There is no enlightenment without shadow work. It is in fact the highest form of light work you can do. The happy go lucky movement of just positive affirmations doesn’t work if there is an unintegrated shadow lurking at us from the corner of our psyche. Affirmations might make us feel better for a while but the second the world quiets down, the damns we’ve built around what you don’t want to see, acknowledge or recognize within yourself break down and give in to the flood and we can’t explain why we do the things we do – after all we are a conscious being, a rational adult right? Partially right, but we need to start at the beginning, right at the first breath on this planet outside the protection of the womb.

We come here whole and integrated. We start belonging to a group the second we’re born and the socialization process begins. In this process (by no ill intention of others) we’ll sacrifice, deny and reject parts of ourselves we’ve been born with. We’ll push them so deep down into the shadow as we disassociate ourselves from that unacceptable to our immediate surroundings. As young children we start to understand that some aspects of our natural integrated personality will have to go and we start to burn them off in order to belong. Belonging is one of the deepest desires in the human heart. As a result of this process we split, we become fragmented and divide into the conscious self (where we build our persona – who we think we are and should be in order to be accepted and functional), and the subconscious (where we store all of the rejected, disowned and suppressed aspects of ourselves). The subconscious starts operating all on its own, like a ghost within a machine.

The positive things can end up deep down in the shadows just as easily as some more basic instincts such as violence, anger, blunt aggression. The process in itself is neutral. Splitting into a subconscious and conscious mind is unavoidable but the damage, trauma and harmful behaviors resulting from it are not. Freud and Jung recognized this and therefore allocated a lot of their professional life to understanding the process of making the unconscious conscious. You cannot see what is in the dark until a light shines on it and consciousness is light of understanding and clarity. Even the “bad” aspects of yourself that were pushed out of you through enculturation and socialization may be useful. They came in the package of original you for a reason, they serve a psychological purpose. Maybe you were born into a passive aggressive family and your natural primary trait of honesty and opens was punished out of existence by shaming or ignoring, you may have been born as a really confident and loud little girl and were convinced that girls should be seen not heard, maybe you were a naturally sensitive little boy who was told that boys don’t cry and that you should grow a pair… So you’ve rejected your true nature in order to be accepted. But it doesn’t go away, suppressed things have nowhere to go, they just fester in the darkness, mutate and degenerate.

Shadow work is the long process of making you whole again, of disarming the potentially dangerous things in the subconscious by dragging them into the light, working through the pain and loss of having had to renounce them into the first place and then reintroducing them in their useful forms into your conscious existence. There is no wholeness without the shadow. Standing only in the light makes you equally as blind as standing in complete darkness. You need contours, shades and contrast to see. Solve at coagula – if built incorrectly things need to dissolve and break apart to be built up again properly.