[Greetings, friend, from Austin! This past weekend, I had the pleasure of co-hosting another quarterly men’s retreat at the Pyramid of San Marcos (aka the Samadhi Yoga Retreat). The day’s docket was full of cacao, community, breathwork, hypnosis therapy, ice baths, food, inner reflection, and some sharing. This quarter’s theme was exploring the shadow. What that means and how we can use it is the subject of today’s essay.]
One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light but by making the darkness conscious. The latter procedure, however, is disagreeable and therefore not popular.
Carl Jung (Collected Works, Volume 13, Paragraph 335)
The idea of the shadow of the psyche sprang from the mind of the great psychoanalyst Carl Jung. In its most general terms, the shadow is the unconscious aspect of our entire Self. It is the dark side of our moon where everything we learned to suppress gets stuffed. It is our emotional blind spot—the basement where all our rejected aspects are hidden.
It is like the labyrinth where King Minos puts the Minotaur he’s ashamed of (because the Minotaur reminds him of his sin). Like the Mr. Hyde to Dr. Jekyll.
When we think of the shadow, we often associate it with only the negative aspects of the Self—the parts of us that are prideful, jealous, envious, lustful, gluttonous, and judgmental. Learning from a young age that these traits are undesirable, we slowly learn how to hide any evidence of these emotions from the rest of the world. We do whatever we must to put ourselves in a position where we can convince ourselves (and others) that we are most definitely not any of those things.
Except, of course, that’s never entirely true. We cannot kill the snake. The emotions we are ashamed of never leave because they are part of what it means to be human; we just get better at hiding them from the world and denying they exist to ourselves. Eventually, we even come to believe our self-deception. We think we have rid ourselves of everything reprehensible, so we dismiss the guards from their gates.
Until the day when we’re tired or hungry, and our defenses are down. We yell at someone we love and wonder where it came from or allow the seeds of envy to give way to full-blown resentment. We suddenly become jealous out of left field. “But I’m not a jealous person,” we say as we push it back into the shadows before anybody sees. We’re no longer equipped to handle that which we thought no longer existed, so it handles us.
That is the essence of Jung’s statement that “until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.” When we refuse to acknowledge the emotions and needs that live eternally inside us, they throw tantrums like a neglected toddler. When the shadow remains unconscious, it wreaks havoc with outbursts. It is the driving force behind the self-destructive patterns we find ourselves returning to. These are the moments when the shadow breaks through and overrides the conscious mind to fulfill some unmet (or ignored) need.
The key to avoiding this shadow possession is first admitting it exists. Rather than asking whether you have any of the traits of other humans you dislike, ask how, when, and where those traits show up in you. Because it’s not if; it’s to what extent. When we start with the assumption that everything we find deplorable in others lives in us, the real shadow work can begin.
Unfortunately there can be no doubt that man is, on the whole, less good than he imagines himself or wants to be. Everyone carries a shadow, and the less it is embodied in the individual’s conscious life, the blacker and denser it is. At all counts, it forms an unconscious snag, thwarting our most well-meant intentions.1
I should also mention that the shadow is not only the negative aspects of our psyche; it also contains some of our more childlike traits. Like the creative boy who was taught real men make war not art so he sent the artist into the shadows. Or the athletic girl who was taught physicality is not ladylike, so she gave up sports to be a cheerleader. Or the always-questioning kid told to just shut up and obey so they learn to be ashamed of their self-reliant attitudes.
What’s common among all in the shadow of the psyche is that we’ve moved them underground, relegated them to the stagehands who operate behind the curtains but are never allowed to step on stage. Sometimes, they represent tendencies or past decisions we’re ashamed of and don’t want the world to see. Other times, it’s because it was denied or rejected by the people in our lives whose love we crave(d).
The practice of shadow work, then, is about becoming aware of our shadow qualities. This doesn’t mean we must welcome them unobstructed back into our lives; it just means being honest about the energies, emotions, and needs at work inside you. Shadow work is about being honest with yourself and the world about your humanity. It’s about recovering a healthy relationship with natural human desires instead of allowing your denial of them to twist them into malevolent and unnatural versions.
When we stop and think about it, all of the aspects we place in the shadows are just extreme and unhealthy versions of normal (and even good) desires. The lust you put in the shadow may just be a perversion of the pleasure you’ve denied yourself completely. The envy, just a perversion of admiration. C.S. Lewis drives this point home in the Screwtape Letters, when he has the senior demon Screwtape explain how perverting pleasures through unhealthy doses is the key to winning souls for Hell:
Never forget that when we are dealing with any pleasure in its healthy and normal and satisfying form, we are, in a sense, on [God’s] ground. I know we have won many a soul through pleasure. All the same, it is His invention, not ours. He made the pleasures: all our research so far has not enabled us to produce one. All we can do is to encourage humans to take the pleasures which our Enemy has produced, at times, or in ways, or in degrees, which He has forbidden. Hence we always try to work away from the natural condition of any pleasure to that in which it is least natural, least redolent of its Maker, and least pleasurable.2
As it relates to what we view as the negative aspects of our shadow, then, the work is about repairing our relationship with the energies inside us and restoring the healthy version of those innate desires.
As it relates to the childlike qualities in our shadow, the work is about reclaiming our authenticity and creativity. We cannot be who we are until all aspects are given a way to find healthy expression in the world. We cannot achieve our outward potential if we leave entire territories of ourselves behind.
We cannot find what we most need unless we dare to scout the shadows.
Post tenebras lux.
After darkness, light.
After shadows, sun.
Carl Jung, Collected Works, Volume 11, Paragraph 131.
C.S. Lewis, Screwtape Letters.