Light in the Shadows
Work to shed light on aspects of your mind that are hidden from you.
to strengthen our Personal Universe we must critically examine our knowledge and experience. This pattern recognizes that some of that knowledge and experience is more deeply buried and will need to be rediscovered.
We all have unconscious knowledge, meaning that we have knowledge we use everyday to make decisions that is hidden from us.
- Carl Jung called these hidden parts “shadows” but they are not “bad” parts of ourselves as the term shadows might suggest. He simply meant that they’re parts of ourselves that are hidden in the shadows.
“…as animals we stay alive only because our bodies are organized in life-maintaining biological systems. Any human animal is vastly elaborated by culture and individual learning, and with these elaborations, the body tends to remain organized. (If it didn’t, we would fall apart very soon.) Given our elaborate learning of what we can and cannot do, a situation can easily become an ‘impossible situation’ for us, one in which we can find no way of interpreting or acting that feels life-maintaining. But the impossibility of the problem itself is made up out of positive tendencies and positive life-maintaining avoidances.” (Eugene Gendlin, “The Experiential Response”)
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For me, this quote describes the situations in which parts of ourselves are hidden in the shadows, away from our consciousness. It is a natural process of our minds, used to protect us and keep us alive. The parts of ourselves that are in the shadow are still parts of us. They’re not some kind of enemy to be overcome. In many cases, they are much younger parts of ourselves that need to be healed.
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When a part of us is pushed to the shadow, it stops growing, so once you are able to shed light on it, it will need to be matured as well.
Therefore:
Work to shed light on aspects of your mind that are hidden from you.
There are a number of practices that can help uncover shadow, including Inquiry and focusing; you may find that working with a therapist or someone experienced in “shadow work” may be helpful