5

Our Shadow Denied

Consider them both, the sea and the land; and do you not find a strange analogy to something in yourself? For as this appalling ocean surrounds the verdant land, so in the soul of man there lies one insular Tahiti, full of peace and joy, but encompassed by all the horrors of the half known life.

—HERMAN MELVILLE, Moby Dick

WHEN WE DENY our shadow, we are like a father sleeping downstairs in a house while his son is having a seizure upstairs. Father and son in this analogy are two parts of one person. Denial is symbolized by the fact that the father is in the dark, at a lower level of the psyche, that is, the unconscious, sleeping through a crisis happening to another part of himself. He is thereby unable to hear the cries of his son and does not rescue him. His destiny as a father is thus unfulfilled. Denial of our shadow happens at just such great peril to our unfolding. It is a life-and-death issue when life means nurturing all the parts of ourselves and living out our full potential. We lose sight of the needy side of ourselves and of our resourceful side too. Denial of the shadow is thus a denial of our destiny of completeness. Are we fearing our own full fruition and full fruitfulness?

The child having the seizure will be angry at his father for not hearing him. It is the denied shadow that becomes unruly and aggressive. The shadow that is attended to and befriended does not react that way. Another metaphor might be of the wild child or the child kept prisoner, who will be fierce and intimidating when she emerges from her constricting cell. When a child is found in the closet where her parents kept her prisoner, those who free her feel compassion and wish to hold her and help her grow. This applies to the closeted, repressed parts of ourselves; shadow befriending is loving and holding the lost that has been found. It is thus a compassionate and spiritually evolved work.

Our unconscious is always at work in our decisions, and we deny that it is a residence of personal choice. Trying to muffle the voice inside that wants a hearing is a form of fear of the truth about our full selves. Only with this truth can we turn our shadow into an ally. This is why the unconscious dimension of the shadow is the first to be addressed as we move toward befriending it. We begin by admitting we have a dark side. Even in Alcoholics Anonymous, that is the “first step” toward recovery.

Alexis is considered a “nice” person. She is always doing something for someone else, always putting herself second. She sees herself and everyone in her world sees her as an ideal friend. But Alexis cannot stand women who are assertive or strong-willed. There is no in-between for Alexis; she finds them all repulsively controlling and manipulative, though she does not admit this to herself or to others. As a supervisor, she will pass over such women for advancement, preferring the more mild-mannered workers on her team who remind her of herself. Alexis is thus unfair and allows her judgment to be influenced by her undercover anger at strong women. She does not see this vindictiveness in herself nor would she believe it if it were pointed out to her. Alexis rationalizes that courtesy and femininity are lost values in today’s world and that she is trying to change that. She has no room in her vocabulary for healthy female self-declaration. Alexis calls that aggressiveness, and yet she herself acts aggressively toward the strong women around her.

The “nice person” of Alexis’s persona seems to be all of her. Yet she has another side: she is also an angry and spiteful woman who is afraid of female power when it is expressed directly through a healthy ego. Alexis has inner strength, but she has not yet accessed it. That is her positive shadow lying fallow in the negative ground she does not know is hers. It can only be released when she stops denying her anger and indignation. Alexis will have to call her sense of justice by its rightful name, retaliation. As she breaks through her own lies and admits her own unsavory truth, she will automatically access her healthy anger with a sense of fairness. Then her unilateral decisions can yield to a dialogue between her and other women, and something valuable to all will result. It is gratifying to see how individual work on the shadow benefits others.

In Jane Eyre, Charlotte Brontë portrays the shadow of the Victorian women of her time. Hidden away in the attic is the wild, uncontrollable, impulsive first wife of Mr. Rochester. She screams her presence in the night, and the gentle, rational, conscientious Jane can hear. She inquires about this presence in the house, that is, in the psyche, but the shadow woman’s reality is denied to her until she attempts marriage to Mr. Rochester. Then she meets her counterpart in his life, the shadow of herself.

What we cut off saps our energy. As we have seen, the shadow becomes a problem only when we deny it. Then it leads to projection or possession, two versions of the same phenomenon of self-disavowal. If the shadow possesses us, we are overwhelmed by its malice and we act out the worst traits of our ego. A vampire is a metaphor for this draining descent into the darkness.

In projection we see our own traits in others but not in ourselves. The alternative is to relate to the shadow, acknowledging its presence in ourselves as well as in others when appropriate. An adult accepts the fact of having a shadow side as a condition of being human. It will always be in us in some way. Likewise, in our collective history we are not trying to destroy the darkness so that only light remains but rather we are trying to accept them both. Each requires the other for existence, as thesis and antithesis are required for synthesis.

The ego usually has to deny its shadow at first in order to establish its own sense of worth. This is perfectly normal and even useful in the first half of life. A strongly developed ego helps us see why befriending the shadow is usually a task of the second half of life, when our ego is already established and is ready to be taken out and polished. Then we see how our shadow contains riches of creativity and a whole new world of possibilities for us. Only then are we likely to let go of our belief that we have no shadow. Instead we begin to look for it in every corner of our personality and want to know its shape so that we can make the best of it.

To continue denying the shadow is like sanding off the tail side of a coin; it loses its value. On the other hand, the shadow is valuable in the same way that coal potentially is: the pressure on it creates a diamond. Perhaps the weight of the repression fosters the hidden value of the shadow. This is the positive side of repression and denial, another example of the best being found in the worst. There is always a way to go from bad to best in our dealings with the shadow. Befriending the shadow is how it happens. The more unconscious the shadow is, the darker its effects. The more conscious we become of it, the greater the chance of finding and refining its dark gold.

Denial of the shadow is repudiation of our own reality: Denial of our positive shadow is the meaning of low self-esteem. Denial of our negative shadow makes for an inflated ego. Here are some ways we deny our shadow and some of the effects and dangers that arise from that denial:

• Not accepting criticism or admitting accountability when appropriate.

• Denying our darker side when others point it out. This is especially dangerous when the survival of an intimate relationship depends on our admitting it. Now we can understand why the conflict stage hits a romantic relationship in such frustrating ways: Here is a young man who needs to build his ego and thereby denies his shadow. Yet the resolution of a conflict with his girlfriend demands that he face it.

• Identifying too much with our self-image, our persona, so that we take ourselves too seriously. We can tell the shadow is being hidden when we see no humor in our circumstances.

• Repressing our darker side for fear of losing approval. This includes people-pleasing, which masks our shadow and thereby makes its effects more insidious.

• Professing beliefs and virtues that we lack: hypocrisy. The word hypocrisy is Greek for playing a part. It is the pretense that our persona is our real self. Just as a mask protects a face, hypocrisy protects our true shadow face from exposure. We pretend to be more than we are or better than we are or even something we are not. Cover-ups in politics are collective examples; shadow deeds are secreted away from public view lest the image they belie show itself as flawed. Such protected images of persons or organizations often take precedence even over human life. A Few Good Men portrayed this disturbingly. What is disturbed is our narrow, uninformed trust that established systems and their representatives have no shadow.

• Fearing our own shadow (like denial of the shadow in general) leads to vulnerability to predators. We are at the mercy of others’ shadows when we deny our own; for example, the guilelessness of Persephone lost in a world of sweetness and light resulted in Hades’ abducting her into the dark underworld. In the same way, ingenuous young people fall prey to cult leaders.

• Denying the shadow in others: “It is hard to believe that those who were protecting me were also those who were harming me.” We disallow the shadow of abusers and predators, especially family members: “They were doing the best they could.” “He did not mean to do that to me; he was an alcoholic.” We may go to any lengths to absolve them: dissociation from or amnesia about what happened, idealization of those who hurt or violated us, fragmented identity: that happened, but to someone else. The latter might even lead to the formation of multiple personalities.

The dissociative mechanism of the self-protective psyche after trauma may be so firmly locked into place that we hardly experience anything with its full impact. Yet many of these strategies of denial are adaptive: they help us accommodate information and memories that might be too much for us to bear all at one time or at this time or at any time. Respect for our limits is not resistance to the truth but self-protection from further intrusion. The work in therapy is to honor the closed door and to open a little window to change when the time is right.

• Believing movies that depict the triumph of good over evil as if that were inevitable, perceiving retaliation as the most successful or only response to evil, trusting in the infallibility of the courtroom, or having any Pollyanna view of life, family, or love.

• Monster making: To the extent that we consider others inhuman in their shadow actions, we are denying that potential in ourselves. When we fail to acknowledge our negative shadow side but see ourselves as “holier than thou,” we may project the “evil” onto others, for example, in witch hunts. Fundamentalists who hate and condemn others as heathens give themselves the right to harm or even kill those who are “less than human.” Society projects its shadow onto minority groups in this same way. Scapegoating is a shadowy attempt to destroy an enemy. Such an enemy is a split-off part of ourselves. What we dissociate from seems alien and dangerous. Hence we strongly persecute, disdain, and seek to hurt or destroy what has been split off from ourselves.

• Idolizing: When we imagine others to be idols above human reach, we minimize our own positive shadow. Then we may follow cult gurus, fundamentalist teachers, or ego-drunk leaders. To idolize is to set apart and thereby to break apart the inner structure of our own psyche. We project our ball into the hands of a pitcher who seems more adept than we. There may be such pitchers, but the healthy choice is to learn from them, not to let them play our game.

Hitler was considered both a monster and an idol. He was a shadow figure for a whole generation whose most somber purposes he was willing to implement. Jung said about Hitler in 1938: “He is the loudspeaker which magnifies the inaudible whispers of the German soul.” Hitler did not simply lead people into evil; he received their mandate for it. This deputation came from the German people, the Nazi Party, Pope Pius XI, who signed the Vatican’s 1933 concordat with Nazi Germany, Neville Chamberlain at Munich, the U.S. exclusionary laws under Roosevelt, and every silent man and woman everywhere. Silence, in this context, includes blindly believing leaders or policies without informing oneself more broadly about them or examining what their record shows.

• Denying our positive shadow, which can happen when people and their impressive lifestyles keep us so in awe that we do not acknowledge our own powers and enthusiasms. We may then lose touch with our deepest needs, values, and wishes. We may lose the incentive to rise to our true potential. We may even act in self-diminishing ways to garner the approval of those “greater than” we. Any life built around approval from people who do not help us self-activate and coemerge puts us in danger of being controlled by them. A life that is centered around personal enthusiasms, projects, issues, service, and bliss sets us free to become all that we are. This fulfills our destiny to bring out the best of ourselves and give it to the world.

• Believing that the shadow will someday be gone and that perfect light will take its place. Shambhala is the Buddhist name for a kingdom of enlightenment that will appear on earth in only a few short centuries. It is said to last for at least eighteen centuries, since there is no permanent kingdom without a shadow. Tibetan Buddhists believe that the heinous and massive dimensions of the shadow in these times is an indication that Shambhala will not be long in coming. Yet the cycles of life and death, light and dark, are unalterable givens of existence and can therefore be trusted as necessary, useful, and nourishing.

There is no physical Shangri-la, no Atlantis, no Never-Never Land where every dream of a shadow-less world comes true. Wherever humans are there is the darkness that destroys. Wherever humans are there is the light that reconciles. Does this mean that appealing metaphors like “the wolf lying down with the lamb,” are not true? Their truth is indeed real. It is called befriending the shadow. It awaits us in “a land of milk and honey,” the one we allow to appear wherever we love one another.

• Believing that evil can be eliminated once and for all by vengeance or war: “the war to end all wars.” Vengeance and retaliation have within them an implicit belief that evil can be ended by more evil. Actually, villains in stories do not always die but rather go into hiding. New villains appear when the original ones are killed. Evil cannot be created or destroyed. It simply is. We cannot even presume the presence of a silver lining before doing the work that sews it in. There will always be a shadow as long as there are people.

When Dorothy returned from Oz, the neighbor “witch” was still alive in Kansas, but Dorothy no longer feared her. This is a way of saying that she did not kill the evil of the witch but only took back her own power from her.

• Believing that the brutality and atrocities of World War II were the worst or the last in the history of humankind.

• Believing that some specific person has no shadow. Jung stated: “People who are least aware of their unconscious side are most influenced by it.” The trickster can be hidden especially in those who seem to have no shadow. Our projected beliefs about them have most seriously diminished and fooled us.

Believing that our partner is not capable of betrayal, our town is not a Peyton Place, our country is not as violent and corrupt as others, our religion not as hypocritical, our family not as inadequate, our bank not as greedy, etc. We automatically assume that if it is ours, it is somehow not shadowed!

• Equating being good and being favored, based on early messages from childhood. In a healthy upbringing, “Be a good boy” is replaced with “Be good as much as you can and make amends when you fail or harm anyone. That will make it easier for people to love both sides of you.” This resolves the dilemma presented by a battle between the shadow and the persona: “I’m bad” versus “I have to look good.” We can hurt someone and still love the person, but we cannot say we still love someone if we cannot make amends to that person.

• Attempting to root out a symptom denies the shadow instead of rerouting it. For example, my uncomfortable sense of obligation about calling my mother leads to my not calling her anymore. Instead I might think: “Perhaps I’m not taking responsibility for choosing to call. I project rather than own my desire or choice. My sense of obligation may be a projected desire that is in shadow, that is not accepted by me or known to me.”

• Believing that all violence and crime is the result of early childhood abuse, which denies the fact that the shadow has a life of its own in every human heart. Early abuse certainly accounts for a great deal of adult dysfunction, but it cannot be the full and final explanation. It describes the context in which violence is instilled but it is not a cause of it. Human beings do dreadful things because they are human and have a shadow side. Some human beings have been so damaged by the violation of their bodies and souls that they become time bombs in later life. Some have been hurt in even worse ways and become saints. The shadow certainly thrives in an abusive atmosphere, but it is not born there. It is innate in all of us and no past can explain it away.

• Insisting that our political leaders be perfect. Ideals are in the office, not necessarily in the holder of it. Ideals of behavior are in our heads and are not meant to be in a leader’s hands. We make no room for a leader’s shadow and then we victimize the person for becoming vulnerable to it.

What has been called demonic possession may be another form of denial of the shadow. The medieval mind had culturally embedded in it fears of spontaneity, impulse, free thought, and ecstatic feeling. Persons who were devout externally became scurrilous, licentious, and irreverent. Polarization occurs when our positive shadow side with all its lively energy becomes verboten. What is not integrated splits off and becomes autonomous (like the cult of Dionysus in ancient times). When that which is fully human becomes taboo, the psyche rebels and sets up its own citadel of rejected feelings and heretical beliefs. These take on a life of their own and may turn against us and our serenity. Unwholesome taboos are those based on fear of the emergence of the full range of human feeling and experience. The medieval church had this fear; many fundamentalists still have it. The psyche rebels because fear-based, health-inhibiting taboos contravene bodily wisdom and alienate us from our deepest needs, values, and wishes. When there is no healthy outlet, we may become possessed and then hurt by our canceled humanity. Demonic possession is a culture-bound example of this. Multiple personality disorder (now called dissociative identity disorder) is a contemporary, culturally accepted version. No matter what the name, dissociation originates in the trauma of abuse or prohibition. The shadow lurks there and, until unmasked, continues the torture.

In the film The Three Faces of Eve, both Eve White and Eve Black seem incomplete and inadequate, and then a third Eve appears. She has self-assurance and sanity and is a beautiful alternative to the other two personalities. She is the healing third who transcends the opposites now that she has contained them. What a powerful and precise portrait of the results of the practice of befriending the shadow. It does not take exorcism; it takes holding, honoring, and allowing something more to emerge. That more is always and already within.

Suppression of the shadow is like remedying a headache by a beheading. . . . In the last resort, there is no good that cannot produce evil or evil that cannot produce good.

—C. G. JUNG

THE PRACTICE

• Find each of the forms of shadow denial in the above list that characterizes you and make a plan to reverse it. Tell the people you live with of your plan and ask them to flag you if they see you slipping back.

• Take the items on the list that you believe do not apply to you and check them against the impressions of you held by your partner or closest friend. Do you find yourself defending your position or can you hear some element of truth in your partner or friend’s feedback?

• There are three main ways by which we invite the shadow into our lives: we deny the existence of a shadow by being overly trusting of others; we have poor personal boundaries and thus become easy prey to predators; we act from a fearbased motivation.

Which of these apply to you? If there is even one person in your life that you imagine to have no shadow, look again. If you constantly let people take advantage of you, look for how you are letting them inflict their shadow side on you. If you act from fear in most of your decisions, look for how you elicit the predatory shadow reactions of others.

HOW WE PROJECT OUR DENIAL

Projection makes the whole world a replica of our own unknown face.

—C. G. JUNG

It is not that man in Rome that is the source of my problems; it is the Pope in myself that needs to be excommunicated!

—MARTIN LUTHER, TOWARD THE END OF HIS LIFE

We are reading and we begin to feel hunger pangs. The message is: it is time to attend to the need for food. If our life is threatened on the way to the restaurant, we will attend to that and the hunger will disappear into the background until the danger is past. An organismic urge toward homeostasis in our bodies brings into the foreground precisely what is important for survival. It makes it figural so we can address, process, and resolve it. With respect to our shadow, our psyche does this by projection: we see our hidden self dramatically before us in others who resemble or act out our shadow side. Thus we project our unconscious shadow for a positive reason: to see it and act in such a way as to integrate it. Like the bashful moon, we have a dark side, but it is only waiting its turn for the light.

Projection is our most pervasive and least acknowledged way of denying our own shadow. In projection, we delegate powers in ourselves to others. We simply see our own shadow attributes in someone else and imagine they are not also in us. It is to burn a witch when we ourselves are involved in magic. Our perceptual apparatus automatically organizes random stimuli into intelligible configurations, whether or not they match reality. Ink blots become butterflies; noises at night become the wind; a wink becomes an offer of marriage. The other person may or may not have the quality we project; usually the person does have it in some way.

Projection is looking in a mirror at ourselves and imagining we are looking at a picture of someone else. Unfortunately, we thereby put pieces of ourselves into others’ keeping. We react strongly to seeing our own traits in someone else: with severe dislike to the negative characteristics in others and with exaggerated awe at the positive attributes of others. This is probably a wake-up call from our psyche because the time has come to befriend our shadow and to recover our projections of it. It is coming back home to the embrace of the authentic Self. This is the home that Dorothy said there was no place like.

Projection of our own negative shadow can cast us as persecutors or victims. Projection of our positive shadow can cast us as martyrs. Examples of negative shadow projections in society are biases toward minority groups: African Americans, gay people, drug users, and so on. This is projective identification in which we cast off what is unacceptable in ourselves, attempting to make others carry our worst self-doubts and self-recriminations.

In nature it is the wolf, falsely accused as the silent predator in the dark forest who kills for sport, who carries our projections, “the big bad wolf.” Yet there is really no evil in nature. No matter how much scientific information tells us that the wolf is a necessary part of ecology, there is still a worldwide hatred and fear of this animal. We keep trying to kill off something we fear. We are attempting to eliminate evil. We are scapegoating an animal with a violent vengefulness. Are not these phrases familiar from the list of ways we deny the shadow?

When we project our positive shadow, we lose touch with our personal potential, the very stuff of our destiny. Projection is not only personal. Like the shadow in general, it has a collective side. We project our archetypal shadow onto others, inflating some people as gods and deflating others as demons. To whatever extent we are stuck in such projections, we remain unconscious of our shadow work and fail to notice the divinity or demonism in ourselves. This is how archetypal projection diminishes us spiritually. We lose sight of our own angelic and demonic potentials when we only recognize those qualities in someone else.

Projection works in our favor to grant access to secret rooms in the psyche that are ready to be opened and owned. It is an invitation from the inner Self to re-member ourselves, to recover our parts and reinstall them in our psyche. Projection helps us retrieve parts of ourselves from others. It is hard to withdraw our projections and face life as ourselves. We want to maintain the persona that has worked so well to make us liked. So we defend ourselves against insight and then against taking action.

Projection of our shadow hurts others and diminishes us. Projection in itself, however, is a normal means of knowing reality. So much of our view of the world has subjective dimensions. A subjective assessment of external reality is a psychic function and so is necessarily tied to our inner life. There is actually no reality without projection and no projection without reality. Projection in itself is therefore not a bad thing, only a human thing. The work is to remain conscious of it, to take it into account as we examine our relationships and our choices.

Our unconscious is first visible in projection. Only the unconscious part of us can be projected. What we are conscious of does not become projected onto others. A man with full and comfortable awareness of his masculinity does not project it. He may admire other men but not so strongly as to diminish himself or aggrandize others.

How can we tell healthy admiration from positive shadow projection? Appropriate admiration leads to imitation and appreciation with no loss of our sense of ourselves. We are genuinely impressed with someone’s accomplishments or virtues. We are not driven slavishly to follow such a person or to give up our own freedom. We are happy there is such a person in our world and we learn from him or her. This is not an example of projection of our positive shadow but healthy responsiveness to the truth of someone’s superiority.

Are anger, outrage, or indignation at an injustice all simply negative shadow projections? Is legitimate admiration a sign of projection? How can we tell shadow projection from simple responsiveness? They often occur together. Here are ways to discriminate: In projection, we become identified with something in a disproportionate way. In simple responsiveness, we relate appropriately. If something is not projection, we take it as information, have a feeling about it, and take responsibility for it. It is the nature of information to instruct and enlighten. It is the nature of impact to arouse: You are aggressive toward me and I react. When that reaction is fierce, exaggerated, or intense I may be projecting my own shadow onto you. Befriending the shadow is basically a way of working with impact so that it can become information.

Outrage at injustice may also be based on a sense of an affront to our entitled ego: “How dare they do this to me!” The shadow side of ego reacts with the wish to retaliate. This reaction does not scare the readers of this book, because we know there is a program that can be put into place that will help us find a creative alternative. None of this has to be an either-or. There can be a progression from one to the other. The work is about developing a response that is healthy and loving, one that gradually overrides the ingrained retaliatory proclivity of the shadow ego. If our outrage leads to compassion and nonviolent work for change, the positive shadow of our ego is being engaged.

Ego outrage at injustice is healthy responsiveness when it flows from a recognition of our hologrammatic humanity: “Do not ask for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for thee.” If all humankind is one mystical body, each person is meant to feel for all: “I respond to your pain even though I have my own personal history or baggage. I feel compassion for both the perpetrator and the victim.” Truly evolved people can feel this stirring of empathy as an alternative to the wish for retaliation. It is the initial response of love followed by congruent action. The realization that you have done something generous is better than the satisfaction of revenge.

In pure projection, something affects us strongly and is usually acted out. It keeps bothering us. It is not limited to one person but arises in any and every instance of our noticing it. In projection we may see truly but we unconsciously add inordinate emphasis to another’s goodness or badness. Thus good becomes superb and unattainable and bad becomes evil and unforgivable. We split opposites and exaggerate their divergence, believing them to be irreconcilable. This is always a clue to the shadow.

On a scale of one to ten, with ten representing purest motivation in your concern for injustice, where do you rank yourself in your most recent response to something you considered unjust? The work you are doing in this book is meant to raise the number. Even a fractional rise is already an instance of success in befriending your shadow.

In the shadow world of projection, idealized images take the place of activating our own potential, and blame takes the place of acknowledging our own deficiency. To see truly is to observe as a fair witness who has nothing to gain or lose by how people are or by what they do. To add hyperbolic emphasis is to add layers such as control, judgment, expectation, fear, desire, blame, shame. These layers come from the scared shadow side of ego. To peel them away and thereby see what is really there (and here) is to say yes to it as pure fact, like it or not. This is mindfulness, attention to the here and now as we lighten ourselves of the layers of our ego that distract us from its truth.

What we conceive of as reality is a few iron posts of observation with papier-mâché construction between them that is only the elaborate work of our imagination.

—J. A. WHEELER

THE HEART OF THE PRACTICE: MINDFULNESS

Mindfulness is a Buddhist meditation technique that brings our attention to our breathing in the here and now and away from our mind’s inveterate habit of entertaining us with fears, desires, expectations, evaluations, and so on. The word mindfulness is a poetic irony, since the practice is mind emptying, not mind filling. The practice outlined below is an adaptation of the Buddhist technique.

The shadow layers of ego are control, fear, attachment, the need to fix things, obsession with an outcome, blame of others, and shame about ourselves. (These are precisely the things that vanish from one’s life after a near-death experience. Perhaps enough of the ego dies in that moment so that its limbs atrophy.)

When we peel these layers of ego away and see our present life predicament purely as it is, we are seeing it mindfully. Mindfulness entails pure attention to what is without the following elements: what I believe it is, want it to be, have to make it, or am sorry it is not. This is what happens in mindfulness meditation: I breathe through it all without judgment, attachment, control, fear, or any other reaction, simply paying attention to each of the ego’s deceptions, labeling them, and then letting go of them. Daily practice in stripping away these ego embroideries that are sewn around us is a spiritual health habit.⁹

Practice this psycho-spiritual style of mindfulness meditation now and each day: Sit in a quiet place with your eyes closed and with attention to your breathing throughout this exercise. Keep returning to your awareness of your breath whenever you become distracted.

Take a distressing event that has happened recently or the main problem you are dealing with in your life right now. Picture it as an onion with many layers. Imagine yourself holding it in your lap and peeling off one layer at a time. The layers are control, fear, attachment, the need to fix things, obsession with an outcome, blame of others, and shame about ourselves. Imagine what your problem begins to look like as you progressively eliminate each layer of neurotic, inflated ego. As each is removed, what is left? Only more and more space. Only the pure event or problem is real, and its reality is roomy. The heavy, smelly, tear-evincing rest of it is self-made, a product of ego.

The final step in this exercise based on mindfulness meditation makes for a powerful shift to our heart center. Imagine the face of the person in your life who brings you joy and toward whom you have always felt love. (For me this is my son, Josh.) Bask in the felt sense of this person. Now, with this heartfelt joyous love, see your problem once more and ask yourself for a solution from within that context. You will see how it does not then emanate from intellect but from caring and compassion. This is such striking evidence that letting go of ego (the layers mentioned above) leads to compassion. An actual experience of loving someone is the bridge. This is how love is the answer.

This exercise is powerful because it simply walks us into the spaciousness of our own reality. That proves to be the unbounded Self, the Buddha nature, utter openness, our positive shadow, our path. There is something alive and immensely sane in us that shuts down when we are caught in the drama of ego with all its neurotic layers of fear and desire. This something awakens in the gaps between the layers of struggle and disguise. Enormous lively energy happens when we stop and sit in mindfulness, when we take time to be. This is how Buddha sat. Predicaments experienced in this way look so much more manageable and they reveal how much of their so-called reality is fluff.

Since nothing less is required for wholeness than the complete undoing of ego habits, every hold-on, holdup, and holdout of ego has to go. What a paradox: finding all through emptiness. Meister Eckhart fearlessly and optimistically says: “Man by his emptiness has won back that which he was eternally and ever shall remain.” Emptiness summarizes shadow work: Regarding the negative shadow of ego, it means nothing to hold on to. Regarding the positive shadow, it means empty of limits.

Mindfulness meditation performs mysterious and immensely valuable maneuvers in the psyche:

• In mindfulness, a conscious vision replaces an unconscious blindness. It befriends the shadow, since it is willing to see all without the distracting blinders of ego.

• Mindfulness is the fast track to building the skill of intuitive knowing. Intuition is interior access to knowledge without need for logic and without obstructions from the neurotic ego.

• Problems are always simpler than our conceptions of them. We have confounded our experience with all our mental addenda. Mindfulness defragments it so that simplicity results. Eventually this mindfulness carries over into daily life and helps us with a major and ongoing problem: confusing reality with our pictures of it.

• Mindfulness makes it possible to look at our limitations and errors matter-of-factly, without shame or self-depreciation. It allows us to ask for help without having to feel ashamed or one down. It allows others to disappoint or even hurt us without our having to recruit the ego’s storm troopers of revenge. We see it all clearly as what it is without the self-serving or self-promoting ego in the way. “I am what I am” is what the mindful Popeye says, with no taking advantage and no allowing of others to take advantage either.

• In mindfulness, natural feelings of attraction or repulsion can be experienced without simultaneously feeling compulsive enticement or terrified avoidance. I simply notice and take as information and I am no longer fixated in any way. Now I am less liable to feel constrained and compelled in my way of operating and I have choice. This is how mindfulness leads to freedom. Choice is only possible because nothing has to be limited to mean anything specific. All is open potential like the positive shadow.

Mindfulness is meant not to help us feel something differently but to feel it as it is without fear or attachment. We look beyond a reality that faces us by looking at it directly and fearlessly without the screens that ordinarily negate and obscure it. The sooner we notice the self-defeating inclinations of ego and halt them, the sooner does a new mental habit develop.

• A rousing gap opens when we stop acting in accord with habit. What a wonderful way to find out who we are. Empty of attachment, we become perfect space, the empty circle of Zen, the unfathomed no-thing-ness. This is the pause between action and reaction, where compulsion ends and freedom begins. Fear begins to diminish because most of our fear is ill-founded and misdirected reactivity.

• Mindfulness provides a shortcut to nondual awareness. This happens because mindfulness means experiencing something without an impulsive leap into or away from it. This elicits a greater recogniton of the transient nature of experience. The result is fewer automatic responses and less compulsion to have needs fulfilled in some specific way. This makes for less of a sense of a solid “I.” Thus mindfulness leads us to see precisely and finally the illusory nature of an independent, free-standing I. “I” is really a stand I am taking: control, blame, etc. In mindfulness, that I vanishes and only utter spaciousness remains.

• Pause and poise in the center of our revolving world is the best position from which to watch the parade of our personal events and experience. Serenity in the midst of the ups and downs of life is a powerful indicator that we are living in accord with our deepest needs and wishes. Ego fixations like control, expectation, blame, etc. actually inhibit the release of our potential. Mindfulness thus contributes to the befriending of our positive shadow. All the landscape of the path is the path.

• The effect of mindfulness that is most encouraging in our work has to do with the positive shadow. How does the limitless potential in our positive shadow become activated? What rouses something out of its unconscious slumber within us? What activates our potential? It is this same mindful attention. Mindfulness is the most precise psychic mechanics for releasing our potential powers. It is the bridge between conscious and unconscious, the centerpiece of the work of the mature soul.

• In the moment of mindfulness, we touch the very fabric of Self, since we pass beyond the distractions of ego’s embroideries. Mindfulness is the awareness of a fearless witness whose defenses are unnecessary because the scared ego has taken its bow, in just a breath. The sense of separateness and separate identity vanish in the farther reaches of this awareness. We are finally not aware of objects at all but reside simply in nondual awareness itself. I am this.

In Zen such mindfulness is called the gateless gate because there is no need to find a way in. We are already in, since we are always present in the moment by mindfulness. Of course, it takes some breaths and some letting go to notice. “I am the space in which I sit. I am the space from which everything in my life arises and into which everything sets.” Mindfulness is a consecration of our soul to the glittering incorruptibility of that space. The mindful psyche is an apparatus of relentless and irrepressible transformation that can only be impaired by ego and only limited by a lazy imagination.

• Meditation combines shamatha, calm abiding, and vipassana, mindful awareness. The sense of refuge that results makes us able to face everything with equanimity. In the mirror consciousness of mindfulness, anything is allowed and nothing is held on to. This awareness in me is the same awareness that is in all things. My mindful awareness is the universe conscious of itself. Distinctions and rankings self-destruct in the dust that ego is left behind in. This is why compassion comes as a result of awakening. Kensho is the Japanese Zen term for enlightenment—seeing one’s true nature—and seeing that self-realization is the same as the realization of our abiding fellowship with all humankind. Enlightenment means making room for that light to come through.

• Tarthang Tulku says: “When the teachings are truly understood, there is little difference between meditation and all our other activities. The teachings and our experience become the same.” When we relax our ego grip on events and experiences, the subject-object dichotomy vanishes. We then experience the state of “one-mind samadhi” (the serene concentration that characterizes the meditative state). The alternative is samsara, captivity in the world of fear and desire with its endless cycles of loss and clinging. Whether the world is samsara or nirvana in any particular moment is actually a matter of our frame of mind. Mindfulness makes any moment nirvana. The neurotic ego makes any moment samsara.

The first line of Changling’s poem speaks of “an empty autumn sky.” The horseman can only ride into the “endless wastes” below an empty sky, that is, no thoughts remain. The thoughts are fear, desire, blame, shame, attachment to an outcome, and all the other layers of the self-made ego. When no such thoughts remain, there is nothing left but mindfulness, the horseman of enlightenment.

The All is wholly within us, . . . an object infinitely great and ravishing: as full of treasures as full of room, as full of joy as of capacity. To blind men it may seem dark, but it is all glorious within, infinite in light. Everyone is alone the center and circumference of it.

—THOMAS TRAHERNE, SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY ANGLICAN MYSTIC

9. True prayer is a form of mindfulness. It is an unconditional yes to the present without the desire to change or control its direction. Ego prayer is about fulfilling ego purposes, especially the alteration of realities and their outcomes to fit its own narcissistic wishes. Spiritually evolved prayer is an assent to the unfolding of destiny in whatever way it needs to happen. Prayer does not ask for immunity; it asks for the strength to accept whatever will be, to grow because of it, and to be thankful for it. Mindfulness in prayer releases the healing power in ourselves and in the archetypal Self. Studies show that the effective prayers at Lourdes seem to be the ones that are mindfully attentive and mindfully open to whatever may result, rather than those that are insistently attached to a particular outcome.