JW: Richard Rohr - Shadow work

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Week Twenty-Five Summary

Shadow Work

June 18 – June 23, 2023

 

Sunday Shadow work gradually detaches us from our diligently constructed personas (Greek for “stage mask”), often shaped in the first half of life. Our stage mask is not bad, evil, or necessarily egocentric; it is just not “true.” Our shadow is what we refuse to see about ourselves, and what we do not want others to see.—Richard Rohr 

Monday On a cultural level, shadow means what our group, our tribe, our religion, our political party deems negative, out of bounds, to be shunned, to be improved, or to be punished. Behind every social oppression lurks a piece of group shadow whose members are exporting it onto others who are not of their tribe. —Ann Belford Ulanov  

Tuesday The shadow is like a darkroom in which our feelings, dreams, and images lie dormant. Shadow-work is like the process of development in which our feelings, dreams, and images come back to life. —Connie Zweig 

Wednesday The Church’s sanctification of the status quo reveals that we have not been formed by the prophets, who were radical precisely because they were traditionalists. Institutions always want loyalists and “company men”; we don’t want prophets. We don’t want people who point out our shadow side.—Richard Rohr  

Thursday There’s a shadowland into which we’re led by God and grace, and the nature of the journey itself. Many saints have called it “the dark night.”—Richard Rohr 

Friday Once we have faced our own hidden or denied self, there is not much to be anxious about anymore, because there is no fear of exposure. We are no longer afraid to be seen—by ourselves or others. The game is over—and we are free.—Richard Rohr 

 

Masking Pain

 

Writer Pixie Lighthorse suggests that a greater understanding of our pain will teach us what shadow work is ours to do: 

Pain doesn’t always present as sadness or victimization. It may present as rage, anger, withdrawal, control, anxiety, depression, illness, dependency, mania, perfectionism, or other afflictions. Your face may be scowling or your eyebrows furrowing. Or pain may not show itself at all. You may feel calm on the outside while feeling like a tornado on the inside.  

To understand what your pain really looks like, begin by observing yourself in stressful or confrontational situations. How do you react in the face of conflict, disappointment, and loss? Do you tend toward resentment? Confusion? Defensiveness? Silence? An open display of sorrow?  

Knowing your default settings under stress tells you about the nature of your shadow and can help you track it. Remember: You were not born with a shadow. It was built by experiencing complex models of interaction that caused you to curb your natural impulses in order to avoid disappointing or displeasing someone close to you. It crystallized in place when it served to protect you with certain behaviors and outward appearances. Shadow works to get your needs met and avoid or control a situation.  

Being hurt results in trying to prevent it from happening again, although what often happens is we end up reenacting the circumstances. Recognizing this pattern means you’ll someday want to take off the mask to shift what you’re painfully reliving.  

In conflict, what do your expressions and posture reflect? Where do you hear yourself becoming confused or childlike? Try going to a mirror when you feel triggered to get a sense for what masks you put on without knowing it.  

 

 

Pixie Lighthorse, Goldmining the Shadows: Honoring the Medicine of Wounds (Irvine, CA: Row House Publishing, 2022), 23–24. Used with permission. 

Image credit: A path from one week to the next— CAC Staff, Untitled. Izzy Spitz, Untitled. CAC Staff, Untitled. Watercolor. Used with permission. Click here to enlarge image. 

Even if my shadow is out of my sight, it still will make itself known. 

Falling Upward by Richard Rohr - Kindle Notes

 A “further journey” is a well-kept secret, for some reason.

Many people do not even know there is one."

Kindle Notes:

(Rohr) invites us to see the value of our own experience of aging as the way God is moving us from doing to being, from achieving to appreciating, from planning and plotting to trusting the strange process in which as we diminish, we strangely expand and grow in all sorts of ways we cannot and do not need to explain to anyone

His new book, Falling Upward, is a great and gracious gift for all of us longing for lanterns on the perilous path to psychospiritual maturity, a path that reveals secrets of personal destiny only after falling into the swamps of failure, woundedness, and personal demons.

A “further journey” is a well-kept secret, for some reason. Many people do not even know there is one.

But, in my opinion, this first-half-of-life task is no more than finding the starting gate. It is merely the warm-up act, not the full journey.

The further journey usually appears like a seductive invitation and a kind of promise or hope. We are summoned to it, not commanded to go, perhaps because each of us has to go on this path freely, with all the messy and raw material of our own unique lives.

All spiritual language is by necessity metaphor and symbol.

As Desmond Tutu told me on a recent trip to Cape Town, “We are only the light bulbs, Richard, and our job is just to remain screwed in!”

I believe that God gives us our soul, our deepest identity, our True Self, 1 our unique blueprint, at our own “immaculate conception.”

Life is indeed “momentous,” created by accumulated moments in which the deeper “I” is slowly revealed if we are ready to see it.

inner blueprint,

INTRODUCTION

No wise person ever wanted to be younger. —NATIVE AMERICAN APHORISM

There is much evidence on several levels that there are at least two major tasks to human life. The first task is to build a strong “container” or identity; the second is to find the contents that the container was meant to hold.

It is when we begin to pay attention, and seek integrity precisely in the task within the task that we begin to move from the first to the second half of our own lives.

Most often we don't pay attention to that inner task until we have had some kind of fall or failure in our outer tasks. This pattern is invariably true for reasons I have yet to fathom.

Those failings and fallings must be there for a purpose,

Setting out is always a leap of faith, a risk in the deepest sense of the term, and yet an adventure too.

The soul has many secrets.

In legends and literature, sacrifice of something to achieve something else is almost the only pattern.

It is the spiritual equivalent of the second law of thermodynamics: everything winds down unless some outside force winds it back up.

We grow spiritually much more by doing it wrong than by doing it right.

great love is always a discovery, a revelation, a wonderful surprise, a falling into “something” much bigger and deeper that is literally beyond us and larger than us.

life itself—which can actually become a constant intentional prayer.

Somehow deep time orients the psyche, gives ultimate perspective, realigns us, grounds us, and thus heals us.

The language of offering sacrifice is rather universal in ancient myths. It must have been recognized that to go forward there is always something that has to be let go of, moved beyond, given up, or “forgiven” to enter the larger picture of the “gods.”

You need a whole new tool kit.

the whole story is set in the matrix of seeking to find home and then to return there, and thus refining and defining what home really is.

It is a metaphor for the soul.

CHAPTER 1

“What makes me significant?” “How can I support myself?” and “Who will go with me?”

The second half of life can hold some new wine because by then there should be some strong wineskins,

Basically if you get mirrored well early in life, you do not have to spend the rest of your life looking in Narcissus's mirror or begging for the attention of others.

Once you have your narcissistic fix, you have no real need to protect your identity, defend it, prove it, or assert it.

“Do not be afraid”; Appears 345 times.

Ken Keyes so wisely said, “More suffering comes into the world by people taking offense than by people intending to give offense.”

“Spiral Dynamics.”

The “adepts” in all religions are always forgiving, compassionate, and radically inclusive.

move beyond the boundaries of their own “starter group” while still honoring them and making use of them.

Mature people are not either-or thinkers, but they bathe in the ocean of both-and.

The second insight about steps and stages is that from your own level of development, you can only stretch yourself to comprehend people just a bit beyond yourself.

Pope John XXIII's motto might be heard here: “In essentials unity, in nonessentials liberty, and in all things, charity.”

CHAPTER 2

We have only to follow the thread of the hero path. Where we had thought to find an abomination, we shall find a god; where we had thought to slay another, we shall slay ourselves; where we had thought to travel outwards, we shall come to the center of our own existence; where we had thought to be alone, we shall be with all the world. —JOSEPH CAMPBELL, THE HERO WITH A THOUSAND FACES

The stages of the hero's journey are a skeleton of what this book wants to say!

go out and beyond their present comfort zone.

There is always a wounding; and the great epiphany is that the wound becomes the secret key, even “sacred,” a wound that changes them dramatically, which, by the way, is the precise meaning of the wounds of Jesus!

All that each of us can do is to live in the now that is given.

CHAPTER 3

The world is more magical, less predictable, more autonomous, less controllable, more varied, less simple, more infinite, less knowable, more wonderfully troubling than we could have imagined being able to tolerate when we were young. —JAMES HOLLIS, FINDING MEANING IN THE SECOND HALF OF LIFE

It has been acceptable for some time in America to remain “wound identified” (that is, using one's victimhood as one's identity, one's ticket to sympathy, and one's excuse for not serving), instead of using the wound to “redeem the world,” as we see in Jesus and many people who turn their wounds into sacred wounds that liberate both themselves and others.

Jesus seems to often find love in people who might not have received much love themselves. Perhaps their deep longing for it became their capacity to both receive it and give it. This surely matches my own life experience.

I do promise you it is a creative tension, because both law and freedom are necessary for spiritual growth,

Most wars, genocides, and tragedies in history have been waged by unquestioning followers of dominating leaders.

None of us can know much about second-half-of-life spirituality as long as we are still trying to create the family, the parenting, the security, the order, the pride that we were not given in the first half.

Maybe these are not so much the alternative to heaven as the necessary path to heaven.

That is perhaps why the best word for God is actually Mystery.

CHAPTER 4

In the deeps are the violence and terror of which psychology has warned us. But if you ride these monsters down, if you drop with them farther over the world's rim, you find what our sciences cannot locate or name, the substrate, the ocean or matrix or ether which buoys the rest, which gives goodness its power for good, and evil its power of evil, the unified field: our complex and inexplicable caring for each other, and for our life together here. This is given. It is not learned. —ANNIE DILLARD, TEACHING A STONE TO TALK

It is those creatures and those humans who are on the edge of what we have defined as normal, proper, or good who often have the most to teach us.

Salvation is not sin perfectly avoided, as the ego would prefer; but in fact, salvation is sin turned on its head and used in our favor.

Enneagram

Once you see that your “sin” and your gift are two sides of the same coin, you can never forget it.

The only people who do not believe that the Enneagram is true are those who do not understand it or have never used it well.

Note:This sounds a bit dogmatic.

CHAPTER 5

There is no practical or compelling reason to leave one's present comfort zone in life. Why should you or would you? Frankly, none of us do unless and until we have to. The invitation probably has to be unexpected and unsought.

Any attempt to engineer or plan your own enlightenment is doomed to failure because it will be ego driven.

You will see only what you have already decided to look for, and you cannot see what you are not ready or told to look for.

“God comes to you disguised as your life,” as my friend Paula D'Arcy so wisely says.

It seems that in the spiritual world, we do not really find something until we first lose it, ignore it, miss it, long for it, choose it, and personally find it again—but now on a new level.

Until we are led to the limits of our present game plan, and find it to be insufficient, we will not search out or find the real source, the deep well, or the constantly flowing stream.

There must be, and, if we are honest, there always will be at least one situation in our lives that we cannot fix, control, explain, change, or even understand.

The knight errant must be wounded, or he will never even know what the Holy Grail is, much less find it.

In much of urban and Western civilization today, with no proper tragic sense of life, we try to believe that it is all upward and onward—and by ourselves.

CHAPTER 6

As has been said many times, there are finally only two subjects in all of literature and poetry: love and death.

“The most personal becomes the most universal,” Chardin loved to say.

Love only happens in the realm of freedom.

“How much false self are you willing to shed to find your True Self?”

CHAPTER 7

Old men ought to be explorers Here and there does not matter We must be still and still moving Into another intensity For another union, a deeper communion —T. S. ELIOT, “EAST COKER”

The Holy Spirit is that aspect of God that works largely from within and “secretly,” at “the deepest levels of our desiring,” as so many of the mystics have said. That's why the mystical tradition could only resort to subtle metaphors like wind, fire, descending doves, and flowing water to describe the Spirit.

I think also of Hermann Hesse's Steppenwolf, in which he says, “We have no one to guide us. Our only guide is our homesickness.” ... See Evernote for Hiraeth

Home is another word for the Spirit that we are,

The self-same moment that we find God in ourselves, we also find ourselves inside God,

True spirituality is always a deep co-operating between two. True spirituality is a kind of synergy in which both parties give and both parties receive to create one shared truth and joy. ? ?? Does this also mean two people?

Almost all heroes heard an inner voice that spoke to them. In fact, their heroism was in their ability to hear that voice and to risk following it—wherever!

Our problem now is that we seriously doubt that there is any vital reality to the spiritual world, so we hear no life-changing voices—true even for many who go to church, temple, or mosque.

For postmodern people, the universe is not inherently enchanted, as it was for the ancients. We have to do all the “enchanting” ourselves.

This is the burden of living in our heady and lonely time, when we think it is all up to us.

The universe really is “inspirited matter,” we now know, and is not merely inert. Now we might call it instinct, evolution, nuclear fusion, DNA, hardwiring, the motherboard, healing, growth, or just springtime, but nature clearly continues to renew itself from within.

Finally God is allowed to be fully incarnate, which was supposed to be Christianity's big trump card from the beginning! It has taken us a long time to get here, and dualistic thinkers still cannot jump the hurdle.

a tool for inner work, a means for knowing the difference between the wheat and chaff, essentials and nonessentials, which is precisely the turn toward discernment and subtlety that we come to in the second half of life.

He is free to stop his human doing and can at last enjoy his human being.

There is a God-size hole in all of us, waiting to be filled. God creates the very dissatisfaction that only grace and finally divine love can satisfy.

Sin is to stay on the surface of even holy things, like Bible, sacrament, or church.

We will move from the starter kit of “belief” to an actual inner knowing. This is most especially true if we have ever (1) loved deeply, (2) accompanied someone through the mystery of dying, (3) or stood in genuine life-changing awe before mystery, time, or beauty.

CHAPTER 8

As many others have said in different ways, we all seem to suffer from a tragic case of mistaken identity. Life is a matter of becoming fully and consciously who we already are, but it is a self that we largely do not know.

We are all and forever beginners in the journey toward God and truth.

A person who has found his or her True Self has learned how to live in the big picture, as a part of deep time and all of history.

Note:Is this what the holy grail is?

We see it in Sufi Islam and Hindu Krishna consciousness, which sees God's joy everywhere. We see it in mystics like William Blake or Lady Julian, who start with a grain of sand or a hazelnut and soon find themselves swimming in infinity. We see it in the Native American sweat lodge, where the participant ends by touching his sweaty body to the earth and saying “All my relations!”

CHAPTER 9

People are so afraid of being considered pre-rational that they avoid and deny the very possibility of the transrational. Others substitute mere pre-rational emotions for authentic religious experience, which is always transrational. —KEN WILBER

“Everything that rises must converge,” as Teilhard de Chardin put it.

Albert Einstein, who said before he discovered his unified field that he assumed just two things: that whatever reality is, it would show itself to be both “simple and beautiful.”

After almost seventy years, I am still a mystery to myself!

Wisdom happily lives with mystery, doubt, and “unknowing,” and in such living, ironically resolves that very mystery to some degree.

CHAPTER 10

There is a gravitas in the second half of life, but it is now held up by a much deeper lightness, or “okayness.”

Our mature years are characterized by a kind of bright sadness and a sober happiness, if that makes any sense.

“luminous darkness,”

That which we oppose determines the energy and frames the questions after a while. You lose all your inner freedom.

Note:How does this relate to politics?

most frontal attacks on evil just produce another kind of evil in yourself,

The Eight Beatitudes speak to you much more than the Ten Commandments now.

In the second half, you try instead to influence events, work for change, quietly persuade, change your own attitude, pray, or forgive instead of taking things to court.

If we know anything at this stage, we know that we are all in this together and that we are all equally naked underneath our clothes.

The brightness comes from within now, and it is usually more than enough.

I am not preoccupied with collecting more goods and services; quite simply, my desire and effort—every day—is to pay back, to give back to the world a bit of what I have received. I now realize that I have been gratuitously given to—from the universe, from society, and from God. I try now, as Elizabeth Seton said, to “live simply so that others can simply live.”

Erik Erikson calls someone at this stage a “generative” person, one who is eager and able to generate life from his or her own abundance and for the benefit of following generations.

It takes such gasping several times in your life to eventually rest in a bright sadness: you are sad because you now hold the pain of the larger world, and you wish everyone enjoyed what you now enjoy; but there is brightness because life is somehow—on some levels—still “very good,”

Your concern is not so much to have what you love anymore, but to love what you have—right now.

Note:RIGHT NOW!!!

CHAPTER 11

Your shadow is what you refuse to see about yourself, and what you do not want others to see.

The Zen masters call it “the face you had before you were born.” This self cannot die and always lives, and is your True Self.

We never get to the second half of life without major shadowboxing.

I am afraid that the closer you get to the Light, the more of your shadow you see.

So watch for any overreactions or overdenials.

Shadow work never stops.)

You no longer “give away your inner gold” to others. You keep yours, and you let them keep theirs.

CHAPTER 12

If you are on course at all, your world should grow much larger in the second half of life.

The bottom line of the Gospel is that most of us have to hit some kind of bottom before we even start the real spiritual journey.

So our question now becomes, “How can I honor the legitimate needs of the first half of life, while creating space, vision, time, and grace for the second?” The holding of this tension is the very shape of wisdom.

One of the great surprises at this point is that you find that the cure for your loneliness is actually solitude!

We move toward understimulation, if we are on the schedule of soul.

Life has stimulated us enough, and now we have to process it and integrate it, however unconsciously. Silence and poetry start being our more natural voice and our more beautiful ear at this stage.3

Much of life starts becoming highly symbolic and “connecting,” and little things become significant metaphors for everything else.

Poets like Gerard Manley Hopkins, Mary Oliver, David Whyte, Denise Levertov, Naomi Shihab Nye, Rainer Maria Rilke, and T. S. Eliot now name your own inner experience, even if you have never read poetry before. Mystics like Rumi, Hafiz, Kabir, John of the Cross, Therese of Lisieux, Baal Shem Tov, Lady Julian of Norwich, and Rabia will speak to you perhaps more than people from your own tradition—

Both-And Thinking

“nondualistic thinking” or both-and thinking.4 It is almost the benchmark of our growth into the second half of life.

Unless you let the truth of life teach you on its own terms, unless you develop some concrete practice for recognizing and overcoming your dualistic mind, you will remain in the first half of life forever,

CHAPTER 13

How surely gravity's law, strong as an ocean current, takes hold of even the smallest thing and pulls it toward the heart of the world…. This is what the things can teach us: to fall, patiently to trust our heaviness. —RAINER MARIA RILKE, BOOK OF HOURS

We all need at least one such mirror if we are to thrive.

We really do find ourselves through one another's eyes, and only when that has been done truthfully can we mirror others with freedom, truth, and compassion.

“The lamp of the body is the eye. If your eye is healthy, your whole body will be filled with light” (Matthew 6:22).

Being totally received as we truly are is what we wait and long for all our lives.

so do not waste a moment of time lamenting poor parenting, lost job, failed relationship, physical handicap, gender identity, economic poverty, or even the tragedy of any kind of abuse. Pain is part of the deal.