The term Shadow Work invokes to my mind darkness, mystery, something a little scary and ominous. In Jungian psychology, it is a core approach to knowing our whole self and to achieving deep healing.

We all arrive in this world as soul without ego. From our first moments and as we grow, we learn through our interactions with the external world around us; about the world, about others and interacting with others, and about ourselves as a relation to the world and others. We learn about what we need to do to survive, about how the world is and how we must operate in it, and we learn what it means to be connected to other people. We build our ego around our true authentic selves, in order to interact and move successfully in the external physical world during a time in which we feel powerless to change it.

Our ego is essentially a survival tool, and when we first learned our ego, it worked to protect us from harm. Yet it can mean we sever ourselves from, or we suppress, aspects of our true selves. They can become aspects that we revile and reject, and we can find ourselves disliking others because they reflect these disowned parts of ourselves back to us in some form.

The world we move into and through over the course of our life is unlikely to reflect the same one in which we learned our ego. The ego, however well-intentioned, often provides us with a distorted, disconnected and inflexible sense of our selves unable to adequately adapt to or attract new external realities. It can involve beliefs and ways of thinking that block out what we do not wish, or have forgotten how, to see.

Enter Shadow Work. Where we seek to meet our lost pieces and integrate them into our whole. There are countless ways that Shadow Work can be conceived. I’ve recently been contemplating it in a new way that I’ve found helpful.

I have considered the inner self as a great and endless expanse. In this expanse, there is a light which shines throughout, and the source of the light is the self. Wherever you are looking, in whichever direction, you can shine a light on any part of your inner self. As we grew our ego, we collected Things, which we placed in our expanse, and behind these Things lies shadow into which we cannot see. It is blocked by the Thing, and because our self is the source of light, there is no angle we can come from to see into that shadow and reveal what lies there. If the Things are small, they may be easy to remove. Some, over time, may have grown quite large, and cast quite a big shadow.

Because it is an unknown, the idea of confronting the shadow can induce fear or other feelings of resistance, and the bigger the shadow the bigger the resistance. It may seem as though integrating shadow into light will mean the light must dim. Combining black and white, for example, gives a shade of grey. If we focus not on the shadow itself, but the Thing that casts it, once it is removed, what will remain? The light, coming from the self, will be unchanged. The space, once filled with shadow, is no longer blocked. Will it simply be space for more light? Or room for something new, something chosen rather than a Thing created as a reaction to the external world? Or maybe it will reveal something else, something precious, that was hidden in the shadow, long forgotten and long sought.

Shadow Work is an inner exploration, to find and remove blockages of our own light. It is a seeking to shine light into dark places, to reveal the true self and become the fullest expression of who we are. In doing Shadow Work, the fear of the shadow can be overcome, the Thing that is blocking the light of the self can become known and integrated, and the lost parts of the self can be reclaimed.

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