, it becomes obvious that less-than-illumined aspects of the personality are alive and well behind the scenes in all of us that can coexist with a certain amount of wisdom, compassion, and clear seeing. As long as there is a physical body, there will be a shadow lingering nearby. Although the increased awareness of shadow dynamics is a positive development, as with all psychological and spiritual concepts, we must approach the situation with fresh vision, depth, and nuance, willing even to explore the shadow of the concept of shadow and not take anything at face value.
Briefly, the shadow is that aspect of the personality we all have (yes, gurus and “masters,” even you) that contains those parts of ourselves that we do not like, that do not fit in to the way we want to be seen, and that contradict the public persona we wish others to see. It refers to the subtle (or not so subtle) narcissism, selfishness, power-hungry, addictive, unkind, and violent parts of the psyche that we have repressed and will do anything to defend against bringing into consciousness.
For example, as spiritual people, many of us believe that we should not be angry and that the mere appearance of anger is some clear evidence that we have failed, done something wrong, or are not nearly as spiritual as we think. Perhaps any show of anger as a young child activated rage in Dad or caused Mom to be anxious and pull away from us, or we were shamed by our spiritual teacher or community for “getting angry.” Whatever the reason, we’ve concluded there is something fundamentally wrong with the feeling of anger; it just doesn’t fit into our image as an evolved person, and therefore we place it into the shadow, where we do not have to experience it directly. Of course, this does nothing to the underlying anger except to allow it to build energy in the unconscious, where eventually it will come out, usually in less-than-ideal ways in which we project it onto others and generate a lot of struggle, pain, and confusion.
Obviously, if our intention is to know ourselves at the deepest levels and to meet our most unwanted experience with curiosity and warmth, we must cultivate a relationship to the shadow, which we do primarily though illuminating and tending to its manifestations. From this perspective, the shadow isn’t some reified entity within us that we must find and battle. We don’t really see “it” but rather its reflections. In the example above, if we have placed our natural human experience of anger “into the shadow,” we might feel quite a lot of anxiety when anger arises within us; we prepare to immobilize our defenses such that the anger will stay buried, or we move to locate it in another. “No way, I’m not angry. But he is so angry. He’s so full of rage, isn’t he? You can just feel it.” The good news is that we can learn to work with this anxiety and uncover what might lie underneath it. We can follow it back and find that submerged feeling we’ve spent so much psychic energy avoiding over the years (or decades).
If we want to discover the wisdom and creativity buried within our most intense emotions, we must provide a home for the unwanted parts of ourselves to return where they can be tended to with greater awareness, perspective, space, and compassion. Some believe we have an ethical responsibility to work with the shadow; otherwise, we will be sure to project, locate, and even unload it onto others and the world, which will only increase unhealthy aggression, violence, and suffering for ourselves and others.
Positive Experience in the Shadow
Usually when we speak about parts of ourselves we have disowned and placed into the shadow, we’re referring to less desirable material such as jealousy, rage, selfishness, and shame. As mentioned earlier, the shadow is typically seen as the dark repository for all the so-called negative aspects of ourselves—that is, our unhealthy dependency, unacknowledged narcissism, unmet hopelessness, and unlived lives. But it is not only negative qualities and aspects of our self that we defend against, dissociate from, and send into the unconscious. In addition, many of us have lost the capacity to access, embody, and express more “positive” experiences such as contentment, pleasure, creativity, empathy, compassion, intimacy, and sexuality.
Although this is more difficult to wrap our minds around, some of us have disconnected from the simple experience of joy, a spontaneous sense of elation at being alive. I’ll never forget the first time I realized we could split off from the experience of joy, which came about when I was working with a man suffering from depression. What we discovered during our time together was how unsafe it was for him to express joy, how the experience of simple delight became tangled in his nervous system with danger and the likelihood of imminent attack against him. During our sessions, there were times when we would both become aware of this simple, childlike, causeless joy coming to the surface as he was speaking about some experience he had, and how inevitably at some point that would constellate anxiety in him: he would quickly change the subject, generate some sort of conflict or complaint between us, “leave” the room and go back into a prior conversation, or even just close his eyes and start to meditate.
After this happened a few times, we became curious about what was going on and were able to explore it together. He was able to trace back early experiences of how his father reacted to his joy and excitement, becoming aggressive and enraged, demanding that he “grow up” and stop acting like “a baby.” He came to see how he had equated feeling full of life and natural states of delight, interest, and enthusiasm with being judged and rejected. Over the course of our time together, he began to unwind this organization and was able to slowly re-embody to this spectrum of experience and touch the natural joy he had disconnected from at an earlier time in his life.
To Feel Alive Again
Developmentally speaking, for some of us the natural, raw, human experience of pleasure or enjoyment activated complexes in our parents—for example, maybe it triggered anxiety or discomfort in Mom and anger or impatience in Dad or caused others to shame or pull away from us. In our attempt to make sense of the rupture, we came to conclude that joy was not okay, destabilizing, and even potentially dangerous. But it was so natural to feel joy and to express that simple sense of aliveness, and it was baffling to discover that it led to our environment turning against us. As a little one, we were unable to understand what was going on and became confused as we began to associate the experience of joy with being unsafe. We had no choice other than to repress the joy and disconnect from our innocent, playful, spontaneous nature, which required that we disowned those feelings when they organically arose in our experience.
It can be helpful as part of our inquiry to ascertain what specific feeling states, forms of vulnerability, personality traits, and aspects of ourselves we have (usually unknowingly) come to associate with emotional hurt and a sense that we’re not safe. Although it might be obvious how negative feelings and behaviors (e.g., anger, judgment, jealousy, fear) create difficulties in our lives, we must also be open to exploring the ways more positive material was also required to be repressed. And, as always, remember that this activity of repression was intelligent and adaptive in the moment because it prevented the devastating consequences of a wholesale withdrawal of affection, attention, and love from those around us.
As little ones with developing brains and nervous systems, we learn to disown or disavow any state of mind (and corresponding behavior) that has the potential to disrupt the tie to critical attachment figures. Although we can honor the adaptive and even lifesaving aspect of these defensive strategies, many of us long to know joy again, to feel alive, and to fully and spontaneously participate in our lives. Until we can provide a home for the entirety of who we are to live and breathe and have permission to be here in this world, we might always feel separate and disconnected from life. By learn
ing to befriend ourselves in new ways, the central organizing theme of this book, we offer this field of permission for the lost pieces of soul to return, to share their essence and wisdom, and to walk with us as allies toward a new way.
To retrain ourselves to feel joy is not an easy path because by definition we will have to step back through anxiety and feelings of potential abandonment and overwhelm that the repression of joy (or whatever the relevant state is for us) has served to protect us from. It can be helpful to remember the possibility, as we’ve been exploring together, that although a part of us genuinely wishes to heal and live in a new way, other parts have an agenda of keeping us safe and protected, which can set up a contradictory state of affairs. Some part of us knows that if we heal from these earlier ways of organizing our experience, we will not be able to count on our previous strategies to protect us from a more naked, unguarded, and undefended relationship with life. On the one hand, this is what we’ve been longing for, to fully participate in an open, spontaneous, and free way, but on the other hand, we must honor the revolutionary implications of what true healing requires.
Shadow, Symbol, and Dream
Sometimes people will go out of their way to explain to me how independent they are. They might talk about how through a lot of inner work, they’ve come to a place where they don’t really need anyone, they can handle things on their own, and they’ve escaped from the messy territory of codependency.
Later in the conversation, perhaps, they’ll share an encounter they had with a colleague at work who was so clingy, so dependent, and so sticky that it just made them feel angry, nauseous, claustrophobic, and so relieved they had somehow worked through all that. “Thank God that’s not me anymore. God, they’re annoying. I just don’t understand how they can be like that. They should really take a look at themselves.”
And then maybe the next week they’ll bring in a dream in which they were out on a walk and came across an inconsolable little infant who wanted to be held, to feel the warmth of skin-to-skin contact, but the dreamer just got more and more anxious and ran into the forest. It just felt so desperate and off-putting.
That with which we are not able or willing to be in conscious relationship within ourselves will have no choice but to manifest outside us, in relatively innocent others just being themselves, in dream figures, in unexpected irrational moods, in fantasies, in symbols, in images, and even in the natural world as animal friends, sunrises, colors, and water. These ones appear not as some cruel cosmic trick or joke or to attack, harm, or take us down but as orphaned pieces of soul, shards of psyche, slivers of heart cells longing to return home, take their place at the table of the vast, contribute, share, dance, play, and remind us of how rare and precious it is here.
Between the extremes of independence and dependence, selfishness and selflessness, meaning and meaninglessness, order and disorder, and oneness and multiplicity is a rich, majestic middle area filled with scintillas of light, strands of creativity, and aliveness of soul. To turn back toward the lost opposite is an expression of mercy and a manifestation of grace.
It is an act of love not only for ourselves but for others and for all of life, for earth and the ancestors, for the animals and streams and stars, and also for the ones circling now, awaiting fertile and ripe conditions for their arrival here.
The Otherness of Shadow
Emotionally sensitive, somatically grounded inner work is distinct for each nervous system. You must discover for yourself the most skillful, effective, and compassionate ways to open your body, psyche, and heart. No one can tell you what the right way is for you. The journey is individual by nature, requiring primary experience; collective spirituality might not be able to meet the longing within you. Although many mentors and guides appear as signposts along the way, the true teacher or teachings will always point you back into your own uniqueness by way of a secret language only you can decipher. The journey of the heart is radical and revolutionary and requires you, exactly as you are, in all your chaotic glory. In this sense, you are the prima materia without which the Great Work cannot proceed.
It is difficult to do shadow work on our own because by definition we cannot see it, at least not clearly. It is often best approached in connection with an attuned other, where we can make use of the energy and dynamics of the relational field to help us see in the dark, in “borrowing” another’s soothed, calm nervous system as we enter uncharted territory and as we open ourselves to the inner figures and pieces of the soul that have become lost along the way. It is not easy to find these ones on our own because the landscape is hazy, the forests are misty and thick, and we all have within us a propensity to maintain life as it is. This “other” need not take expression within a professional relationship, such as with a therapist, coach, or counselor, though of course that is a valid pathway for some. Any person we trust who resonates with us, who can listen carefully and empathically with a limited agenda, and who shares an intention to bear witness and travel with us into the depths of our experience can be helpful.
I want to make it clear that although shadow work is often best undertaken with an “other,” I am not saying it is not possible to engage it on our own. Much of the territory we cover together here in this book is supportive of recognizing, illuminating, and “reowning” the shadow, a sacred activity we do for ourselves as well as for others. As we become more acquainted and conversant with the inner territory of psyche, body, and heart, we can develop a more intimate and illumined relationship with the various “internal” others as they appear through our dreams as well as in the waking state in moments of meditation, inquiry, and contemplation, and as they emerge within our close personal relationships. We begin to see how we take unwanted qualities that are part of us and “locate” them in another object, person, or group of persons. And from this seeing, the path of “reclaiming” the shadow begins to make sense to us experientially; we start to “reown” that material and provide a home for it within ourselves.
The important point here is that the shadow has the sense of being “other” to us, that is, “other” to our ordinary standpoint of ego consciousness. At first glance, it doesn’t seem to “fit in” so well, but there is something (hauntingly) familiar about it. To honor the otherness of the shadow, whether via another person, dream image, strange bodily sensation, intense emotional state, or other aspect of our experience with which we’re not usually in touch that feels “foreign” is helpful in bringing the shadow out of the shadow so that we can work with it. Remember that the shadow is not evil or an enemy but a lost part of ourselves that seeks illumination so that it can resume its rightful place in the larger ecology of what we are.
The way of direct revelation and embodied, experiential discovery is not the easy way. It is not the path of five clear steps to empowerment, manifestation, or thinking our way into permanent happiness, abundance, and bliss. It is not about learning a bunch of new powerful techniques or the latest awakening technology. There is nothing wrong with these approaches per se, but mine is only an invitation to keep our eyes open and realize we might never be able to fully touch the mystery with technique or prefabricated steps and stages. We must discover the secret map within us, hidden inside our hearts, and cultivate the courage and the trust to follow our own path, at times to walk alone and at other times to make the journey side by side with a kindred traveler who can see into our shadow in ways we cannot see on our own. How this “kindred traveler” takes form is a mystery and often comes into our lives in surprising and unexpected ways.
The Threshold of a New World
From an alchemical perspective, wisdom hidden in the core of our so-called negative emotions is not available by privileging and attending only to “positive” states such as joy, happiness, clarity, and peace. If our relationship with the “material” of our lives is oriented around purging or even more subtly transforming or “healing” it (at least at first), we might never be able to get close or intimate enough to mine th
e intelligence concealed in its core. Although positive qualities and experiences are also of course valid, honorable, and worthy of cultivation and ongoing relationship, they do not represent the entirety of what it means to be a living, breathing, sensitive human being. If our emphasis is to eradicate the unwanted material from our systems as quickly as possible, we sacrifice powerful opportunities for self-awareness. This deeply rooted urge to rid ourselves of parts of the personality we have deemed “negative” reflects a larger cultural rejection of the darkness and the creative, yet misunderstood, unknown territory of the alchemical nigredo. When we are in an awake, embodied, and compassionate relationship with shadow elements and less-than-desired aspects of ourselves, we can work with and integrate them rather than project them onto others and into the world.
As we are able to provide holding and attunement for even our most undesirable qualities, we might come to the profound realization that none of this needs to be “let go” by way of some active, controlling process and procedure. Rather, it will organically “let go of us” when we meet it in open awareness, metabolize it, and find that its previous role and function are no longer required. The war is ended. When we allow the wisdom inherent in psychic experience to come through the symptom and for its messages to be decoded, we find ourselves at the threshold of a new world. When the energies and figures of the inner landscape have been acknowledged, tended to with care, and touched with curiosity and awareness, they soften and resume their rightful place in the overall ecology of being.
In the Dzogchen tradition of Tibetan Buddhism, it is said that the nature of all experience is to “self-liberate” when we meet it with open, warm, agendaless, naked awareness. I find this image of “self-liberation” rich, evocative, and helpful. In other words, painful thoughts and feelings do not require active effort on our part to transform, transmute, or reveal their primordial nature. We do not need to get rid of, shift, or even “heal” these difficult states or convert them into their opposites but only to infuse them with presence, bearing witness to how they arise, dance for a short while, and dissolve on their own in the context of an enormous amount of space. In this practice, we begin to discover they are not obstacles on our path but illumined lanterns in the darkness.
