‘The shadow is the greatest teacher for how to come to the light’ - Richard Alpert
‘Ram Dass’, the recently deceased American spiritual teacher, author and psychologist, here points towards a fundamental truth behind any authentically wise process concerned with self-transformation; That the shadow aspects of our personalities, the parts that we naturally tend to dis-identify with or project onto others as our persona takes shape, are ultimately necessary and essential parts of our wholeness.
Our shadow is what we refuse to acknowledge about ourselves and what we do not want others to see. The more we have cultivated and been successful in protecting a chosen persona, our carefully constructed self-image and social mask, the more our shadow casts in our inner life in the form of anxieties, doubts, potential guilt or shame. Who amongst us does not know something of this? Depending upon one's psychological make-up and life circumstances, these negative or dark emotions are often then immediately projected onto someone else or a negative situation in one's life. In this way, socially celebrated and somewhat positively idealised roles such as priest, doctor, politician or moralist, often trap their adherents within a narrow persona-driven expression of their real fuller selves, whilst their inner lives fall into torment or their external relationships suffer.
Wholeness as a spiritual intention is not grounded without the emptiness and humility involved in acknowledging shadow. Spiritual maturity is largely a growth in seeing and assimilating the complexity of one's full self-expression, beyond what our conditioned egos (our ‘I’) want us to be. This is a lifetime's work, accelerated at times of humiliation or serious illness, as any psychotherapist, priest or hospice worker might tell you. Perhaps the best we might eventually muster, unless we consider ourselves already a Saintly figure, is a cultivated ‘seeing-through’ of our tendency to deny our own hypocrisy in our inner and outer lives, the gap between our personas and correlated shadows. The fruit of working with the personal (and the collective) shadow is not its eradication, but a kind of lived-in acceptance of formerly disowned parts of ourselves, previously visible to others, but now personally reclaimed to an enlarged sense of our full warts-and-all presence in the world. Once you have faced enough (there is no end-point!) of your hidden or repressed self, there is not so much to be truly anxious about; You are already exposed to yourself and to others.
As the spiritual life progresses and the shadow of things becomes more integral to a vital sense of life, interest in idolising or denigrating persons, events or ideas loses something of its urgency or importance. That is not to say that one falls into an emotional stupor or loves less; In fact the obstacles to a more profound love, one less compromised by the ongoing maintenance of persona-driven values or denial of shadow urges, are removed. Life takes on a potentially different quality and energy in which former attachments still exist, but occupy space in a more complex, interconnected and richer tapestry of life that holds the former opposites of light and dark as complementary and necessary bedfellows in life. What was formerly pejoratively denounced as shadowy might also be newly appreciated as vital to life, for much of our hidden potential also lies outside of what we initially value about ourselves.
In our current situation, stripped of the reliable but stifling knowns of our day-to-day personas, we are in a moment of collective invitation into the hinterland of our shadow lives. Do not be so quick, right now, to disown the unfamiliar in you.
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