Transforming and Integrating the Shadow
The conscious part of our being is only a small portion that is accessible to us in our normal wakeful state. This too is not a stable state because the submerged parts rise up and take over the conscious part every now and then and we experience this as mood swings or shifts in personality with different emotional states and behaviours. They bring with them strong emotional surges and the normal wakeful state gets swept off and carried away by these waves. Not all these hidden parts are dark in their nature, there are luminous parts of our being that bring with them a high degree of inspiration, clarity and joy when they pass through. Our interior has both these types of parts in us, that of light and that of darkness. What is dark brings with them pain, sorrow, suffering and depression or anger, rage and violence. The luminous parts bring with them harmony and integration whereas the dark parts bring with them disharmony and disintegration. Our challenge is to recognise, transform and integrate the darkened parts of our being and this integration requires centring all parts around our most luminous core, our soul.
The first rule to follow, if you are to transform and integrate the shadow, is that you don’t go after it; instead, you go after the light. The darkness is transformed by the light, just as lighting a lamp removes the darkness. This lighting of the lamp here means finding your soul and living from there, that is what brings healing, transformation and integration. The evolving and emerging soul, the psychic being, is the integrating psychological centre of our being. It is this part that we need to search for, not the shadow.
However, just as the good old saying goes, you may not be interested in war but war is interested in you. So even if you don’t go after the shadow, it will come after and grip you. That’s where you must learn to deal with it without suppressing or repressing it. First is to recognise when it shows up and there are many different ways to spot the presence of your shadow. Whether you know it or not, the shadow is fed by your thoughts, ideas, imaginations and emotions and it depends on you to survive and propagate.
The shadow shows up whenever you get out of your comfort zone either voluntarily or when pushed by others. The comfort zone is your facade, consciously cultivated outer personality and its mask, your normal orbit in the society where you have adjusted to the norms. It is your current established normal state and when you try to go beyond it, the hidden forces get into action. In fact, the surface being is a plaything in the hands of these hidden forces. Behind and below are the hideouts from where strange forces show up and grip you with heightened emotional intensity and the drama starts. There are two directions this can take, one is an inward collapse crippling you from within, the other is an outward explosion aggressively hitting back at the world. If it is an inward collapse it shows up as grip of fear, shame, guilt, sorrow or depression with their corresponding self-deprecating thoughts and ideas or if it is an outward explosion, it shows up as irritation, anger, rage, vengeance and violence with corresponding self-justifying thoughts and ideas. In both cases, you are momentarily gripped and possessed by a different personality. During this momentary seizures, you can notice a change in your facial expression, tone of voice, your emotions, your energy level and behaviour.
These alternations are usually triggered by some external agency, a person, event or situation, but always accompanied by a higher intensity of the emotional drama. A common mistake is to consider the external agency for the cause of the shift in your personality. Often you may complain that this or that person brings out the worst in you. The fact is, if it were not there within you as a potentiality it wouldn’t be showing up in the first place. Behind the facade are the many hidden characters. So one rule to apply is the mirror principle, that is if someone or an event or situation out there is triggering a disproportionate emotional response in you, stop blaming the external situation and look inside to see your shadow lurking within. It is your inner luggage showing up, but you are not yet ready to own it up. Stop playing the ‘poor me’ or the ‘victim’ or the self-righteous ‘don’t make me angry’ drama. Own up your stuff, that is a good place to start.
When it surges up and takes possession of your conscious being, you are identified with it and experience yourself to be that. There is no separation between you and your shadow, you are the pain and the sorrow, or you are the rage and the violence with its dramatic intensity. You experience it within you and you are that. When you are in a theatre watching a movie the same happens; you identify yourself with the characters and the gripping dramatic intensity, but you always know that is it only a movie, you can always snap out of the identification and watch it as a separate observer. But the theatre of your shadow movie is within you and you are the theatre, the characters and the audience. It is hard to separate them, especially to become an observer, the audience of the unfolding story. So after applying the mirror principle and leaving aside the external trigger, the next step is to step back and disidentify from the drama and watch it as a spectator. It is in this disidentification, in this ability to be an impartial witness, the key to freedom and self-mastery. The key is within you.
Once you stop blaming others and get the knack of disidentifying with the wave of emotion that is griping you, you are in a good position to see the recurring storyline in which you are playing out a certain character. What role are you playing in the drama? A weak poor victim or a strong and angry tough nut, a rebel, not be messed with or many other variants of their mixed shades — it doesn’t matter, what is important is to note some recurring plot in your movie of life and you repeatedly playing a role. It doesn’t even matter what events of your personal history lead to its formation, though that knowledge too will come as you start watching them getting played out repeatedly. The more you see the drama as if watching a movie, the more objective it becomes and gradually its emotional charge gets released. Your unconscious reveals its content, its beliefs, convictions, obsessions, events from the past and the more the emotional energy is released, the more things loosen up and your perception gets clearer. There will be more space for objectivity over what is happening.
Freedom comes when you accept that you are not only the audience of this drama but also its author, you need not accept things as they are, you can rewrite the script, you can stop playing these roles unconsciously and change the course of the drama. In this process your unconscious increasingly became conscious, the unprocessed baggage from the past gets digested and assimilated. The spectatorship also gives you sufficient space to look deeper inward to truly feel your deeper depths, to truly begin to feel your authentic deeper feelings that lie beneath the dramatic and turbulent outer flux. In the process you will recover the light that was veiled by the drama because within all these dramas there is always some luminous truth of your being that was denied, that was veiled. Once you recover that truth of your being, the healing and transformation happen. It is in that deeper depth you can source your faith, your light, your power of truth and surrender to its call. That is where you would know that there is a being of truth, goodness and beauty within you. These are the godheads of the soul within and your suffering was resulting from the denial of these godheads. It is the source of your light within.
As you gain confidence and dive deeper you also begin to see that all the outer drama was only a stage set for you to turn inward and discover your true nature and its light. In that light, you would also discover what appeared as painful and disastrous events of your life where the turning points that pushed you towards deeper depth that played a significant role in your awakening. Soon you will discover an inner guide and its unerring light and force guiding your steps. Eventually, this inner guide will reveal to be not only within you but also everywhere and in all things. A benevolent artist potter kneading the clay of human consciousness shaping each one according to their possibility and pushing all towards greater perfection. At this stage you are seeing the light more and more and beginning to walk on the sunlit path, moving from perfection to greater perfection without having to go through sorrow and suffering as a means to grow. Pain and suffering are indicators of internal resistance and unconsciousness, the more conscious you become, the less their utility in your growth towards psychological perfection.
Essentially you increasingly disidentify from the movements of darkness and identify with the movements of light. The more you identify with the light, the lighter you become, the more delightful your emotions and the more self-luminous your mind becomes. So, find your faith in this light within, sincerely follow its call and develop daily practices that will invoke its presence. Focus on practices that bring lightness and joy within, focus on what inspires you, these are the doorways for the entry of light. Step out of your comfort zone, and when the shadow shows up, become the audience, don’t throw it upon others. Watch the play, release its emotional content, understand its demands, recover the light behind and let it heal and integrate naturally. Every part that gets healed, transformed and integrated adds up to your inner strength and creative force.
