Your shadow is that off-limits part of your psyche where you hide stories that cause you shame or fear. As you learn to navigate it, you’ll see positive as well as negative stories concealed there, gifts as well as destructive elements. By examining falsehoods, self-deceptions, and out-and-out lies, you’ll deepen your understanding of how shadow helps you survive—and blocks you from thriving if you don’t investigate its contents. As a writer, it is important to have access to an inner refuge, as it offers a vantage point that is protected and stable, so you can do this deep investigation.
In the process of becoming an individual, composing a story that’s ours alone, we pick and choose who we want to be—and who we absolutely don’t want to be. We relegate the undesirable parts, or those we can’t make sense of, to our psychological shadow, the dark side of our personal moon. In time, we come to believe that these hidden parts don’t really exist if nobody (not even us) knows that they’re there. The more we are able to forget our shadow, the easier our life becomes. Then one day, we look around and realize that big chunks of ourselves have gone missing, leaving us as an impostor, cut off from the truth.
This is the downside of storytelling, because there are many things we have to leave out. We can’t have a story without a frame, and we can’t have a frame without limitations. This psychological editing happens before we’ve even heard of the shadow. Every time we’re punished or praised, encouraged or taunted, gifted with the fulfillment of a desire or disappointed, we decide what belongs in the light and what goes into the shadow. Depending on personality and environment, we are drawn to different styles of attracting attention and love. One child learns that when she’s good, her parents shower her with affection, but when she disobeys they ignore her. Another child learns that when she’s good, no one pays her the slightest attention, but when she disobeys she becomes the center of attention. These two children are likely to grow up relegating different sorts of traits to the shadow according to how these qualities are received. The principle is the same, however. We use what works and discard what doesn’t in order to survive and fit in.
This makes for a lopsided internal load that grows more burdensome over time. We may not know quite what the matter is—we just know that something in us is causing a lot of grief. The poet Robert Bly claims that we spend the first forty years of life putting things into the shadow bag and the last forty years taking them out. It’s impossible to know ourselves and reach our potential while denying so much of what is inside us. Fortunately, writing is an excellent way to remove things from that shadow bag, hold them up to the light of consideration, and reclaim what’s ours to keep.
Toni attended one of my weekend workshops. She was a yoga teacher with a thriving community of followers all over the world. Gliding into class in flowing white clothes, she looked like a blond Nordic goddess. She was soft-spoken, graceful, and always smiling—an ethereal being in a room full of earthlings. The class was in awe of Toni, especially after I asked her to read her self-portrait aloud. She said, “I am a prism, a glass in the sun, containing nothing and everything. Space. Nothing can touch me, though I touch all. Transmitting light: sweet offering.”
I immediately smelled a rat. Toni’s self-portrait contained no shadow. The divine allusions were lyrical, but problematic. Toni seemed to be greatly invested in presenting herself as an angel of light who was barely terrestrial—which told me that there must be lots of imperfect earth-stuff hiding in her shadow bag. For a couple of weeks, she maintained this spiritual facade, writing about “the death of ego” and how it felt to be enlightened. Then, in week three, Toni’s mask began to slip when the class did the “Telling Secrets” exercise. She wrote:
My father committed suicide when I was ten. No one told me what had happened. Mommy refused to talk about it. It took years to find out. It turns out that the year before I was born, my father had an accident in the driveway. He ran over my three-year-old brother, who I didn’t even know existed, and he died in front of him. That’s when Mommy got pregnant with me. They named me after little Anthony.
In the years since that time, Toni had come to believe that her birth was part of a cosmic plan in which her soul chose to incarnate to take her brother’s place, and that it was a blessing to be given this healing mission. Toni wrote, “I have always welcomed the opportunity to serve.” Without questioning this belief, I asked her to write about any problems or challenges that came with this demanding task.
“I don’t see them as problems,” she responded, saying that viewing things that way was old-paradigm thinking. “Are you asking if there was pain? I would have to say yes. I guess my ‘pain,’ if that’s the right word, comes from feeling badly for my parents. Not being able to make them happy. Wondering if I’ve completed my mission.” In Toni’s life story, she was the savior figure who came to earth with the sole purpose of relieving her parent’s suffering and bringing light and hope to the world. To this end, she’d kept her own, very human, needs and emotions stuffed deep in her shadow bag. To ensure that her dark parts remained hidden, Toni had constructed a personality so bright that it left no room for natural human complexity, or self-doubt. I invited her to reclaim her discarded parts and offer herself the same compassion she gave so generously to others. When asked to write about who she might be without this creation story, as an ordinary little girl born into a grief-stricken family, she ran into a wall of fear. Finally, Toni was able to hypothetically describe this girl-self: “She’d be sad, I suppose. Probably confused. Scared that her mother might disappear, too. She might feel guilty that she wasn’t perfect. Like ‘why should I be alive instead of my brother?’ I know my father wanted a son. When I write that down, I feel like crying.”
As the class progressed, Toni continued to pull things out of her shadow bag. As she did so, we witnessed a visible change in her. She became more accessible, humble, and real. Toni was still beatific and unusually kind, but the angelic routine began to fade. She wrote about her longing for children, and the fears she felt about being a mother. She described a troubled relationship with her own alcoholic mother and a fear that she would never stop drinking. Toni realized she was a textbook codependent dressed in savior’s clothing. By touching her shadow, Toni was experiencing a kind of spiritual maturity she had never known before, which included dropping the myth that “Nothing can touch me, though I touch all.” By the end of the nine-week class, she was considering Al-Anon meetings and had enrolled in a class on tantric massage. In the final exercise, she wrote:
I need to come into my body. But when you have a body, you have a shadow. When you have a shadow, you have clay feet. I didn’t want to feel that vulnerable. But how can you surrender to God without vulnerability? The truth is, I had to keep a distance from everyone and everything, including myself. I want to engage with my life now. I know I’m still a work in progress, but at least I’m not hiding anymore.
That’s the point. When you touch the shadow, you come out of hiding. The dark side of the moon becomes visible. As the psychologist Carl Jung wrote, “One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious.” As you continue to explore your own shadow, you’ll see how writing helps to illuminate the darkness, draw attention to what’s been ignored, and uncover wisdom we didn’t know we had.
In the process of composing a story that suits our needs, we put our undesirable parts into our psychological shadow.
The more we are able to forget our shadow, the easier our life becomes. We use what works, and discard what doesn’t, in order to survive and fit in.
It’s impossible to know ourselves and reach our potential while denying so much of what is inside us.
Writing is an excellent practice for removing things from our shadow bag and reclaiming what is ours to keep.
This is a challenging, but rewarding, step in your practice. Writing about your shadow parts can bring up pain, and also relief and clarity. Trust the process.
The shadow is bound to surprise you as you continue to explore its contents. There are so many secrets, and so many gifts. Let’s look more closely at what the shadow is made of and how it operates in our lives.
In Jungian psychology, the shadow refers to unconscious aspects of self that our personality doesn’t know how to deal with. To make sense of ourselves and create a comfortable daylight image, we habitually shadow the parts of ourselves that are threatening, embarrassing, confusing, vulnerable-making, wounded, or are even cruel, venal, or dishonest. The shadow is full of everything that we deny about ourselves: the things that we don’t want to face, the places that scare us, the qualities that are threatening or shameful. This includes our demons.
At the same time, the shadow includes positive things that we may suppress in order to toe the line, conform, and create this life that we have. Let’s say that you’re an artist at heart, but your parents wanted you to become a lawyer or do something that would enable you to make a secure living. So you took a cautious professional path and suppressed the things in yourself that were creative, free, wild, and passionate; things that may have thrown you off your straight-and-narrow course, had you let them come into your life.
The problem is, when you suppress things into the shadow, they often come out in unhealthy ways. Addiction is a common, sideways expression of the shadow. Jung called addiction “a prayer gone awry” because it’s often the prayer we have for ourselves that is thwarted by addiction. When we suppress the intimate truths of our desires and longings, we may fill their voids with destructive semi-pleasures. But because they are driven by unexplored parts or our shadow, they diminish us rather than enlarge us, and keep us on the surface of our own existence.
While the shadow is adaptive and helps us survive, we must examine its contents if we are to grow. “Everyone carries a shadow, and the less it is embodied in the individual’s conscious life, the blacker and denser it is,” Jung explained. Just as shamans are trained to pass through spiritual darkness before emerging with second sight, we too must learn to pass through the shadow in the process of self-realization. Eve was a widow who lost her beloved husband suddenly in a boating accident. In the aftermath of his premature death, Eve attempted to take her life twice and shut herself into her lonely house on a rural lake. She refused counseling, medication, get-away vacation offers, and anything meant to raise her spirits. Instead, Eve stayed where she was, put her life on hold, and sank into melancholy. The one activity that held her attention was organizing her late husband’s paintings. She hoped that by touching his canvases, she would feel she was touching him.
I suggested Eve explore the stories she held about being alone. It seemed there were two griefs pulling her down: the natural grief over her husband’s death and an equally strong grief over having her life story taken away. She was being forced to explore life as a single woman—a prospect that filled her with dread. The testimony she sent me confirmed my suspicions. She wrote:
I had an aunt who lived in the maid’s quarters of my grandparents’ house in Maine. She was my father’s sister, an intelligent, creative, eccentric woman who never married. Aunt Pearl was sweet, but she terrified me. She seemed so alone. Unmoored. I never wanted to be like that. Facing the world as a single woman seemed like the biggest failure in life. It pains me that I’m looking at doing this now. It connects to all kinds of things in my life, ways I could never stand on my own. The downside of a happy marriage is you get to coast. But if one of you dies, the other’s still coasting.
I suggested to Eve that debunking this story could be the first step to the rest of her life. As she rummaged through the shadow bag, she found related narratives that exacerbated her melancholy: “People feel sorry for single women,” “I will never love again,” “My mother never really loved me,” “Sexually, I’m past my prime and wouldn’t take my clothes off in front of a new man.” Eve uncovered a whole range of stories she’d unwittingly secreted into her shadow. As a friend, I guided her through this writing process quite intimately and it hastened her return to the land of the living. Five years later, Eve is going to Kathmandu with her Christian care group. She’ll be feeding undernourished children and teaching them to read, activities she and her husband dreamed of doing together but never had the chance. To do this, she needed to touch the shadow. Now, it’s time to write about your own shadow parts and listen to their stories.
In Jungian psychology, the shadow refers to what remains unconscious in us—both negative and positive.
We put into the shadow parts of ourselves that are threatening, embarrassing, confusing, vulnerable-making, wounded, or worse, but we must examine the shadow’s contents if we are to grow.
When we suppress our gifts in the shadow, they often come out in unhealthy ways as we seek to fill the void with destructive semi-pleasures.
We must learn to pass through the shadow for self-realization.
Here are four questions that can help you reveal and accept the contents of your shadow bag. It’s best to write your responses to these shadow questions as quickly as you can, without forethought or censorship.
The shadow self, the alter ego, has a voice you must listen to. It’s not necessary to do what it says, but its messages and their implications are filled with growth potential. The shadow self walks the threshold between fear and desire—that illuminating edge where we transcend the known and step beyond our shadow, beyond our story, into something new. Fear and desire are deeply connected. The next step on our journey reveals why.
As humans, we are all too aware that desire and fear are two sides of the same stick. Anyone who’s ever been madly in love, or devoted to a goal, or enamored of anything at all, knows how closely fear shadows desire. It’s hard to have one without the other, it seems (though we will debunk this false claim soon). How can you want love without fearing its loss? Commit yourself fully to a goal without fear of failure? Give yourself wholeheartedly to your own life without worrying that it will end? We’ve struggled with this conflict since time immemorial, caught between seemingly opposing forces.
What’s more, we fear the force of desire itself because it threatens to change the status quo: the story of who we are and who we’re not. Desire doesn’t care about minding the rules or coloring inside the lines; it’s free and anarchic by nature. In Greek mythology, the god of desire, Eros, is shadowed in the world by his sister, Chaos. We’re all too aware that when desire is indulged mindlessly it has the potential to destroy what we love. In an effort to protect what we’ve built, including our identity, we may even deny our desires altogether in deference to our fears. This robs us of vitality and the willingness to tell the truth. Here’s a short list of desires that commonly scare us:
This list could go on and on. We fight off what we most desire in confusing, detrimental ways that often keep us in bondage to fear. This self-sabotage makes no rational sense. Why would anyone be afraid of success or freedom? Yet the shadow beckons us to abandon desires that risk changing our story or altering our self-image. We are likely to keep such desires, which may be sources of shame in themselves, safely out of sight—if we acknowledge them at all.
Beverly was an eighty-year-old spitfire trapped in a claustrophobic marriage. Beverly was a study in opposites: a strong-minded, brilliant, nonconformist who was afraid to stand up to her bossy husband. She’d mastered the art of pretending not to have desires—especially the desire for time alone. “He’s like a boa constrictor,” she wrote, “sucking the life right out me.” I asked Beverly to write about the dynamic of fear and desire in her life. What was stopping her from stating her needs and claiming her autonomy? Here is her response.
It’s a case of the “the devil you know”—I know what it’s like to be strangled; I don’t know what it’s like to be free. That’s the truth. I grew up with an oppressive father and a mother who told me that without a man, a woman is nothing. In those days, that was the story they fed us. I bought that misogynist myth hook, line, and sinker!
As Beverly continued to explore the truth of her feelings, she realized that fear was tangled up with authentic desires to travel, pursue alternative health care, publish her poetry, and fulfill a lifelong dream by moving to the country. Her marital troubles were mere symptoms of a larger malaise: a habit of self-sabotage that was caused by voices from the shadow she had never explored. As she articulated these voices on paper, Beverly was surprised how quickly their hold on her loosened. Three months after the course ended, she sent me a postcard from Italy, where she’d traveled with friends, without her husband. He had resisted but, to her amazement, had backed down when she threatened to leave him. She wrote: “All those years I thought he was stopping me, when in fact, I was stopping myself and using him as a big excuse.”
We all use fear as an excuse not to be ourselves or admit to our authentic desires in life. We tell ourselves stories about why we’re trapped, fortifying those stories—and the fears they mask—through repetition. Like Beverly, we may constrict ourselves and blame others for our own fears. But the moment we recognize this pattern, it can begin to shift. We can assume responsibility for our own desires, whether or not we choose to pursue them. No longer the victim, we can face our fears and find out what’s behind them. Take time to explore the following list of common desires shadowed by fear and see how they play into your own life.
We fight off what we most desire in confusing, detrimental ways that often keep us in bondage to fear.
The shadow beckons us to abandon desires that risk changing our story or smashing our self-image altogether.
We use fear as an excuse not to be ourselves or admit to our authentic desires in life.
When we assume responsibility for our own desires, we can face our fears and find out what’s behind them.
Write about your experience with each of the following fears and desires. Give concrete examples, exploring the stories behind your fears and what might happen if you pursued this desire.
When you realize the strength of your desire-and-fear stories, and how they define what you believe is possible, you make way for courageous choices, as well as breakthroughs in self-acceptance. You discover that your shadow can be a refuge, in fact, when you make it your ally.
When I went to India for the first time, I traveled to Ladakh, the northernmost province of the country that used to be part of Tibet. Ladakh is a land filled with Buddhist temples and one day, while visiting one these temples, I wandered into a darkened back room where I came upon a “secret Buddha,” an unassuming life-sized figure hidden away from public view. Unlike the grand, ostentatious statue at the temple entrance, this secret Buddha had an air of sacredness precisely because it was tucked away inside its own private refuge. The secret Buddha was surrounded by images of demons that symbolized hatred, fear, and greed; yet instead of threatening The Enlightened One, these figures appeared to be protecting him. Having conquered his demons by confronting them, the Buddha had realized his own true nature, turned former enemies into allies, and transmuted negativity into strength.
Similarly, when you face your fears and desires through writing, you transform resistance into courage and gain access to your own inner refuge. It is a sanctuary of self-awareness that becomes your base of operations on this writing journey. No longer frightened of your own shadow, or scared of being alone with yourself, you learn to access this sanctuary at will and renew your courage through self-reflection. Becoming your own secret Buddha, you uncover the gifts of solitude and vision only found in darkness and shadow. “In a dark time, the eye begins to see,” wrote the poet Theodore Roethke. Entering the dark, you see through different eyes and surprising insights begin to appear. This can’t happen in the glare of exposure and daylight. Just as newborn babies are unable to see in the sunlight, your new eyes need darkness and protection in order to focus. The two greatest challenges in writing practice—solitude and entering the shadow—are also the doorways to self-revelation. You can’t see yourself clearly in society’s glare, nor write about deepest feelings and thoughts when barraged with outside stimulation.
Solitude is different from loneliness. Solitude is rich, inspiring, and restful; replete with space and possibility. Loneliness is empty, pathetic, and enervating; bereft of power and potential. Lonely people expect others to fill their inner void, whereas lovers of solitude—which is what I invite you to become on this journey—recognize that time alone is precious, a refuge where you can practice meeting yourself in the mirror of the blank page.
Let’s do an exercise together. Take out a pen and piece of paper. Imagine yourself in a solitary place, enjoying the silence. Imagine that your body is light and open, receptive to subtle thoughts and feelings. Then write for five minutes without stopping about a challenge you face in your life today.
When time is up, take out another piece of paper. Imagine yourself somewhere stranded and alone, calling out, and no one answers—like a child abandoned in its crib. Feel that desolation and loneliness in your gut. Then write for five minutes without stopping about something that gives you a lot of joy.
As you finish, notice how that exercise went. Was it hard for you to do? Did cognitive dissonance interfere with your ability to write about pain while feeling peaceful or joy while feeling lonely? This exercise shows how the atmosphere of your inner refuge affects your ability to do this writing practice. If your internal atmosphere is tense and threatening, you will have a harder time expressing the truth about your experience, even when it’s positive. If the atmosphere is relaxed and protected, you’ll have an easier time exploring your thoughts and feelings, including the contents of your shadow. Here are five useful tools for cultivating and protecting your inner refuge:
Your inner refuge will serve you well once you take the time to make your own. These deepening practices will help you create that sanctuary.
When we face our fears and desires through writing, we gain access to a self-awareness that becomes our base of operations on this writing journey.
By entering the dark, we see through different eyes and surprising insights begin to appear.
The two greatest challenges in writing practice—solitude and entering the shadow—are also the doorways to self-revelation.
Enjoy solitude. As writers, we must be able to enjoy our own company.
Set aside an hour for this series of short writing exercises. Take ten minutes to explore each of the following topics. Try not to edit or reread.
As long as you have a strong inner refuge, you can venture deep on this writing journey without losing your balance. You can meet your true face in the mirror and know that there is much more to learn.