HERE COMES THE SHADOW

And I say: It's alright.

Photo by Matt Nelson on Unsplash

The night before my photo shoot for a career changing article that LA Times Image did about my work with dreams, I found myself in my backyard in the pouring rain at 3 o’clock in the morning, cleaning tiny pieces of undigested pasta and broccoli off my bedspread with a garden hose.

The stomach bug I’d kicked just days before, had taken up temporary residence in my 5-year-old son’s body, causing him to projectile vomit - thrice - on pillows, comforters, sheets, the bedroom carpet, the bedroom furniture, my hair, even the wall and several of the pictures on it.

He fell back asleep within minutes of every episode of wrenching, but I had run out of bedding, the laundry and dryer were already working overtime, so there I was, soaking wet, trying to salvage my beautiful navy Ralph Lauren quilted coverlet - a wedding present that I had received jointly with a man I was no longer married to.

I thought to myself: “Wow! I am SUCH an influencer.”

It has always astounded me how, when you live a mythic life of your own making, there is a very thin line between what feels like rock bottom and what feels like new, dizzying heights.

In Buddhism we say: It follows as surely as one season follows another, that when an ordinary mortal is about to achieve enlightenment, obstacles and devils will invariably appear and the wise will rejoice while the foolish will retreat.

In this paradox we call life we are never just expanding in one direction. If we are expanding, we do so both up and down and sideways and backwards and forwards at the same time - if we can only see it. The higher we climb towards the summit of our own ascension, the bigger the challenges we have to contend with. It must be so, because challenges are what makes us grow. Ease and rest does not build muscle. Only strenuous effort does that. Life has a way of handing you challenges that are tailor made for you to be able to individuate in your own unique way.

And while that LA Times Image article was in no way synonymous with achieving enlightenment, it certainly increased my client base and my reach in the world. To this day it continues to open up new and exciting avenues in my work life - and most importantly, new ways to help other people.

Curiously, what prepared me the most to be able to hold that expansion - to authentically live as a grounded capacity in the world - were the things I had no choice but to do as a single mother of a young child, prone - as children are - to every possible and impossible virus floating around in that excellent canopy, the air.

It was a relentless struggle to find work hours during sick days, take client calls during nap times, being utterly sleep deprived from night upon night of administering the nebulizer every three hours (and not sleeping in between for fear that I may miss that he had stopped breathing) and then, having to go straight into the studio to teach a 7-hour workshop, or consult during rehearsals of a play, or leading dreamwork for a group of 40 people on Zoom, and still finding the way into my passion and love for the unconscious and the creative process, giving what I was there to give, while a part of me was back in my son’s bedroom, holding a clear bubble of energy and healing around him to Somehow make sure that - even if just by magic - he would not take a turn for the worse while I couldn’t be reached.

I was running a breathless marathon through an impossible situation, drawn out for years. I was constantly vacillating between the weight of massive domestic challenges and a feeling of unspeakable, unimaginable love. I was never really exhausted. I did it all because of love, and that gave me energy. It was the greatest lesson I ever learned.

They say mothers are born when children are born and that was certainly true for me. But even more so, what was born through those motherhood-specific challenges was my sense of humor and my belief that anything is possible as long as you love. That we can all tap into capacities we never knew we had and that often, the way we do that, is by contending with the kind of challenges that we would probably decline if we’d been given a choice.

I love my son. I love the world and I love my work in the world. My commitment to that love was born through the challenges I underwent, then. Through making the impossible possible.

We grow, says Rilke, by being defeated, decisively, by larger and larger beings. When these beings defeat us, whatever felt like a challenge before now looks easy. And then, an even larger being comes along and defeats us again, and the previous undefeatable being seems to us like a teddy bear. I never felt comfortable with the double pirouette until I spent a long time being defeated, decisively, by the triple. Now, the triple is my edge, and I know that in order to master it I probably have to move on to the quadruple, and once again feel like an awkward beginner.

And yet. Knowing all of these things in no way diminishes the challenges when they occur. Whether it is me, or the wise dreamers I work with, when Shadow rears its ugly head - in our inner life or in the perceived environment around us - it is, at least at first, almost impossible to see the potential for expansion that it holds.

~~~

The first question we are taught to ask in Dream Tending is: “Who is visiting now?” If someone were to ask me over the last month who is visiting now, my answer would be: “Shadow. Shadow is visiting now.” In the individual dreams and certainly, too, in the collective dream. Of late, the dreams I hear are of cataclysmic destruction, of death and dying, the world bottoming out, of monsters, predators and prison guards.

However, for many of the dreamers I work with it, Shadow isn’t is just showing up in the dream life. It is coming through in their waking life as well. I have witnessed so many people be right on the precipice of more happiness and illumination than they ever experienced, only to be yanked back by a force so strong and so nebulous they did not see it coming. It takes the form of sudden anxiety we cannot shake. It shows up as our worst fears illuminated, either in the world space, or in personal relationships. As sudden uncontrollable rage or depression or descent into momentary madness. As illness. As that insidious voice inside that, at the crucial moment, says: “No. Don’t trust it. It is not worth it.” It shows up in the ways we suddenly can’t help but judge or distance ourselves from the people and things we care about.

Of course Shadow is not all I see in the dream life, but it is more prominent than it has been in a while. I am not surprised. The deep, dark and intolerable images of our cultural shadow are being exposed for all to see. How could it not echo through our psyche?

At this time we might do ourselves a favor and turn inwards. By paying attention to our dreams we will see, clearly, the resonance this collective shadow brings up individually. And, as Jung said, the only way we will make it without destroying ourselves at this time is if enough people take responsibility to transmute their own shadow.

Even if we have been telling ourselves this for decades, thinking it couldn’t possibly get any darker, I think it is still useful to remember that it is always darkest right before dawn - provided we choose to make it so. We need to believe it to see it, and that is difficult to do.

I had no idea that hosing down a soiled bedspread in the middle of the night would somehow teach me to show up more sturdily in my professional life. I only understood that much later on. Speaking of garden hoses, it is useful to remember, too, that when you turn a hose on after a long winter, the water that comes out of it at first will not even look like water. It is brown, and dark and clumpy. You have to keep the hose on until all that gunk comes out and the water begins to run clear. That is exactly what all the shadow material feels like in the current dreams: A clearing. A releasing of all that is dark and sticky, so the waters of feeling, insight and inspiration might once again flow freely.

If we could recognize the Shadow for what it is it would have no effect. But we rarely can, at least not soon enough, and that’s what knocks us off our feet. And maybe that is exactly what it should do. Because it is only when we are nose to the ground that we surrender. And we are all being called to surrender. Our individual identity. Our collective identity. Our ambitions. Our belief systems. Our perception of what is good and what is bad.

In Dream Tending we learn that if we can stand our ground, surrounded by inner support figures, and engage the Shadow figure, not in direct battle but with support and curiosity, it may one day transmute and become an ally. There is a freedom in acknowledging our biggest fears. There is a freedom in no longer feeling that we need to arrange our entire existence (individually and culturally) around not seeing certain things that have been visible - at least partially - for a very long time.

What if, instead of resisting we were to say: “Yes, I, too, carry a Shadow. Yes. I/we have deep, terrible wounds. Now, what will we choose to do with the rest of our lives? And what might we do to help our culture from a place of absolute, unapologetic visibility?”

An extraordinary thing has been happening for all of my dreamers who recently got to know Shadow in a way they had not known it before. They all found incredible gifts in that encounter. They have all arisen from the blow as more compassionate, solidified people, attuned to their purpose in the world. And it has been a quick turnaround. Processes that once took years now seem to take but a couple of weeks. We are transmuting the shadow energy so quickly now, it really makes me ponder this strange game of life, which, more and more, seems like a dream within a dream. Where we get to play many parts, try out many ways of being and where we’re invited to understand that at the root of everything there is only love.

There is no good or bad but thinking makes it so, says Hamlet. And as I watch the way people are bouncing back so quickly from these onsets of shadow, more fortified, expanded and more loving than ever before - as I watch how adept we are becoming at navigating darkness, navigating the unconscious, the upheaval and the dissolution of the world as we know it, I wonder if what is really happening is, that we are moving from thinking to feeling. From thinking to Being. From a mere knowledge of good and evil to an inner wisdom that life is change, and life is love and life is always creating itself anew.

We don’t solve our problems, says Jung. We just outgrow them. And right now we seem to be outgrowing a lot of problems. Problems mainly caused by that old, retreating worldview called Duality.

Shadow and Light, courtesy of Matt Watkinson (the man I’m no longer married to.)