(How to Do) the Hard Work of Growing as People and Societies

Why the Work We’re Doing Today is Shadow Work

One of the hardest things we do in life is confronting our shadows. Our dark sides. By confronting, I don’t mean simply yelling at them — “confrontation” in the casual sense. I mean it in the psychological one — the hard work of revealing them, knowing them, and understanding them. Not bottling them up, or shouting at them, or putting them in a little cage — but ultimately, making something beautiful and true from their darkness, which is what every seed needs to grow.

It’s hard, gruelling, demanding work. Nobody wants to admit their flaws. So this shadow work really happens in a life when we’re ready to understand that our shadows are desperate cries for help — for attention, for intimacy, starved parts of us crying out for nourishment, lonely parts of us which badly need nurturing, parched parts of us which need to sip from the waters of truth and mercy and goodness again, haunting, cries for safety, belonging, meaning.

Our shadows are cries from our souls to make ourselves feel whole again. And sometimes those messages become curdled, twisted in on themselves. Ignored too long, denied too long, those pleas become screams. Of rage, of hatred, of fear, of despair.