The Myth of Shadow Work

I think we do, I definitely do, and I think we need to do it in the biggest possible context. I think most of us get lost in trying to deal with the shadow in a personal context and loose a lot of time that way.

The shadow is the part of us that we don't (want to) see and as a result of that we usually act out of it. It can be desire that we project onto some else. Ken Wilber illustrates this with the story of the man who wants to clean out his garage. The man in this story had the plan to clean up his garage for months and months and one day he finally decides he is really going to do it, but hardly started he comes upon a pile of old magazines and starts to read... After a few hours his wife pops her head into the garage to ask her husband how it is going, the man looks up from a magazine and starts shouting at her to get of his back and leave him alone. He projects the desire he feels to clean up his garage onto her, and as a result feels his wife is putting pressure on him, hence the anger towards her. Now that's a great way to explain what shadow is.

So what is the Myth of Shadow Work that I am referring to? It is the myth that many, many people subscribe to nowadays, that working on our shadow in a personal context can help us to be free, or bring us closer to enlightened awareness. A lot of the shadow work that I have come across is about focusing on aspects of ourselves that are not necessarily pretty, and transforming those, or stopping to judge those parts of ourselves.

What do I have against that? I think first of all this approach is endless, there is always more to see and to transform because we are never perfect, and all that time we don't feel we need to reach for our highest potential because we are not ready yet. It also makes these parts of us seem much more real and important than they actually are. And finally, I have not met anyone that benefitted from this approach in such a way that I felt that they were an inspiring example of freedom and self-knowledge.

My experience tells me that enlightenment is about a leap of faith, a radical leap out of the personal context altogether. We have to dive in at the deep end, care for Life, for the Development of Consciousness, for the Sacred. If we do this we will find the wakefulness to not act out of our unconscious motives, because we care. Caring is, of course, something entirely different than planning to care in the future and that is why I don't feel we have time for the kind of shadow work I mentioned above, even if it would work...

So let's go back to the man and his garage; if he would just get on with it and get that darn garage cleaned out, he would see that the pressure he felt from his wife was his own desire to clean up his garage. But if he would start to focus on his anger, laziness and need for clean garages, and tried to integrate that to become a more whole person, his garage would probably stay a mess for a long, long time to come. And his marriage would probably disintegrate in the meantime...

I find life unspeakably thrilling, I love the discovery that we don't need to work on our ego first to be wholehearted participants in Life. I find consistently caring to the best of my ability for some time now, has given me a perspective on ego or shadow, that enables me to learn and let go on the run, without dropping the ball or bailing out. And this is what I want to share, because the world needs caring, giving people, for whom their shadow is not a game. People that care so much it hurts, that are willing to burn in order to create an enlightened future.