The two sides to shadow work
While shadow work often refers to addressing the unconscious, the dark side of the moon, the unseen... we usually relate it to our personal (and perhaps collective) “darkness”, our old traumas, and wounds... Holding space and care around that awareness and healing is essential work for us to live in more wholeness and integration..
...But...what about the “golden shadow”?
So many of us have already been programmed to seek out and be hyper aware of our flaws. We may be over-identified with the voice of our inner critic and think those criticisms are the summary of who we really are. We may self deprecate and behave with a modesty and humility that is actually cutting ourselves off from our gifts. We may find ourselves divorced from our vitality because criticism and shame occupy more of our internal relationship to ourselves than celebration and moving through our lives with true confidence and purpose. We may be much more adept in sitting with our “dark” parts because we have become accustomed to thinking of ourselves in those ways.
With exposing the “golden shadow”, we connect not just to the way we engage with the “negative” aspects of our unconscious, we may also expose hidden talents, previously unknown courage and capacity and creativity, and renewed passion and power and effectiveness.
But that is a vulnerable space to be in as well. To truly honor and uplift our gifts and embody our courage and joy and talents, is risking exposure of maybe an even more soft and sensitive aspect of ourselves.
The ego is not something to be rid of... it is to be made both strong and flexible. Just as our bodies function best with mobility rather than rigidity, to be able to have the tensile integrity to bend but not break.. to be permeable and receptive but not boundary-less.
We have to be willing to let the ego respond not just to affirming a false self concept and it’s own desire for self preservation... but to relate purely to being a healthy container of our psychic selves in each moment, to provide the psychological container that allows us to be present in everything simply as it *is*, including all aspects of ourselves, and our story. This means I don’t have to get stuck in the harmful half-truth of over-identifying with my smallness. And I also don’t get stuck in the ego trip of grandiosity and godliness being overly identified with power in a misaligned way. We are no longer the wounded helpless child, nor are we the projected fantasy of the all-powerful parent figure. This is the basis of the narcissistic wounding that many have incurred on a spectrum of being overly self concerned, or underly self concerned. We are not in reality or our personal power on either sides of that spectrum and we are 99% going to be getting some of our needs met in manipulative or subversive ways because we are dis-identified and fragmented away from so many parts of ourselves. The denied aspects will be forced to get needs met indirectly, rather than being able to recognize and directly meet those needs.
Either of these over-identifications stem from wounding of a very similar nature, created through polarized defensive responses. Some of us moved towards power over, and some towards power under. Ultimately when left to fester, either of those wounds function to create a lot of harm. You can imagine how messy that gets in a world of 7.8 billion people who nearly all suffer power wounds and fragmentation from their childhoods. We flail and flounder in our powerlessness or we crush others (and even aspects of our internal selves) in our need to dominate.
When we can do both our “dark” shadow work, and our “golden” shadow work, we can recognize the wholeness that lets us be both divine and infinite, and finite and temporal. Embodied in our own capacity and power and purpose. We can recognize that we are in a body that is impermanent and will die, and also have a soul or some internal life force that connects and extends in quantum ways to all time and space at psychic spiritual and cellular levels. A flexible ego allows us to contain the full reality of who we are, letting us be our full light and full darkness without denial.
If you made it this far, I’d love to hear three golden shadow things about you! In what ways are you more courageous and talented and lovely than you ever imagined?