Art by Deepti Nair and Harikrishnan Panicker
The journey of discovering ourselves is life-long. Every step forward takes us further into a deeper knowing of who we are, yet in the dormant edges of our consciousness will always lie forgotten and neglected aspects of our Soul. Our sense of Self remains limited, while we identify with qualities we wish to embody, at the expense of others we learn to forget. Never fully aware of all that we are, a lot of us exists unclaimed in the depths of Self and Soul.
The personal shadow in Jungian psychology is a space in our unconscious psyche that holds all the unacknowledged, denied, neglected and rejected parts of who we are. Beyond the boundaries of consciousness lives all that aches to take its place amongst the rest of us. Here we delegate the parts of us that threaten to unstitch our domesticated sense of self. Exiled by a moral compass that has been handed down to us at a tender time in life, a time when being loved and belonging were crucial for our surviving, their exclusion helped us fit into the families we come from, the groups we belong to, the societies we are part of.
The wild creatures of our shadow lands tend to the intricate balancing act of holding a counterweight to all that we think and wish that we are. They compensate for our persona, the mask with which we present to the outside world. This trained and tamed part of our self is absolutely essential for navigating society and our various roles in it, but it can also trick us into believing that we actually are who we appear to be. This hollow husk of Self has no roots into our deep Soul and cannot sustain us in times of trouble or transition. We need to summon the wider capacities of a greater wholeness to navigate the waves of life.
What grows in the shadow of the psyche remains abandoned and starved of its potential for vitality and purpose. Here in our deepest dark we may have relegated the darkness that completes our light or even the light that completes our darkness. If we have found safety in the world behind the fortress of a defensive identity that keeps anything fertile at a safe distance, then all the love, compassion and capacity for connectedness have been entrusted to our shadow. If, on the other hand, we have allowed ourselves to be only right, only kind, only light, then our sadness, shame and rage have been banished into silence.
Exclusions create tensions and what is excluded will always find a way to re-affirm its presence and right to belong. If we cannot trace the edges of our shadow within ourselves we will come across it, time and time again, outside ourselves. What is an outcast within us converts to outcasts outside of us. This is how scapegoats form into reality. Our projections create mirrors where we can catch a glimpse of what needs to be recalled within us. If we have kept our potent capacities at bay, we run the risk of idolising others in search of the light we know we hold but cannot find. If it is our sense of inadequacy and shame that we have kept at bay, we will attack others in our attempts to shore up what needs to be re-membered. Finding a way to sit with whatever creature of the Self crosses the threshold into the daylight of consciousness, will slowly soften their hard-worn edges. What finds its way back to us will have to be slowly assimilated and honoured into consciousness. As we gather stray parts of our Self in their rightful place amongst the rest of us, we also awake to our greater capacities.
Shadow work is inherently strengthening and reminds us that in psychological work wholeness is not synonymous with perfection, it is synonymous with integration and while the end result might be a lot less perfect, it stands in greater truth and wholeness. Our task is never to eliminate our shadow, but to process and relate to it with conscious awareness. We have to be willing and courageous enough to allow ourselves to become contaminated with the breadth and depth of life. To separate from our identification with the Gods and return to our mortal fate of limitations and imperfection. Inhabiting our rightful size and place opens us up to the potent heart-medicine of compassion, which restores us to a deeper belonging with all aspects of life, within and without.
