Let’s look at how shadow work and spirituality relate to one another and the importance of combining them in any personal growth endeavour. Often they are practiced in isolation from one another, or confused and conflated, so let’s seek an inclusive yet discriminating view of these areas of human growth.
I’d like to acknowledge Ken Wilber for his work on the shadow, spirituality and human development. A considerable number of the insights in this article come from his work.
Definitions of Shadow Work and Spirituality
Let’s quickly define what shadow work means. It means integrating desires and personality traits that have gone underground, that we’ve repressed. These can be both positive desires and traits, or negative ones.
I like Doshin Roshi’s defintion of the shadow, which is “the me that I can’t see”. Seeing is of course metaphorical here. So, shadow work is the path of reintegrating of all the you that you can’t see. It tends to be formed of addictions and allergies.
Let’s define spirituality as the process of undoing our habitual sense of self and contacting our deeper, truer selves and identities. We can also define it as the process of growing through the five state-stages of consciousness. This is our spiritual walk. We can also include our spiritual talk, which is how we conceive of the divine in terms of concepts and how this view relates to life and our place within it. This is the realm of James Fowler and the Stages of Faith.
For now, we’ll collapse spiritual walk and spiritual talk into one, and later we’ll be more careful to separate them.
Traditional View of Shadow Work and Spirituality
Traditional spiritual systems tend to present the spiritual path as the one and only important path, the number one dimension of human growth. Under this paradigm, if you get enlightened or reach the higher stages of that path, whatever that path is, then you’re a perfected human being. Any other work is superfluous because you’ve already achieved the pinnacle.
The Cutting-Edge View
In recent times, as our knowledge of the human psyche has increased, as our knowledge of human intelligence has increased and as we’ve started integrating spirituality with psychology, we’ve come to realise that the picture is not so simple. We’re starting to realise that spirituality itself is just one area, one of the many human growth potentials.
This is interesting, because it takes spirituality off its pedestal, it de-addicts us from spirituality a little bit. It encourages us to continue taking it seriously but also to see it as just one more area and not as the only thing to develop in our lives. It also helps us realise that even if we’re spiritually advanced, we might still be very deficient in other areas. The shadow is just one of those many areas.
What’s more, the shadow and our spiritual life interact in certain ways. Enlightenment is a many-faceted duel. While the core of it is realising who we really are at deeper and deeper levels, there are also many complementary aspects that are crucial if you want to live a full enlightened life. A fundamental part of the Buddhist perspective is that morality and ethics (sila) are as crucial to enlightenment as wisdom and meditative awareness. The greater the shadow, the more morally and ethically questionable we’re likely to be, and the more it impedes enlightenment.
Separating Shadow Work and Meditation
It’s powerful to realise that meditation is one world of practices that share certain features, namely the attempt to cultivate our focus skills, and that shadow work is another world of practices with their own procedures and outcomes. Look closely, and you’ll realise these two worlds are very different.
Sure, shadow work involves self-awareness, emotional awareness, awareness of your thoughts, and the ability to see the parts of the shadow that show themselves to the conscious mind. But still, the methodologies are fundamentally different, the goals are different and the outcome is very different.
You can do meditation work your whole life and it’ll never really help you understand what shadow work is. At the same time, you could be Carl Jung and not be spiritually awakened in the sense of discovering deeper selves beyond the self-identity, but I’m sure he was very clean of shadow.
So the worlds of meditation and shadow work are quite different. They’re different methodologies with different goals. There is no guarantee that you’re going to be free of shadow if you’ve done a lot of meditation, and vice versa.
What I’ve found is that meditation makes me more aware of my shadow but doesn’t necessarily clean it up. It might loosen the boundary between the conscious and the subconscious a little bit and make my own thoughts and emotions more clear to me, but I’d be reluctant to say that it helps me clean it up. I’ve had to do specific work on that.
You’ll also find that spiritual teachers are often very shadow ridden. They’re very touchy and defensive, which can be a sign of shadow anger. They can be screwed up in certain ways, and they can exhibit symptoms of psychological projection. This is more evidence that their spiritual growth is just one dimension.
Combining Shadow Work and Spirituality
Think of spirituality as being one life module and the shadow as being another life module. The shadow question is “how much shadow do you have?”, and the spiritual question is “how aware are you of your deeper identities?” and we’re starting to realise that growth in one area does not guarantee growth in the other.
There’s an interesting organisation called Integral Zen, whose founder, Doshin Roshi, has used Ken Wilber’s Integral Theory as a guiding framework, as a structure for creating the systems and practices that he uses with his practitioners. They do shadow work alongside meditation, in addition to it.
Doshin Roshi’s basic principle is that we can be enlightened, we can realise our deeper selves, but our shadow is fundamentally unconscious. It doesn’t matter how conscious you are of your deeper identities because much of the shadow lives down in the unconscious. It’s not necessarily healed by higher growth, and severe enough damage to the shadow can derail our spiritual life or make us dysfunctional in surprising ways.
You might like my video on how acid exposed my shadow.
Shadow’s Effects on Spirituality
In this section, we’ll consider the presence of shadow as a weight that drags down the process of growth, and its absence as a catalyst.
The Effect on Our Spiritual Walk
Remember, the shadow is the “you” that you can’t see. It’s all your hidden material. Wilber has even postulated that the earlier states of consciousness can go into our shadow, either as addictions or allergies, and hinder our later growth. If we’re addicted to the Gross realm, our experience will be dominated by it, when perhaps the Witness or Non-Dual perspectives should be more prominent. We end up subtly interpreting higher teachings from the Gross point of view, and thus our growth is jeopardised. If we’re too averse to the Gross, we’ll never make a clean break from it.
The Effect on Our Spiritual Talk
On the other hand, our spiritual talk can be jeopardised. We can be addicted or averse to any faith system we have already lived through, and thus fail to healthily transcend and include it in our functioning. It goes underground and rots in the dungeons of our psyche, compromising our ability to move into higher levels.
Unfortunate Effects of Shadow: Example
One way I think that the shadow has played out in the spiritual world is in the unfortunate cases of child abuse. In a simplistic way, what I think has happened is that religious leaders have taken vows related to their sexual life, and in doing so their sexual urges become splintered and broken off from their psyche.
It’s not that they no longer have them, but they get pushed into the subconscious. It’s institutionalised. They’re not allowed to satisfy these urges in a normal way, so their identity gets skewed and twisted. They start demonising these urges in followers and companions, while their own urges remain alive and well.
This is what happens when you push the shadow down. Because you don’t acknowledge it, you don’t express your desires, they tend to come out in very twisted ways. They come out contorted, or exaggerated, or uncontrolled. Religious leaders don’t live an ordinary life and aren’t allowed to satisfy their urges in a normal way, so they come out in a distorted manner.
If you combine that with the fact that they have power over people younger than them, we have a recipe for disaster.
The Bigger Picture
In discovering that spirituality is not the only dimension of human growth, it means we’re no longer under the spell thinking that everything will be fine if we just do our spiritual practice. We won’t be surprised when that doesn’t happen. And as I said, the latest cutting edge theories are showing us that things are a lot more complicated than we thought. The human being is a multifaceted, multidimensional, complex creature, and addressing one area doesn’t necessarily address another.
Another question opens to me: if shadow is such a fundamental dimension of the human being, and spirituality is too, what are the others? What are the fundamental areas that we need to work on in our lives to feel, to reach our full potential, to feel fulfilled, to feel whole and full, to live a full life?
That is the ongoing project of this website, so do stay with me if you’re interested in discovering the answer with me.
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The post Shadow Work & Spirituality Combined first appeared on Deep Psychology.
The post Shadow Work & Spirituality Combined appeared first on Deep Psychology.
