Placing My Shadow Materials on the Altar

What do darker aspects of myself have to teach?

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On Wednesday, I’ll be one of the facilitators at online sharing circles to raise for funds for Médecins Sans Frontières, at an event called Love and Grief in the Shadow of War, co-hosted by Acer Integration and the UK Psychedelic Society.

Speakers include Dr Gabor Maté, Sulaiman Khatib, Dr Rosalind Watts, Natalie Lyla Ginsberg, and Sima Basel. Please join us! (Resonant World#66).

To book a spot, click here.

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Resonant World now has almost 1,000 subscribers in countries from the United States and Australia, to the UK, South Africa and Colombia. Of these, 24 are paying supporters. This newsletter serves the global movement working to heal individual, inter-generational and collective trauma — and any support readers can provide, by sharing, commenting, or subscribing, helps reach more people. Thank you!

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And if you enjoy Resonant World, please check out my new, sister publication, Toxic Workplace Survival Guy:

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“The healthy ego is the hero that struggles successfully to be free from fears and attachments so that he or she can join the forces of the light,” — David Richo, in Shadow Dance: Liberating the Power and Creativity of Your Dark Side.

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Resonant World#67

This post has been bubbling up ever since New Year, when I was still in the throes of a mini-Dark Night of the Soul. Ostensibly triggered by covid, I now recognise the episode as part of a broader process of integrating the unconscious material shaken loose by two years of intensive work on my personal, inter-generational and collective trauma. (Resonant World#59).

I was confronted so starkly with my negative patterns of thought, and low moods, that something big, dark and old felt like it was ready to pop. I’m now grateful to be feeling much, much clearer. It feels time to honour the impulse that kept arising during those challenging weeks: Share Your Shadow Work.

Clearing the Fatbergs

Ever since I first heard the term “shadow work” years ago, the concept has held both a a dark allure — and a strong scent of danger.

It makes intuitive sense to me that if we’re going to grow, we need to face the parts of ourselves that we habitually repress into our unconscious — the anger, shame, envy, fear, greed, retaliatory urges and forbidden desires. I believe these exiled parts merge with everyone else’s repressed material to form the fatbergs clogging up our collective psyche, which have now reached such epic proportions that we’re in danger of destroying ourselves, and all complex life on our planet.

But shadow work takes courage.

These exiled parts were banished for a reason.

Other parts of me will do anything they can to avoid confronting the feelings they hold, or even letting other people know they exist — let alone invite them in for tea.

Power of Witnessing

Thankfully, I’ve learned something very precious about working with my shadows during the past two years of intensive immersion in healing principles via the Timeless Wisdom Training run by Thomas Hübl and his team. (Resonant World#10 ).

When I’ve felt safe enough to allow an exiled part into my awareness — while being held in compassionate witness by one, two or 200 people — something shifts.

When we approach this process with the integrity and presence it requires — both in terms of the depth of the witnessing, and the transparency of the sharing — we can alchemize shadow material that may have been frozen for decades, or generations.

In my own process, and in bearing witness in the processes of many others, I have experienced an almost tangible feeling of grace in action. It is as if the purity inherent in the act of witnessing — and being witnessed — opens a channel for Divine Intelligence to do its healing work.

I wrote a few weeks ago about what an authentic process of integrating our split-off shadow fragments feels like — the tears, the shifts in energy, the new realisations, the eros and the joy. (Resonant World#63).

So, in the spirit of my own continued process of shadow work, I propose to share some of the shadow material I’ve identified within myself of late — particularly during my mini-Dark Night. I offer this process in the hope my personal shadow signatures may serve others by helping to illuminate universal themes.

Washed Smooth

Shadow work can itself become shadowy — if we unconsciously approach it as an exercise in demonstrating how “special” or “evolved” we think we are.

As the meme somebody just sent me warns:

“Yes I finally killed my ego. Now I’m better than everyone else.”

That’s why this is the first edition of Resonant World I’m putting behind a paywall, for my 24 paying subscribers — to whom I’m profoundly grateful, and who I’m assuming will be willing to bear witness for me today.¹ (Knowing most of you personally as I do, I feel honored to be in the company of such a powerful, committed and loving group).

I imagine the 25 of us standing in a circle, on a sandy beach, flanked by the granite cliffs of a timeless Scandinavian coastline, at sunset.

In the centre, we’ve built a simple altar from pebbles polished by the waves. We’ve gathered fresh flowers, and placed a stone bowl of clear spring water on the cairn.

Next to the bowl: a wooden knife; and propped against a rock, a staff.

We created this altar to invite the Divine Intelligence that we’ve all felt at work one way or another in our lives to help transmute the shadow patterns we carry from our own unique blueprints — and the shadows we’ve inherited from our ancestors, and absorbed from the collective.

The sacred objects remind us that we can also access subtle competencies to expedite this demanding, and sometimes perilous, work.

Taking a moment to sense into the presence of my 24 witnesses, I step forward, and make my first offering.