Befriending Our Shadow 1 (course #101)

Based on Dr. David Richo's book, Shadow Dance:
Liberating the Power and Creativity of Your Dark Side
6 contact hours -- course fee: $60
Anyone is welcome to take this reading-based course. However,
at present we can offer C.E. hours to California license holders only.

The course you are about to take is for you. Using the Jungian archetype of the shadow you look at who you are and what you are hiding in yourself, both that which is unacceptable and that which is a positive untapped potential. Both these options may be projected onto clients in the form of countertransference. This course helps look at that dimension also. Please read the extended introduction below to decide whether this course is for you. It is the prologue to the book you will be using: Shadow Dance: Liberating the Power and Creativity of Your Dark Side (Shambhala, 1999) available at any bookstore.

COURSE COMPLETION STEPS:

The course consists of reading the introductory essay that appears below, reading any four chapters of Shadow Dance, and doing four of the practices presented in the book.

Enroll in the course by paying the $60 course fee through our PayPal online payment system. (Click the PayPal button below and fill in the appropriate information.)

After reading any four chapters of Shadow Dance, and doing four of the practices presented in the book, write a two-page commentary on how the reading and practices helped you know yourself better. Be sure to indicate which chapters you read.

E-mail your commentary to me at davericho@aol.com, and I will mail you your certificate of completion. Please be sure to include your full name as it appears on your license, the type of license you hold (counselor, therapist, nurse, or social worker) and your license number. As mentioned above, at present I can certify Continuing Education hours only for California license holders.

If you find this course helpful and satisfying, you are welcome to sign up for Befriending Our Shadow 2, and work on another four chapters of of Shadow Dance.

I am committed to helping my students complete this course successfully. In those rare instances where I feel that a student has not yet worked with the ideas as fruitfully as might be desired, I will suggest some additional writing.

This course is meant to increase your scope of practice by providing you with insight into your projections. This directly relates to countertransference since clients are often the objects of our projections of our own unknown selves. As we know ourselves, we are able to know others with more compassion. This course also increases your scope of practice because you can begin helping clients work on their own shadow material as you have.

INTRODUCTORY ESSAY

BEFRIENDING OUR SHADOW by David Richo, PhD

Do you dare to love what you have hated all your life? If you can entertain that paradox, this course is for you since it attempts to show how everything about us contains creativity and goodness no matter how bad or useless we may think it to be. Our dark side has been called our personal shadow by Carl Jung. The shadow is everything about ourselves that we do not know or refuse to know, both dark and light. It is the sum total of the positive and negative traits, feelings, beliefs, and potentials we refuse to identify as our own.

The shadow is that which is incompatible with who we think we are or are supposed to be. It is the realm beyond our limits, the place where we are more than we seem. The shadow has ironic humor in it because the opposite of our self-image proves to be true in spite of all our tricky attempts to believe and display it as otherwise. Fear of that wider self keeps it in the dungeon but there are ways to release the prisoner. It takes practice. This course presents it in bite-size pieces and accompanies you through the process. It shows you how to transform your inner demons and awaken your dormant divinities. It invites you to grant hospitality to all the pilgrim parts of yourself and make room for them one by one.

The challenge is in accepting ourselves all the way to the bottom: admitting and holding rather than denying and eschewing our arrogance, our self-centeredness, our will to coerce others, and any other dark truths we cannot face about ourselves. All these constitute our negative shadow side that can turn out to be not so much a threat as a promise. We can find the best in us in what is bad in us. We shall see how the counterpart of every negative in the human equation is something positive. Everything is meant for good, says Saint Augustine, even what is bad.

This course is also about accepting ourselves all the way to the top: acknowledging and accessing the creative powers we have never believed we possessed and have never put to use. This is our darkened positive shadow side. We may admire these glowing attributes strongly in others and deny them in ourselves just as we strongly dislike in others what may be true but ugly about ourselves. Hope grows from welcoming our positive shadow since hope is about believing in the potential in us for a life that is greater than the one our frightened and limited ego has designed, for a wisdom larger than our thinking mind can muster, and for a love that is wider than our immediate circle of friends may embrace.

The gnawing sense of emptiness that arises sometimes in life might be just this: our refusal to grant full suffrage to our shadow regions, our failure to see that we are more than we seem. We lose contact with our dark side when we deny our pettiness, our selfishness, our vindictiveness. We may also lose faith in our own bright merit and spiritual limitlessness: “I am larger, better than I thought,/ I did not know I held so much goodness,” wrote Walt Whitman.

To think that what we are conscious of about ourselves is all there is to us puts us in danger of being run by the unconscious forces in our shadow. This is scary since we are mostly unable to see or even know the full darkness of our shadow side. It is a personality with our name on it but it was deported long ago. This part of us was banished early in life. To gain and maintain approval, we may have had to exhibit only the personality that was acceptable to our parents. Later in life, we may have persisted in that self-negating routine with other adults, partners, and peers. By hiding the personality traits that were considered objectionable, we lost out on our chance to rework and move through them. Instead, they simply went underground. Qualities that required only some sanding and polishing were confined to the cellar, our unconscious, as useless or even dangerous. This was perhaps the fate of much potential for creative transformation. Given the chance, an ugly aggressiveness might have been trimmed to assertiveness, unwelcome controlling ways might have been spruced up into efficient leadership, fear might even have become love.

At the same time, some of the great assets or talents of our personality might also have been threatening to our parents and others in our life and they too had then to be sequestered. These higher attributes went into the attic, our untapped unconscious potential, perhaps with the promise that they might be looked at some other day, but they were soon forgotten. Our self-doubts about our skills and potential may still be in trunks gathering dust, overlooked, and seemingly above our reach.

Our dark shadow can be called a cellar of our unexamined shame. Our positive shadow is an attic of our unclaimed valuables. This is the manual that takes us down into the cellar of ourselves to retrieve and capitalize on our negative shadow and up into the attic to exult in and capitalize on our positive shadow. Unlike other courses on the shadow, this one concentrates not so much on the savage darkness in us as on our practical day to day shortcomings and faults, not only those we fail to see but also those we clearly see in ourselves.

With great optimism, we grant a hearty and fearless welcome to all about us that might have been unwelcome before. We locate a kernel of goodness in every hard and unappealing shell. We are alchemists believing that gold can come from lead, nurturant parents trusting that little rascals will become presidents, readers suspecting that villains will become heroes, and priests believing that sinners will become saints.

How? It will not be by denying and canceling anything about ourselves but rather by acknowledging it, cradling it acceptantly, and then moving through it to its true fulfillment. In this friendly way, lead will have its full opportunity to be heavy, rascals to be mischievous, villains to be sinister, sinners to be miscreant. They will all be themselves, see themselves, accept themselves. Then they will notice how much of the energy in them is available for greater and higher purposes, how much potential they have for more joy and more giving. A shift will occur and they will become the swans that ugly ducklings become when they find out who they really are. What a wonderful prospect!

A dark side is perfectly normal for beings like us who include both sides of every set of opposites. There could be no light without the dark to realize it by contrast. Too much light would create a longing for night. It also follows that there is no dark without a corresponding light. This is the source of hope. It takes work to bring out the light. In these pages is a program to help us do that work and to accept both sides of everything about ourselves as fitting, understandable, and immensely useful! Jung presents the image of the two thieves who were crucified with Jesus as symbols of the two sides of the shadow: one thief reviled Jesus while the other commiserated with him and asked for transformation. These are the opposing sides of our own souls. We fight the entry of the light into our lives and yet yearn for it. Wonderfully, both have a place in the uncovering of inner wholeness. The promise of paradise was instantaneous for the thief who welcomed the light. At the same time, it still remained available for the thief who turned away from it, if he would become willing to enter the purgatorial fires where his own interior darkness could be faced and integrated. Working on the dark shadow side of ourselves is just such a fiery enterprise.

It is said that each of us has a twin. Psychically we are all Gemini. Every person to whom we react with strong fear, desire, repulsion, or admiration is a twin of our own inner unacknowledged life. We have qualities, both positive and negative that appear visibly in others but are invisible in us and to us. Our practice is to be fascinated with those who upset or appeal to us and to find in them the hidden corners of ourselves. An archetype of twins exists in our psyche, one bad, one good. We have it in us to separate and even alienate one part of ourselves from another part. The challenge is to be on friendly terms with everything about ourselves. We can welcome what seems repulsive and recall what tries to get away. This will require a boundless curiosity about the foreign territories in our psyche that have always wanted annexation, always wanted to join the union of our self or rejoin after seceding. Such a consolidation of all our “parts” actually maintains their identity and amplifies their cohesiveness, as states maintain their rights though they join the union.

The shadow presents a challenge to us: to negotiate an alliance among all the opposing forces in ourselves. Every honest man has a dishonest side; every faithful woman has a faithless side. The courageous honesty required to look for such contradictions in ourselves creates character. Befriending both sides of ourselves allows our polarized tensions to emerge into consciousness. Then we begin to locate their creative possibilities. In this sense the shadow is a gift. Without it our ego might identify only with its light side and maintain an inflated view of itself, thus obscuring a dark glory that wants so much to peep out.

The shadow shapes our daily interactions and relationships much more forcefully than we imagine. Since it is a disowned and demonized energy, it is insidious and sly in its ways of hiding in our choices and behavior. Nature is a metaphor for human nature. Under this visible world is another world. Digging is required to uncover it. It is full of caves and pits; the birds down there are bats. It takes special training to explore this underworld. We have, psychologically, to become spelunkers, perhaps an unappealing and scary prospect. Our visible persona, the image we present to the world, feels threatened by exposure of its dun underpinings. The underworld is, of course, our inner world.

In Greek mythology the Minotaur was hidden in the labyrinth, a metaphor for the shadow in the unconscious. The Minotaur killed seven Athenian boys and seven girls each year. This is an allegorical way of saying that what is hidden can destroy liveliness. The hero Theseus killed the Minotaur externally but never confronted his own inner Minotaur. In later years, he drove away his son, who was then devoured by a sea monster. Thus Theseus did to his own son what the Minotaur did to the Athenian sons! We are cursed to act out the dark and desperate scenarios of the shadow as long as we keep believing it has to be killed or canceled.

Like cathedrals and forests, metaphors of the psyche, we are never finished though always whole. That is wonderful news since something complete can still be made from unfinished things. In fact, our lively energy, our life force, depends directly on our being whole but not on our becoming perfect. The only question is how much consciousness can we stand. We can never know all of our shadow, only a piece at a time, only what we are ready for, and we will never be ready for all of it. It can never be totally tamed or befriended but we can relate to it and horse-trade with it. When a little more each day is a good enough bargain for us, we are liberated from both perfectionism and inadequacy, two tough features of the shadow!

The hero's journey is an apt western metaphor for going out and working for enlightenment. Our opening poem presents a powerful eastern model of the journey of enlightenment into our lives. [It will be helpful to reread it now and then return to this text.] Hakuin, the Japanese Zen teacher, comments that this poem is meant to describe how enlightenment comes from emptiness. We are empty of ego fear and attachment when our mind, “sky” is clear. The void of “endless wastes” that we find in ourselves when we are free of separate ego identity— “where no one goes”— is the autumnal experience of mature spiritual life. The horseman connects man and nature, east and west, emptiness and fullness, light and dark. All the opposites combine. It is only this territory that enlightenment visits, swiftly, dawnward. Yet, in Chinese mythology, the west is the locus of paradise and the birthplace of the gods. Thus, enlightenment begins in heaven and then makes earth a heaven too with no oppositions left standing. Our epigraph is ultimately about the human-divine journey to the east of awakening.

In a Bombay temple there is an image of a three-headed Shiva. The heads on either side are alternatively gentle and terrible. The befriending head is in the center and looks benign and amused as it accepts both sides of itself. The challenge is to see both sides with those same eyes of welcome rather than with aggressive wishes to destroy the darker side. To acknowledge all our powers is to evoke those powers. They then tell us how we can be more than we ever thought we could be, more than we seem.

Shadow traits await an audience from consciousness. They are like courtiers outside a king's chamber. Each has a suit to present. Each has a wish for satisfaction or a request to adjust an imbalance. If the king of light keeps them in the dark antechamber for too long and refuses to welcome them, they mill about, grumble, and gossip. Then, they may begin hatching desperate and even treasonous plots against him. The king has great power, but to keep it, he does well to hear from each of his courtiers and deal with each of them in turn and fairly. This is how they become supportive allies rather than seditious enemies. Each of us is a king and a courtier ready for alliance. As you read and work this course, you begin the dialogue and receive the royal favor.

This is not a Jungian course on the shadow nor does it adhere to Jung's vision entirely. It is original in more ways than it is derivative. In short, this course uses Jungian terms to present a new synthesis with original applications. It will sound true if it elicits and expands the personal vision of the reader. Traditionally, the shadow has referred only to the unconscious. I am expanding it to include the known or easily known dark side of our personality, persona, feelings, and choices. “Dark” can be quite subjective. I define it most simply as that which interferes with others' rights or subverts our own deepest needs and wishes. The shadow in its widest connotation is thus about how we get in the way of others and of ourselves.

The practices that adorn the text also reflect an age-old wisdom that is interior and enduring in the human psyche. This is a course for individuals who are taking an inventory of themselves both with regard to limits and limitations. It is not about the shadow of the world but about the shadow of our individual egos and how ready they are for light. Many courses on spirituality recommend the letting go of ego. This course tells exactly how. Its purpose is not to inform us about the shadow but to taste it in bite-sized chunks that surprise us by how nourishing they are.

We are not alone in the work of befriending the shadow. Assisting forces are collaborating all the time. Even now, as you read these words, many saints and Bodhisattvas are gathering to help you. They are attracted to the hearts of those who want to wake up and love more. They are the guardian angels who accompany us over the bridge we notice is unstable and perilous but nonetheless decide to cross.

In the darkness of anything external to me, I find...an interior psychic life that is my own. -Carl Jung