Working with Shadow, retrieving Shadow in everyday life.

The beginnings of working with Shadow.

Recognizing projections.

Can we work with Shadow in our everyday life without any special knowledge? Yes. However, it has become more difficult in the modern western world. In older times there were rites of passage to teach us how to do this, now we just have to get on with it the best we can. The people we come into contact with and what the world brings to us are our best teachers. Soul often speaks to us through a crisis when we don’t pay sufficient attention to what’s going on around us. Which “we” am I referring to? Our Ego which was created at the expense of Soul.

Soul, if it cannot reach us any other way will create a crisis for us (our Ego) to deal with. Soul is extremely powerful in this way but cannot override the free will of the Ego.

Soul, Shadow, and Ego are three legs of a stool bound together by time in each lifetime. 

Here is a poem By David Whyte that speaks to what I’m describing above. Why use poetry at this point? “Poetry, are words against which we have no defense”. Like cupid’s arrows, these words pierce right through our Ego’s defenses and pierce to our deepest heart. One of the traditional ways of bypassing projections, like a good story in the story menu on this site.

Everything is waiting for you. By David Whyte. The “You and Your” refers to our Ego understanding of the world

Your great mistake is to act the drama as if you were alone.

As if life were a progressive and cunning crime

With no witnesses to the tidily hidden transgressions.

 

To feel abandoned is to deny the intimacy of your surroundings.

Surely even you at times, have felt the swelling presence

 of the grand array; The swelling presence, and the chorus,

crowding out your solo voice.

You must note the way the soap dish enables you,

Or the window latch grants you freedom.

Alertness is the hidden discipline of familiarity.

The stairs are your mentor of things to come,

The doors have always been there

To frighten you, to invite you, and the tiny speaker

in your phone is your dream ladder to divinity.

 

Put down the weight of your aloneness and

ease into the conversation. The kettle is singing

even as it pours you a drink. The cooking pots have

left their arrogant aloofness and the gods see you at last.

All the birds and creatures of the world are unutterably themselves.

If your going to attempt this work alone then the line “Alertness is the hidden discipline of familiarity.” is the most important instruction to begin with. To see our own projections without outside help requires we be alert to what’s going on around us. OR find a group that is doing this work. Like in the Lord of the ring series the adventure starts with the fellowship of the ring. 

Leaving aside for the moment the accusation “Your projecting” or “It’s just your projection” which is probably true at that moment. Most of the time we are totally unconscious of our projections. Our beliefs, whatever they are create our reality and judgments about others’ slightly different reality. I would recommend reading the chapter on “Towards an understanding of Shadow” for background.

Here is a quote by Dave Bedrick. with some descriptions of the Status quo. our collective Shadow.

We don’t heal our shadow, our shadow heals us. It heals us of our naivete.
It heals us of our one-sidedness.
It heals us of our projections.
It heals us of our powerlessness or our desire for power.
It heals us from our internalized patriarchal, White-supremacist and capitalistic foundational beliefs.
It heals us from our fundamentalisms.
It heals us from our tendency to bypass.
It heals us from looking for fixes.
It heals us from thinking we have found perfect teachers (who also have shadows).
Our shadow is not a problem or an illness, it is part of our wholeness.
Shadow work is not something we do for a weekend or a moment in time, but a lifetime unfolding and flowering.
Shadow work is simply the art and practice of getting to know ourselves.
More simply put, it is the art of an honest and sustainable self love.
by David Bedrick

Here is a simple diagram of where projections come from. Ego, our sense of self and “I” are above the heavy blue line, the boundary of conscious awareness. Projections are part of ourselves that we see in other people and things. Projections are how we first meet our own conscious content.

By the time we are 25 years old we are pretty certain what reality is and we accept that. We do this to comply with the demands of the Status quo, the norms of the day, what we are required to believe and accepted as reality. We do this to get our Zebra stripes, to belong, and enjoy the protection of the herd.  So Where do the unwanted bits of our original and secret selves go?

We become heavily invested in our beliefs. Try challenging some of them and you will soon see how invested we are. “The world is flat”. People died for this belief and were excommunicated from their church for it. Currently, Twitter will suspend your account if you’re too radical. Never mind CO2 and global warming, vaccinations, and fake news.

In the formation of Ego and our Ego identity what we have come to call “I” At the transition to adult life, Career, work, or how we want to be seen. A huge amount of our essential selves (our Soules or self) has got left behind, through the various processes of creating our Ego. Where does it go then, this cut-off content?

It is represented by the Golden Ball or the deep forest of the Wildman in the Iron John story. The forest protects the discarded bits of ourselves until we are ready to reclaim them. Or it is projected on the world outside of us, on to anything willing or able to hold or carry that projection.

Having now successfully got our Zebra stripes, established who we are within the herd. Feeling the comfort and lack of anxiety in the certainty of that. We now defend our position within the herd with some vigor there are always those few annoying people who get under our skin and disturb the tranquillity of our comfortable existence and challenge our beliefs of reality. Politics and religions are great carriers of the status quo and tell us what is what.

There are people and things we are in relationship with who carry parts of ourselves as projections. We call this relationship, whether it be with people, a career, a profession, or animals especially our pets. Inanimate objects can carry our projections just as easily, Cars, houses, collectibles, things we buy. The greatest carrier of these projections are our family members, which is why for the most part family gathering a fraut with tensions. Hense the clique “Young eagles should nest far from home”

Perhaps this aspect of projection is the most difficult to understand and to experience, that our own unconscious is trying to bring back to us parts of our real self (Soul) to experience and claim back in the guise of other people, animals, and things.

In the contemplative traditions teach that the greatest source of discomfort are called “attachments” Attachments are just another word for projections. When we become overly attached to something whether it’s a person or a thing, take that thing is taken away we feel that part of ourselves has died. In a way that’s true, part of what we projected on to that person or thing, the part we expected them to carry for us unconsciously, is now no longer available to carry that part of ourselves and we feel the loss of that acutely.

Now suddenly, we have a choice. Claim that part back into ourselves which requires some consciousness and awareness or go into mourning. The mourning process if followed through the five steps ends in acceptance. This is a step in owning projections.

Some thoughts on what these times of covid are calling out from us. Can we come to understand what’s been called from us?   projection at this time of loss, at this time of covid in our world. Covid has forced us to reconsider all our boundaries and our relationship to our attachments about life.

It is hard to do this work. Attention to detail and acute observation is required. Sometimes our friends will tell us about our Shadows in terms of behaviors. You always do this or say that. Pay close attention to what they say and then consider it over time.

There are groups that travel this path.

The 12 step process

Philosophical groups

Meditation groups

People who deal in breathwork

Mankind project.

Boys to men.

Just to name a few

Life (our Soul) is intensely interested that this work takes place and will always bring us our next step.