There comes a time in every man’s life

When he’s gotta handle shit up on his own.

THE PHARCYDE, “RUNNIN’”

PRACTICE

SHADOW SELF

There are a number of shadow work practices and great teachers on the subject, so if it’s something that interests you (I truly can’t stress the importance of this stuff enough), I’d recommend checking out writings by Carl Jung, Robert Augustus Masters, Ken Wilber, and others who go into significant depth. In the meantime, here’s a quick practice to help get you started on uncovering, befriending, and re-owning your shadow.

       •  The best time to do this practice is either in the morning after you wake up, using someone who showed up in your dreams (if you’re able to remember them), or in the evening before you go to bed, using someone from your day who elicited any kind of emotional response from you.

       •  When you have that person in mind, mentally face and talk to them. Discuss whatever came up for you in the dream or in person during the day (your thoughts, feelings, and emotions). Let it all out—you’re doing this only mentally, so there’s no reason to hold back.

       •  Next, become that other person and adopt their perspective. Face and speak to yourself as if you were them. As best as you can imagine, offer yourself their perspective of the experience and situation. This helps to take you out of yourself and to see what role you possibly played in whatever the situation was.

When I first learned this practice, I didn’t really think anything would come from it. I didn’t see how imaginary conversations and talking to myself could do a damn thing to unlock my Everything Mind. Through the years, however, I’ve found that this practice has really helped me understand and experience the ways I project my unconscious shadow emotions onto others.

Take sadness as an example. I used to seek out sadness in others so that instead of having to face and feel my own sadness, I could focus on, and feel, theirs. Through this behavior, I disowned my own sadness and projected it onto others. I was using their sadness as an excuse to feel sad rather than acknowledging and exploring the roots of my own. The difference may seem subtle, but any time we disassociate from parts of ourselves, no matter how small, it’s never a healthy decision.

When we do shadow work, we’re really digging into the core of our unconscious ugliness. We’re uprooting the painful thoughts and memories we’ve consciously or unconsciously hidden away throughout our lives. Please know that shadow work can be heavy at times, and while it’s great to start working with it on your own, for going deeper, it may be worth looking into going to a trained psychotherapist.

I mentioned earlier that I’ve periodically struggled with my eating habits, and in turn my weight. A few years ago, while doing shadow work, I stumbled upon at least one of the contributing factors. It was morning, and the previous night, I’d had a dream in which I ate constantly. I woke up feeling disgusted with myself and began the aforementioned shadow work practice.

As I thought about how disgusted I was with my behavior in the dream, and occasionally in real life as well, I saw the other me begin to get very sad. This was followed by “me” turning into a Little League baseball coach I had when I was a kid. . . . And then it hit me. I remembered the day we got our team uniforms and all put them on. Mine was particularly snug, and the coach said to me, in front of the rest of my team, “Looking good, Crisco.” Everyone, including the coach and his assistants, proceeded to laugh. I don’t think his comment was meant in a completely malicious way; however, it hurt me deeply enough that I had suppressed it since I was a kid.

After the initial residual pain from this deeply buried memory wore off, I began to feel a tremendous sense of peace and spaciousness arise within me. That’s what happens when we do shadow work: we uncover and release these shit-tastic memories that have been buried for Christ-knows-how-long. With that, we also release the accompanying negative energy associated with them.

As with any practice, we do the best we can on any given day and trust in the process, understanding that shadow work can be a particularly difficult undertaking. In the spirit of complete honesty, shadow work for most of us is pretty much a forever thing—for where there is light, there is also a shadow. But in our shadow practice, we begin to integrate both. Ken Wilber really summed it up nicely when he wrote, “The shadow is just one tricky little son of a bitch, which I suppose is how you get to be the shadow in the first place.”1