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Is the key to know and to work with the shadow in shadow work, or is it from deep meditation and looking within and accepting the truth.
What makes two half’s whole, a pretty simple and bare bone answer but in the place of Mage there are many ways and paths to this answer I fear. What are some effective ways you have used to find the person you have tried to hide for years ?
Is the key to know and to work with the shadow in shadow work, or is it from deep meditation and looking within and accepting the truth.
What makes two half’s whole, a pretty simple and bare bone answer but in the place of Mage there are many ways and paths to this answer I fear. What are some effective ways you have used to find the person you have tried to hide for years ?
I never did any formal work on this, but I certainly did a lot of "looking within and accepting the truth". My best friend who I met when I was 17 told me that "I knew exactly who I was" even back then, and that I think is it. You need to know who you are ("You have no choice but to do Thy Will" etc.) before you can go about making changes.
Don't think of it as two halves; think of it as the same thing seen from different angles.
I think it's best to avoid viewing the Shadow as one's 'evil twin', i.e. a fully formed entity that is the mirror image of our 'virtuous' Selves; it's definitely not a Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde thing. Rather, it's dark bits and pieces within our personality, intermingled with traits we are conscious and approve of. In my opinion your everyday Self and your Shadow don't complement each other to finally make at whole once they've been successfully integrated ; rather, the Shadow is the dross of our childhood imprinting and life experiences. Today, Shadow work is mostly about healing old traumas, not 'fessing to icky repressed urges like in Freud's and Jung's day. However, I wouldn't completely neglect the dark corners of our psyche we find less than acceptable (or, god forbind, even uncool!) or which give us trouble when unacknowledged; you sometimes notice them whenever you respond to a certain situation or a person in a much too forceful and irrational manner without really knowing why, or when an apparently trivial thing (like a movie scene, for example) deeply affects you, to a degree you find inexplicably embarrassing. Shadow work will help you to become aware of these impulses and accept them without having to blindly act them out.
The secret hope regarding Shadow work many people have is that the Shadow somehow harbours some secret power that can be 'harnessed' or 'unlocked' or whatever shallow self-help books on this topic promise in this respect. These books, for example, often claim that once you uncover your unacknowledged aggressions, you can instantly use them to use as a source of inner strength. I don't think it's that easy, and the same goes for the old therapeutic narrative that harmful aspects of the Shadow are instantly healed once they are brought to light. Those things just don't disappear by themselves; if they were, issues like addictions could be cured in a heartbeat.
As for methods, I wouldn't count on meditation at all. I'm a pretty hardcore empty-mind meditator, and anything that crops up while I'm trying (by not-trying, or some Zen paradox or other) to still the mind, be it repressed memories, angelic choirs, God, my Mum, the Buddha, the annyoing phone ringtone of a friend, Ascended Masters, etc. has no place whenever I'm sitting there quietly on my hard chair and my meditation cushion. What helped me personally though at the beginning of my journey was Family Constellation Therapy (despite all the - justified - criticism levelled at it) because I routinely refused to admit that I was a product of my upbringing (despite the fact that I had a happy and trauma-free childhood), and many people of course just don't want to be or become like their mothers and fathers.
All in all, I'd say that Shadow work primarily means "Know thyself" and not so much "Change thyself". Changes may come as a result of knowing yourself but you can't force them, as however mechanistic those self-help books describe Shadow work. It's also not about becoming more virtuous but about becoming more authentically YOU, warts and all, and counting and thoroughly examining those warts will go a long way.
