Embracing The Shadow

the Labyrinth of the heart(47 slides)

creatively compiled by dr. michael farnworth

Please Note:

The issue of the shadow is more than just a personal one.

The shadow energies also extend to the family, institutions and the society and nation at large.

This lesson will be an attempt to explain a difficult issue:

The nature of oppositional light and dark in human nature and how to embrace it.

It will attempt an explanation of the shadow and the gift of the shadow in our own life-

If we have the integrity and courage to embrace it and then let it go but we can’t let go of something that we never possessed.

It will also address the surrendering of the adult ego for the enlightened child as the center of one’s consciousness in living life.

When a person lives in a state of incongruity and wages a war of self, against the self, there will be no

inner peace and safety.

The shadow will not be dismissed via superficial role playing and polite public behavior.

Religiosity may reign in our life but spirituality invariably suffers.

The emotional crisis (emptiness, anxiety, depression or helplessness), many feel in their life of endless checklist living is, in actuality, an invitation

by Life, to engage life more authentically and fiercely.

I want to use the ancient symbol of the labyrinth for this lesson and the 3 fold path of:

1. Letting go…is the realignment of the adult ego.2. Enlightenment… led by the enlightened child.3. Union with Life… is the rebirth.

The number three in the Hebrew represents perfection, wholeness and being complete.(Biblical Mathematics, Ed F. Vallowe, p.53)

In the Middle Ages, when the pilgrims finally reached Chartres (a cathedral near France), they completed their journey by walking the labyrinth which is set in the stone

pavement at the west end of the cathedral.

They understood this walk as following the Threefold Path.

The first part was Purgation, or letting go of the cares of the world.

The second was Illumination where, standing in the center, one could experience clarity of heart and mind.

The third, Union, or joining God, occurred as one walked back out into the world emboldened by the meeting in the center.

This walk was a sign of homecoming and wholeness.

The expanding and contracting circles spoke of a strenuous yet hospitable reality which took human striving seriously yet revealed that after all our striving, life comes to us as

a gift.

(Reverend Alan Jones)

A picture of the Chartres Labyrinth.

A story… there once was a man who worked as a custodian, in a religious building, cleaning it at night.

He often worked alone and would sometimes get scared, nothing

serious but just a little jumpy at strange noises and such.

One time while cleaning some glass in a semi darkened room, he was up on a ladder, when he thought he saw a person in the glass’s

reflection!

He panicked. Frightened, he suddenly turned around to see who was there and just about fell off his ladder in the process.

As he composed himself, he realized the image he saw was a

reflection of himself in the glass, which was acting more as a mirror in the semi-darkened room.

There are a lot of good metaphors in this little story.

The religious building being symbolic of our self and our sacred places.

The cleaning representing excursions into the corridors of the sanctuary to tidy up the day-to-day business of living.

The fears of being alone and by ourselves in those sometimes darkened rooms of the heart.

And the stark fear of catching a glimpse of a seemingly dark and ominous shadow or reflection that is mirrored back to us in that sometimes lonely

place of the soul.

• The Adult Ego:

• The ego is the socially created persona of our idealized self. It represents the conscious, thinking part of our cerebral cortex with all of it’s defense mechanisms and intellectual powers. The ego is centric in it’s thinking and observations. It sees itself as above reproach. The adult ego is the metaphorical command center of our personal and professional life. It is the Ring Master of our circus. It calls the shots based upon supposed rationality and logic but is often saddled with the history of emotions, feelings and energies that get in the way and makes an entangled mess.

First some definitions

• The Enlightened Child:

• The enlightened child represents that part of the personality that Jung referred to as the sacred Self or God Self. It represents the sacred and holy places of the inner sanctuary of the human psyche. The enlightened child is led by the wisdom of Life and fueled by the energy of childlike exuberance. It is the combination of the human and sacred energy unified into wholeness and maturity. The enlightened child is the metaphorical part of the sacred self which we need to embrace in exchange for our adult ego. It is the child spoken of in the stories that we are to become. It is the sacred center of our being.

• The Shadow:

• The shadow is an Jungian Psychology term that means the unlived, un-owned parts of the self (the parts we don’t like, are

embarrassed about or that someone else didn’t like). The shadow represents the energy of the underbelly or dark side of human nature. Sort of a Dr. Jekyll-- Mr. Hyde conundrum. Besides being the dark side of the personality it can also represent those parts that have been fragmented off and repressed. For the typical person, it is the memories and energies that we would rather not have to confront in life.

• Embracing:

• to hug, to hold close, to encircle, metaphorically to accept, love and to have charity for. This process of embracing the shadow is a difficult issue for most of us. We have absorbed the contempt of self from others in our life when we didn’t behave and feel in a way that coincided and agreed with those in power over us. We learned to hide from ‘them’ and our self- which gave the shadow side in us, even more power. The shadow is fueled by self contempt, loathing and disgust!

The gift that the shadow has for us is one plagued with dangers, or so it seems.

Many are frightened to honestly look at them self and feel and comprehend past the idealized persona that they have created

for the world to see.

The shadow bears the gift of truth and honesty painful as that gift sometimes is.

It is essential for the mature life.

Anything short of embracing the shadow spawns sentimentalism and vanity in our lives.

Embracing the shadow means to feel, own and suffer the negative emotions of hurt, pain, shame, loneliness, anger, fear,

failure, woundedness, flawedness, abuse, etc. etc., that we have fragmented off to keep us out of our selves.

We construct an outer life, leaving the inner sanctuary abandoned, and in that deserted place a wilderness grows.

All of me, is in need of healing (by all of me) I mean all of me!

Not just the parts of me that are nice, conforming and polite but the parts of me that are rebellious, evil, mean spirited and rude.

I cannot fragment off my unwanted parts and pretend they are no longer a part of me.

(ok, I can by disassociating, but it is only in my head that things have changed)

My wholeness of light and dark is a compound of the paradoxical opposition that is the necessary condition for this reality state.

There is no escape.

The healing is not just for my fragmented parts but rather for my entire being and personality.

No matter how dark I am or how wonderfully sophisticated, educated, self controlled and successful!

The nature of opposites, with it’s knowledge of good and evil, is that they balance, temper and restore each other to wholeness,

rather than one overcoming and dominating the other.

The transcendence of opposites into wholeness is accomplished by surrendering to the power of Life.

It does not occur by the dominance of the adult ego, which is already distorted, perverse and burdened with it’s own wounds,

defenses and centric existence.

Our shadow side needs integrated into our self, not dominated or repressed away.

That integration can only come through our faith in living the wholeness of Life.

What sense does it make for us to come down to the earth to have experiences and then spend the rest of our life pretending the experiences

never occurred.

Using denial, pretense, disassociation, dishonesty and forgetting.

According to the logic and conventional wisdom of the adult ego, we can overcome and dominate the dark side of our self through

the power of the will.

The work ethic associated with self improvement and change is a powerful core assumption of this culture.

The conventional wisdom of the culture invites us to engage in cognitive and behavior reinforced activities to bring about the

changes we logically desire.

We learn, not by dominating one side of the duality of life, but from experiencing and suffering from it.

We are changed and transformed and purged of the pairs of opposites through the tempering process of struggle and the healing of the

fragmentations, not by the victory of triumph!

Because, even if, through our will power, we do temporarily triumph, it will be shallow, superficial and of short duration.

The next few slides give us an idea of why this dual nature is so important in Life.

“He who wants to have right without wrong, order without disorder, does not understand the principles of heaven and earth.He does not know how things hang together.”

Chuang Tzu

Help us to be the always hopeful gardeners of the spirit who knows that without darkness nothing comes to birth

. As without light nothing flowers.

May Sarton, Journal of a Solitude

In this world of duality and opposition

We cannot know the sweet without the bitter.

We cannot know the health without the sickness.

We cannot know the happiness without the misery.

And we cannot know the light without the dark.

We cannot know the life without the death.

Let me be as clear as I can on this concept.

Life intends suffering and the experience life, both good and bad.

That oppositional state of good and bad is in us.

We are not suppose to create some sort of temporal self righteous bubble by subduing the darkness through will-power

of ego.

But rather, we are to submit and surrender to the wisdom of living Life honestly and with completeness.

Those who refuse to incorporate their shadow into their life because they prefer to pretend they are too good for such a thing, become a one

dimensional personality.

They become self righteous, shallow, superficial and vanilla flavored.

They can’t help their dishonesty because it is part of the ego package.

The sacrificial scapegoat…

• Just as Israel had sacrificial scapegoats to carry the sins of the community, we have our own sacred goats to offer up.

• We may want to blame our parents, our circumstances, our history, our lack of opportunity, etc. etc.

• We want other people to carry our shadow for us so we project it onto them.

• We may excel in rationalization and passing the buck but in the end there will be an eventual accounting and a restoration of that which we truly are for we cannot escape through our ego.

It is a difficult thing to explain to people the concept of the shadow.

It contradicts the enculturation process as we all want to appear good, nice and sanitized.

Nobody is fond of seeing them self as wounded person or broken person.

And yet, that is exactly what the shadow will invite us to confront in our own lives, if we do not run and hide from the

encounter.

Life invites us to heal from the broken fragmentation.

The inner workings of redemptive shadow work

Requires that the ego consent to a subordinate but still important role.

Jung described this moment of realignment as the relocation of the center of gravity of the personality.

This process is so painful, since it consists of dethroning the ego, that it is rarely done.

Robert A Johnson, Transformation, p.70-71

The process of realignment can be summed up in one sentence: It is the relocating of the center of the personality from the ego

to a center greater than one’s self.

(Robert A. Johnson, Transformation, p.84)

I have labeled this center - the enlightened child- but more on this later.

This relocation (realignment of the ego) appears to be death when viewed from the perspective of the ego.

And death it is!

The ego looses it supremacy and goes through a short time of violent suffering.

(often times referred to as the Dark Night of the Soul)

Robert A. Johnson, Transformation, p.84

The ego will never take us where we need to go because it will never submit itself to the suffering of giving up control and

surrendering it’s superior position in the psyche of the human.

This adult ego is the ultimate expression of the slumbering human.

Those of us who underestimate the devious and scheming powers of the ego do so at our peril.

It is wonderful at what it does.

Namely, keeping us asleep.

Meizumi Roshi, a Zen Master put it this way in reference to the ego:

Why don’t you die now and enjoy the rest of your life?

Our cultural wisdom teaches us (the adult ego) to overcome our undesirable side with will power, with positive mental attitudes,

goal setting, and the like.

This conventional wisdom feeds into the grandiosity, vanity and pride that already fuels our egos by keeping us asleep.

The ego centric syndrome…

• The ego centric syndrome is based on the will power of self.

• I can do it by myself if I just apply myself to the best of my abilities.

• I can do it.

• I can make something of myself if I just keep at it.

• I can overcome my weaknesses and my problems if I just have enough time to work on them and solve them.

• I can do it.

• Believe me, just give me enough time, I can do it!

This quote typifies the conventional wisdom of the culture we live in:

Man has two creators, his God and himself.

This first creator furnishes him the raw material of his life, the laws in conformity with which he can make that life what he will.

The second creator, himself, has marvelous powers, powers he rarely realizes.

It is what a man makes of himself that counts.

William George Jordan

You see, (and this is important) the ego thinks that it can do it by him/her self!

It can fragment off it’s shadow and live in denial about it’s need for healing change.

The cultural plan for human improvement, is all our ego needs or wants.

Please do not underestimate the ego’s abilities to fake good and to be in denial and fragmented about it’s inner state.

We may attempt to hide and insulate our shadow self from our ego via the looking good, conforming behaviors of the culture in

which we are socialized but nothing really changes.

But I think our hearts know the reality of our predicament.

Now we need to explore the nature of this greater self that I have labeled the Enlightened Child and which Carl Jung called the Self.

This enlightened child metaphorically represents the higher consciousness of the sacred self that is fueled by the connection to Life.

It is the symbolic inner child.

The paradox of the adult ego surrendering to the child like qualities of the enlightened child- were not missed on Jesus who said:

“Except ye be converted and become as little children ye shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven. Whosoever therefore shall humble himself as this

little child, the same is greatest in the kingdom of heaven.”

(Matthew 18:3-4)

The enlightened child is centered in our hearts not our heads.

It is a difficult thing to surrender our adult ego and thinking in exchange for the wisdom of our hearts.

The heart’s frequency is much different and much stronger than that of a brain.

Our own childhood experience that was encoded upon and within our hearts, when we were young determines in large part, our defended nature in

relation to our self and the depth of our own shadow.

Please Read:

The Monster

by anonymous

I have had a monster dwelling inside of my soul. A monster that has been there all of my life, yet I have subconsciously suppressed out of fear. This monster has been growing inside of me by feeding on that fear. Fear

of seeing and admitting the shameful secrets of my past. Fear that if someone knew-they couldn’t love me anymore. All my life I have strived to be perfect because only if you are perfect enough do you receive the love

you need. In my culture it is taught that bad mistakes are horrible evil things that are very shameful and embarrassing. I was implicitly taught that you should never tell anyone of your awful disgraceful deeds. So I didn’t. I never told those whom I needed love and admiration from the most. And the monster continued to

grow.It took many years and the help of an enlightened witness for me to finally see this monster that held my heart hostage and haunted my very living. He shared with me a scripture found in Matthew 5: 43-44. He told me that

Christ teaches us to love our enemies-the enemies outside and inside. He also explained to me that this monster- my “enemy”- had a gift for me. A gift that it has been trying to give me all of my life. A gift that will

help me and strengthen me. I knew that I needed to embrace this enemy and see what it had for me.The monster is black, mysterious, and scary. It is a dark black mist that is not confined to a locked box, but that is pushed and held to a certain area of my body. The area where it stirs impatiently is right next to my heart. I

fear that if I let it loose it will literally destroy me.I finally gained the courage to embrace the forbidden monster and share the shameful secrets my past with the

person that I love and admire most. He is the person whose love is most valuable to me-my dear husband. While on the tough journey I began to open my heart in ways I never had before. I admitted to myself the

shame and guilt that was hidden deep inside of me from long ago. He listened to me and loved me more. I had finally freed my soul from the past that had held it in bondage.

The black confined mist turned into a light gray/pink essence that now flows freely through my soul like blood through my veins. My monster isn’t a monster anymore, it is part of who I am. The gift is freedom. Freedom from the contempt I held for myself. Freedom from the feelings of disgust and hostility. Freedom to not care

what people may say they once knew about me. Freedom from wondering if I would still be loved after someone knew the things I had done. Free to feel the love and acceptance of who I was and who I am now. I

have embraced my past. It is my history-without it I wouldn’t be who I am today. And with my past-not despite it-I am a wonderful person.

The inner adventure of discovering and then listening to the enlightened child is the emergence of the inner life.

The ego is secular and is built upon the outer conventional wisdom of the world.

It is important but should not be the center of our consciousness.

The wisdom of Life is grounded in our inner chambers and

resides in our heart.

The enlightened child is metaphorical of the energies and fruits of being connected to the Life force.

the end