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I was recently talking with a colleague about mindfulness. My colleague works for an agency that specialises in delivering a service for those folks who have learning difficulties-sometimes this is known as intellectual or cognitive disability. The agency had just finished delivering an 8-week mindfulness course and the results were very pleasing; a significant amount of the participants reported feeling calmer and more self-compassionate, more grounded than they ever have been before. The participant’s size was quite small, so we might be better to consider any thinking around this to be tentative at best, yet it might allow us to consider why mindfulness works, even when-as a participant-you don’t know why it might work, since this was the feedback given in a number of cases.

It might be useful to begin by reflecting on why psychological or talk therapy works. The classic (but not the only) model is the client/therapist model that’s been around for over a hundred years: the client talks to the therapist and the therapist listens, and (depending on their approach) might offer reflective feedback with empathy that allows the client to process at depth what they are thinking about. But what happens when the client is not “psychologically minded” as this was called in an agency where I worked? Usually they are referred onto another service, and there is a covert sense that not to be psychologically minded, or in some way cognitively impaired, lessens the chance for healing.

Yet, in mindfulness there might be something else happening.

What we know in mindfulness is that there are three stages:

1. Recognising and settling unsettled mind
2. Self-acceptance and self-compassion
3. Embodiment

What we begin to realise after (sometimes after prolonged practice) is that our thinking mind with all of its categorising and analysis often gets in the way: we are so busy thinking, thinking, thinking that effectively we can’t see the wood for the trees. So, it is crucial in our practice to let the thinking mind settle (sort of, go off duty) and reach past it.

One the best supports for this is the breath and the body: simple breathing; say allowing the breath to breathe in to the count of 4 and then out again creates a small miracle, where we activate (without sometimes knowing it) our parasympathetic nervous system and relax, the relaxation allows us to both meet our experience in a calmer and kinder manner (self-compassion) which in turn promotes greater openness and allows us to drop down into our bodies, getting a felt sense of our experiencing, reaching the “true you” that is a living, breathing, embodied self.

Probably one the most extensive writings on just this can be found in Reginald Ray’s book “Touching Enlightenment”.

This might explain why mindfulness works, even when you don’t know why it works: it’s actually not about “knowing why” it is, in truth a kind of limbic resonance which at best cuts through the thinking and gets straight to the core of luminous selfhood: our embodiment.

What do you think?

What do you feel?

What do you sense?

Stacey

Stacey sat in my consulting room. She looked worn out. “I was standing in line, waiting at the self-service check out and this old woman cuts me off with a trolley load of goods, I mean, that’s not what the self service is for, I’m waiting waiting and I can feel the stress and the anger, it’s happening more and more-it’s as if I’m not getting angry I’m becoming angry! Help!”

I don’t think Stacey is alone in this experience, not only do we all get quite reactive (and lose it) at times but the more we lose it, well, the more we lose it.

Getting hijacked

Daniel Goleman, author of Emotional Intelligence uses the term “amygdala hijack” to refer to an immediate and overwhelming emotional reaction or state of reactivity which at times is expressed in a way that seems inconsistent to the stimulus; we’re easily triggered and lost in a catastrophic set of emotions.

What’s happening here?

Under normal circumstances, we process information through our neocortex or “thinking brain” where all our so called higher functioning – logic, problem solving, prioritising and reflection occurs.

When we are triggered or under severe pressure, our fight or flight system comes online almost immediately, our brain can panic and activate our “fire alarm system” which hijacks some of our higher functions and puts us in a reactive mode. Processing and reflection goes off line, as does soothing and we find it hard to think clearly-signals are sent straight to our amygdala, into the “emotional brain.”

Our million-year history

There are millions of years’ worth of evolution at work here; our fight or flight system was responsible for our survival when we stood at the door of our caves and fought lions and tigers many millennia ago; yet we find it still present at supermarket checkouts!

This threat related system also comes online at work or with our kids, from emails or letters-we’re now besieged by the paper tigers that are a low-level threat but chronic in nature. We’re living more and more in a perpetual state of fight or flight or chronic reactivity. The more we experience this and don’t deal with it, the more we overlay new neuropathways that start as rickety little roads then become habituated into tarmacked neurohighways; the road to reactivity becomes well-trod.

The second arrow

There is another way of looking at this.

Two and a half thousand years ago, the Buddha gave the Sutra of the Second Arrow, where he suggested that whereas pain (the first arrow) is inevitable, suffering (the second arrow) is optional; the problem is that during our amygdala hijack we don’t see this, we get caught up in this story of suffering and we’re lost in reactivity.

But it doesn’t have to be this way.

Another ARO

I’ve developed a very easy method of approaching this, called The ARO method ©™

Here’s how it works

The outcome in red is caught up in the “red reactivity” we’re essentially hijacked into flight and fight and we’re literally seeing red. It happens before we know it happens.

The good news is that study and research in mindfulness shows that we can learn practical skills that change the way our brain reacts to all kinds of emotional triggers and actually create new neural pathways. When we practice simple Mindfulness techniques, we can down-regulate our amygdala and change our reaction to response.

Here the action is the same, yet a green response has led to a green outcome. So, it’s learning to move from reactivity to response, which is a central technique of mindfulness.

But how?

We need to notice when we get triggered.

Can we?

The body is our friend

We need to practice this, since by default it feels as if we’re lost at the point of being triggered to react; at first, we may only be able to notice what’s happening after the event; no matter-we have to start where we are.

We need to activate our soothing system, which is best activated by deliberately bringing it online via a mindfulness of breath and body practice; we breathe out, deliberately relaxing into the situation, turning towards the trigger with a calm sense of presence, welcoming it home, so to speak.

The breath itself is calming and will almost immediately reverse the hijacking stress reaction; the heart rate slows, blood pressure drops, we have an awareness of our body and muscle tension. Then the mind settles and we are in a more responsive state of being.

And, for Stacey?

For Stacey (above) this worked by beginning to listen more closely to her body. She took pauses at work, even just for 3 minutes in her day to breathe and be, she enrolled in a once a week yoga class and sat for 10 minutes every other day in silence, allowing her thoughts to settle and calm, grounding into her body.

As Stacey listened more closely to her body and focussed on its sensations, as she met her body with more acceptance, she began to see how her own felt sense or embodiment could be a kind of barometer for wellbeing, she could ease into her own embodiment and follow the patterns of stress that less and less stuck and grew, but were impermanent, and she learnt to let go at a somatic depth; her resilience increased, as did her wellbeing.

“relationship itself gives meaning to life” -Jon Kabat-Zinn

life is difficult; it’s fast-paced and driven, full of family, relationship and work stressors. This living, along with the ever-increasing pressures of keeping up with evolving digital technology and society, can really take a powerful toll on your couple relationship.

Mindfulness can help!

You don’t have to be a Buddhist to benefit from practicing mindfulness in your couple relationship. Mindfulness allows you to become more present to everything in your life, and this can include your partner’s life, too.

Jon Kabat-Zinn wrote about mindfulness in his book Full Catastrophe Living and he created what are now known as The 7 Pillars of Mindfulness. They are

1. Non-judging
2. Patience
3. Beginner’s mind
4. Trust
5. Non-striving
6. Acceptance
7. Letting go

How might these apply to our couple relationships?

1. Non-judging. The traffic in our minds that we get caught up in is largely characterised by degrees of categorising, evaluating, scoring and comparing. We often believe that we have an objective hold on what’s happening, yet most of our judging is deeply subjective. This projects out into our relationship: we judge our partners, ironically often silently measuring them against our own self-criticism. We do this in our relationship by reacting when our partners don’t make us feel good (as if that was their job!) and hence make us feel bad. Yet often in couple relationships if we stand back and begin to watch our mind with a degree of impartiality, we step out of automatic pilot, our judgments fade and we make closer couple connections.
2. We’re running all the time, from one email, one task, one job to another; we often skim like a stone through life, desperate to get the next big thing done until we collapse in fatigue. The stress that this visits upon us can be expressed in an angry, intolerant, impatient tone. Who receives this most? Our partners. How much better might it be to simply give our partners-and ourselves- space to breathe and be, allowing them to come to their own conclusions in their own time. This-essentially-compassionate gesture can infuse the couple relationship with calm.
3. Beginners mind. You have been in this couple relationship for 10, 20 years, you might think you know everything about your partner. Meet them again, as if for the first time. What is about them that you are curious about? Perhaps there is still so much to get to know about them (as there is with you). Cultivating a Beginners Mind approach encourages us to see and relate to our partners afresh, not with the screen of our relational history.
4. Cultivating a sense of trust in your own experiencing is a foundational part of mindfulness training. Trusting your partner is a product of relational mindfulness that allows you to see deeper into them, recognising and appreciating their inner goodness; but you can only do this if you are aligned to your own experiencing, that is you trust yourself first.
5. Non-striving. You have to put in the work to make the relationship work is a very basic truism, but at the same time we also need to let a relationship configure its own shape, almost as if the relationship itself were our teacher and guide, rather than two hard working egos who want to get their own way. Asking ourselves this basic question: what if we both took our feet off the pedals and let the relationship tell us which way to go? Or What does the relationship need right now? This deeply reframes the perspective in the relationship into kind of reciprocal mindfulness where the couple relationship unfolds and evolves without so much stress.
6. It’s difficult not to assume this is the same as non-judgment, and it certainly has some similarities. Yet we often get into a situation into our couple relationships where comparisons become quite invidious; why is my partner of 30 years not so slim anymore (or why am I not!) and become locked into a kind of denial off what is, distorting our very view of reality. Acceptance allows us to see more clearly what is, and frees us from experiencing our partner with a lens of criticism.
7. Letting go. It’s true that we get caught up in our thinking and our feeling, caught up in future anxiety and past resentments. Letting go allows a relationship to become less Velcro and more Teflon for past conflicts; in this relational mindfulness we then meet each other here and now, as we are, rather than getting snared up in our stories.

What is “my shadow?”

Our shadow is aspects of ourselves that we have found unacceptable or we cannot tolerate that we have, in turn, come to split off, reject, suppress, deny or have projected onto others (qv couple relationships). Shadow often expresses itself through legitimate or “illegitimate” complexes or neuroses, likes, dislikes and common prejudices.

We will, at times, have found very elaborate reasons to justify what will have become our preferences, beliefs and way of conceptually holding the world and keeping those things we fear at bay.  This is ironic, for in actuality we are simply keeping ourselves-or the fullness of what we can become-at bay.

Living caught up in shadow is simply a Case of Mistaken Identity: this is not really who we are.

We are required to own our shadow or be owned by it.

Shadow work is the process we use to own and integrate the shadow into ourselves, in order to enhance our emotional, cognitive, psychological and spiritual wellbeing; a wellbeing that otherwise would have been spent in shadowboxing ourselves and hence others. It is a kind of cleaning out the basement or swamplands; Jon Kabat-Zinn in his book Wherever You Go, There You Are describes it as “bucketing out the pond”-or, to use another metaphor, it’s like reverse engineering the situation.

In Jungian psychology our shadow is often found in myth and in legends, often in fairy tales; one the most potent symbols of the shadow is The Trickster, often personified as a Dionysian or a figure of harlequinade, an opposite (for example in fiction The Joker is The Batman’s shadow, and a Trickster). Yet this figure is in reality our inner Trickster, who fools us into maintaining our mask towards the world, our fragile ego; the figure of the inner Trickster illustrates the slippery nature of the shadow.

Our shadow is always present, yet hidden.

Hidden where, though? Where do we find the shadow?

Possibly one the simplest yet more effective ways of remembering the way shadow works is to recall the old “psychodynamic rhyme”

“I looked and looked

and when I looked

this I came to see

what I thought was you-and you-and you

was really me, and me”

Which perfectly captures the essence of projection and transference in the game of shadowboxing.

There are, though, 5 areas that we explore to bring our shadow into light:

1. Our family
2. Our persona
3. Our triggers and othering
4. Our couple relationships
5. Our body

1. I can find it in my family: family shadows

Draw your family tree, or better still draw out your genogram, linking your family tree to your partners and ex partners. In this elaborate and multiple family tree, look within in the branches and explore

-taboos and transgressions

-scapegoating

-rejections

-abandonments

-patterns that connect with each other, especially transgenerational patterns

-secrets and shame

-alliances

-issues around mental health

-mottos

Shadows lurk (The Trickster!) and play hoaxes on us in these branches, yet in these branches reside the way our families have worked to keep the shadows at bay, hiding in the “normal” and the “nuclear” family, smiling away fear, guilt and shame.

2. I can find it in myself: my persona is my shadow

Taking a long look at myself, often with the help of a skilled therapist, can be a profound stepping stone to integrating those parts of ourselves we have disowned. Here are a few ways to do this:

-what are my shoulds, oughts and musts, what do I feel I have to do?

-where do I work? Why?

-which friendships groups/communities would I never belong to? Why?

-what choices have I made? Why?

-when have I self-sabotaged?

-what thoughts and feelings am I ashamed of?

-what are secret desires?

-what happened to me?

-what is my attitude to sex, money, politics?

3. I can find it in my likes and dislikes: projection and transference

-when I dislike [    ] who do this person remind me of?

-when I blame or start to hate the other person, projecting myself in turn as “good” and allowing the other to be bad: that’s my bad stuff I’m projecting out

-what makes me angry? -take it back into yourself, as the Buddhist Lojong slogan says, “drive all blames into one”

-which groups do I demonise?

-what kind of folk do I keep close to me?

-what, in my life is in, what is out?

4. I can find it in my lover: couple relationships, or me and my shadow

Couple relationships are probably the fast track into discovering our shadow, since the material we long ago rejected we find in our lover (see Henry Dicks Marital Tensions) and then often end up disliking; both times we fall in love with ourselves (our unmet needs) and end up falling out of love with ourselves-that which brings us together, tears us apart-keeping the darkness at bay. We could ask ourselves

-who is The One?

-what is my couple fit? What am I finding in my lover that I have rejected in myself?

-what needs get met here?

-what am I getting from my partner that I don’t get anywhere else?

-what are my secret sexual fantasies?

-where does power lie in my relationship?

-where does drama appear in my relationship? What are the triggers? Why am I so invested in not ending the drama, the conflict?

5. I can find it in my body

Shadow hides deep down in the body; in fact, writers such as Reginald Ray strongly suggest (See his book Touching Enlightenment) that the body, its deep forest of feelings and sensations, its trapped and often frozen psychic energy is the unconscious, the place where shadow resides; or as Mariana Kaplan says in Eyes Wide Open: “the issue is in the tissue”

What can we do physically to open up to the shadow?

-yoga, is most powerful in releasing egoic tension and freeing shadow

-mindful inquiry, linking thoughts, emotions and bodily sensations helps to integrate these three aspects of ourselves and create in us a more embodied living, free of the weight and tricks of the shadow

-somatic inquiry, where we track and trace what the soma offers us, in the way it offers this material to us, often in felt sensation, image, memory or association, often fleetingly

-creativity, using pen and paper, drawing, locating the creativity of the right brain

-walking in nature; nature is our Great Soma, our shadow awake and realised. See Awake in The Wild by Mark Coleman.

I’ve found my shadow. What do I do next?

Recognising where our shadow(s) expresses itself can create a huge shift in our thinking and our ways of relating to ourselves, and of course the world. Yet still this might only be experienced as data, information we now have on ourselves and sit as such in our left brained inner world. To make a real change we are required to experience a kind of “installation” (In the words of neuropsychologist Rick Hanson) that shifts the “data” into the spaciousness and embodied sense of the right brain, the true master to the emissary of the left brain, to acknowledge Iain McGilchrist’s work (see his book The Master and The Emissary).

Perhaps the most succinct process we might use to do this is the one developed by Ken Wilber. Wilber is not so well known in the U.K. as in America, where he is affectionally hyped up as the “Einstein of consciousness”. Wilber has published over 27 books detailing maps of human consciousness and psychospiritual development.

He has also developed his own model of shadow work. I have adapted it slightly for this article, but in essence it’s all Wilber.

Wilber’s 321 shadow process

Face it, talk to it, be it

Begin with a difficult person; a person who triggers you in some way.

3. face it: with a journal or a chair visualise the person, let the image grow in detail and see if you can get a felt, embodied sensation of the fullness of the person. Allow this to happen.

2. dialogue with this person. Enter into a relationship with what is disturbing you. Ask questions such as

• What do you want from me?
• What is the felt sense of you?
• What are you telling me?
• What’s driving you?
• What are you bringing to me
• How will I know when you are through?

1. See the world through the other’s eyes and make a statement of identification (this can be hard, after all it’s what your psyche has been denying for so long). Feel yourself as the difficulty: hug the shadow. Accept and allow it to be

Conclusion

We are a case of mistaken identity; we have fallen in need with our persona, yet shadow work is connecting with something vaster that is already us, already here, and waits for us to reach out to it: we’re trying for something that’s already found us.

What is shadow?

Our shadow is aspects of ourselves that are unacceptable or we cannot tolerate and we have come to split off, reject, suppress, deny or have projected onto others (qv couple relationships) which then often express themselves through legitimate or “illegitimate” complexes or neuroses, likes, dislikes and common prejudices. We will often have found very elaborate reasons to justify what will have become our preferences, beliefs and way of conceptually holding the world and keeping those things we fear at bay.  This is ironic, for in actuality we are simply keeping ourselves-or the fullness of what we can become-at bay.

Living caught up in shadow is simply a Case of Mistaken Identity: this is not really who we are.

We are required to own our shadow or be owned by it.

What is shadow work?

Shadow work is the process we use to reintegrate the shadow in order to improve our emotional, cognitive, psychological and spiritual welling that otherwise would have been spent in shadowboxing ourselves and hence others. It is a kind of cleaning out the basement or swamplands; Kabat-Zinn describes it as “bucketing out the pond”-or, to use another metaphor it’s like reverse engineering the situation.

Turning inwards with a certain attitude

There are three very basic and very different attitudes we can take when we meet shadow or difficult, triggering thoughts or feelings. We can

• Turn away from them
• Turn against them
• Turn towards them

Of them all, the most challenging yet most responsive is to turn towards the issues that we find intolerable; it’s a huge call, because, well why would you want to? Simply because by doing so you integrate more of “you” into the overall fullness of your being and live a fuller, more conscious life freer from external constraints; you are more alive and spacious in the way you relate to the world.

But there is a problem.

Who’s afraid of Virginia Wolfe?

Over decades of turning away or turning against ourselves this has left us with an inner critic, a Big Bad Wolf inside that, whilst originally there to protect us, now is freighted with self-doubt, shame, a profound sense of unworthiness and in the extreme, self-loathing. Steve Chapman gives an excellent TED talk about this here http://bit.ly/2hjlw4T

The inner critic keeps us frozen in time, locked into past stories of distress and trauma, often caught up in an advanced and subtle fight or flight, persistently self-attacking, in short believing that there is something wrong with us.

This might then express itself in depression, anxiety, social phobia, addictions or compulsions. Yet our mask, our persona often still smiles away as we prop selves up with medication or distraction. The inner critic becomes over time a kind of inner “Panopticon”-the device popularised by Jeremy Bentham as a way to keep the minimum amount of goalers involved in surveillance towards the maximum number of prisoners; the inner critic keeps us a bitter yet ironic prisoner of our own making; we are involved in a self-surveillance to the extreme.

So, there we are, frozen in time.

Self-compassion: the mighty thaw

If we’re going to meet-turn towards- the parts of ourselves that we’ve disowned we need to do in with self-acceptance, we ned to engage with these parts with kindness and self-compassion.

Accepting ourselves, warts and all, is the task and the work we’ve never been taught (the most important life skills we need are not part of any educational curriculum) yet without self-acceptance and self-compassion our persona, our mask, remains glued tight and our shadow remains in darkness.

But how to meet?

Self-compassion has had, over the years, a difficult press, allied as if can be with flaky self-love, pity, mere sympathy and it appears soft in the face of todays get-on-with-it and get-digital culture. Probably one the clearest descriptions (not verbatim) of compassion is from the Dalai Lama, who said “compassion is recognising the suffering of self and others and having a deep wish to alleviate the same”.

So, there are two aspects to this,

• Recognising suffering
• Wishing to alleviate the same

In their book “Mindful Compassion” Gilbert and Choden call this the two psychologies of compassion, and it is clear that in order to be more compassionate to ourselves we probably have to build up our inner resources, the muscle of compassion.

Compassion flowing in, letting compassionate moments enter your life, reaching out and letting yourself be more compassionate to others, this opens a swinging gate that brings more and more compassion into your life and living.

Loving the alien

The method of meeting of meeting the inner critic is to let it build up in your imagination and meet it with the compassionate part of you, asking it what it needs, befriending it with acceptance and tenderness.

It will return, but after practicing this, it will return with mush less sting; this is seeing through the inner critic, or as the Buddha said “I see you Mara” -speaking of his own shadow.

What was once frozen, slowly is no more; we preparing to meet the shadow.

A few nights ago, I was flicking restlessly through the Freeview channels on my TV when I came cross the original series of Star Trek. I guess most of us over a certain age might have fond memories of this series; how Jim Kirk got to kiss beautiful women from alien civilisations every episode, how many times Spock said “illogical” or Bones implored “I’m only a doctor” and Scottie cried out “I canna hold it captain!” ahhhh, time……

I chanced upon an episode that I had all but forgotten about called “The Trouble with Tribbles”. To cut a, well, shortish episode shorter, a single cuddly create known as a tribble is beamed onto The Enterprise. Before very long there are thousands of tribbles in the ship, threatening to take over, thus heralding a catastrophe for our star spanning vessel. This is a puzzle: where, so soon, did all the other tribbles come from? Finally, we find out: tribbles are born pregnant.

Now, I reckon this is pretty much like my thoughts; no sooner do I seem to have a thought then another is born from that thought, and so on adinfinitum. They just won’t stop, clogging up my mind, effecting my emotions and changing my bodily sensations, a real bridge to engine room problem if ever there was one! It can feel overwhelming….

Ahh, I canna hold it captain!

How does my mindfulness practice help with this problem? (Geekfact: the original title for the episode was “You think you’ve got tribbles?”). It turns out that my thoughts do appear to beget more thoughts and this creates a kind of conveyer belt of endless thinking, a thought stream if you like, or a growing band of tribbles, to mix metaphors.

Yet I also notice something else, just like the born-pregnant tribbles, my thoughts, and indeed my emotions and bodily sensations, just appear this way, make a bit of show of themselves, get a bit of attention then go. Tribbles do this.

So how do I stop this from occurring?

I can’t. It’s in the nature of tribbles to be born pregnant, just as it’s in the nature of my thoughts to-the more mindful term is- to self-arise, self-display and self-liberate, and yet when my take my attention from this unceasing activity and ground into my body, then open up in a very curious and welcoming way, allowing my experience to be just as it is, the tribble “problem” is a problem no more, it just is what it is, and I appear to rest in an observer self that witnesses but does get so involved in the endless proliferation of thought-tribbles.

And then it feels as if I’m boldly going where…. but you get the picture……live long and prosper.

The shadow side of us is the repressed and bundled aspects of ourselves that long ago we found too intolerant to process[1]. This material is not “gone for good” but lives in the unconscious as disowned psychic energy. If we are going to engage meaningfully with the shadow (and if we don’t, we live half-lives, caught up in its grip: my teacher Rob Nairn says we either become aware of the shadow or “it’s got you by the throat”) then we need to start off in a skilful way.

There’s a reason why this part of our psyche has been disowned: its full of scary stuff (not chock-a-block full, there is some non-scary stuff there too, we put positive things that we cannot tolerate in our shadow, too). Or at least, at some point in our lives it was scary, so we snuck it away, way away.  Often, we use metaphors such as dragons and demons to describe shadow content[2], since that pretty much sums up what the content was like when we first encountered it, fairly intolerable and unmanageable to our often-infantile selves, the stuff of (Grimm’s) fairy tales.

So, what breathes in the dark has become demonised. So, to approach it in a hostile, controlling fashion is both to replicate the original experience and probably reinforces the very neuropathways that led to the shadowing[3]. We are required to tread carefully. This is a child in pain.

Approaching this demonised child with harsh words or control freakery will not work; the child will withdraw further. We need to whisper our words with compassion and love, to calm and sooth this tender child, we ned to whisper sweet nothings into its heart.

Perhaps Rilke said it best[4]:

We have no reason to harbour any mistrust against our world,

for it is not against us.

If it has terrors, they are our terrors.

If it has abysses, these abysses belong to us.

If there are dangers, we must try to love them,

and only if we could arrange our lives,

in accordance with the principle that tells us

that we must always trust in the difficult,

then what now appears to us to be alien

will become our most intimate and trusted experience.

How could we forget those ancient myths

that stand at the beginning of all races –

the myths of dragons that at the last moment are transformed

into princesses?

Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are only princesses

waiting for us to act, just once,

with beauty and courage.

Perhaps everything that frightens us is,

in its deepest essence,

something helpless that wants our love.

So you must not be frightened if a sadness rises before you

larger than any you’ve ever seen,

if an anxiety like light and cloud shadows

moves over your hands and everything that you do.

Life has not forgotten you.

It holds you in its hands and will not yet you fall.

Why do you want to shut out of your life

any uneasiness, any miseries, or any depressions?

For after all, you do not know what work these conditions are

doing inside you.

Let us practice our whispering and listen within.

[1] See The Religion of Tomorrow by Ken Wilber

[2] See Feeding Your Demons by Tsultrim Allione

[3] See Buddha’s Brain by Rick Hanson

[4] From Letters to a Young Poet

Western culture is increasingly becoming mediated not by depth or span but by speed and data[1], information gathered that is then considered to represent and shape us, yet this information may only gather one side of us, the mask or persona that promotes a veneer caught up in societal preferences and vapid extroversion. But behind the mask is our shadow, alive with all of our unprocessed urges and needs.

This is how smart the shadow is: it does not belong to the world of work and productivity, to the domain of the glamorous extrovert or the merely seen, it is behind the lot, the freak behind the control freak we have become, the other side of our coin and the reality behind our simple desires and endless wants; it speaks in half seen images, metaphor, dream worlds, Freudian slips and inexplicable and contradictory, often paradoxical thoughts and feelings. It has no productive or economic value and it sets itself at odds with all we hold dear and yet this dragon side of us, this demonised aspect is where we truly meet ourselves in taboo, transgression and finally transcendence.

Unlike other forms of “work” this is not a “job that gets done” Shadow work is process without end, for it is in our very nature to create more shadow as we age and grow. Repudiation is a dynamic part of our psychological and spiritual framework; learning to more clearly differentiate and integrate these aspects of ourselves that we have disowned and have reduced us and often compelled us to self-sabotage is our real work, our life’s vocation.

How to make a start?

We cannot start by denying the shadow, we must be open, and accept and acknowledge that there is a significant part or aspect to us, an unknown depth to us that we have barely explored. This shadow stands at odds to our preferred social image or mask. This work, then, is a wholing a seeking to integrate the split off parts of us, it is human becoming-it is no coincidence that the word “whole” has a similar etymological origin to “holy” or healing, finding within ourselves that which is most precious or scared.

This a descent into mystery and wild nature.

This healing is not a linear activity, not an endeavour that will yield predictable results. Jon Kabat-Zinn[2] talks of this using the metaphor of “bucketing out the pond” -it is physical or somatic work and quite wearing. It is also about using our discriminating awareness and making clearer distinctions. The founders and pioneers of shadow work-Freud and Jung- illustrate some of the potentials inherent in shadow work. Freud viewed the shadow as cauldron of destruction impulses, Jung saw it as a holy and creative force. But the truth is that shadow work produces both; Ken Wilber[3] writes about the “pre/trans fallacy” where Freud reduces all the prepersonal and limbic drives and Jung elevates all activity here to transcendence. It is clear that twinkling in the coals seams there are diamonds, but also much sooty carbon.

Bucketing out the pond. There’s a kind of trial and error here, where we must be prepared to commit and keep going even when it appears that nothing is happening (in this case, when nothing is happening there’s probably quite a lot occurring in the dark).

Traditional approaches to shadow work involve degrees of restorying, finding a new narrative or myth within which to flourish. There is much that can be met or discovered, much glitter is this mine, yet this approach can become a mere recycling of story after story, contributing to a disabling rather that an enabling change. To swap a narrative for a narrative is just that, it is still, perhaps, to be lost in a story.

There is another way in.

Mindful shadow work encourages us to engage with our mindfulness practice to walk openly and compassionately into the depths of ourselves and meet the stranger behind the mask without a story.

[1] See Distracted by Maggie Jackson and The Shallows by Nicholas Carr

[2] Jon Kabat-Zinn Wherever You go, There You are

[3] Ken Wilber Sex, Ecology, Spirituality

“like a priest with a pornographic watch/looking and longing on the sly/sure it’s stricken from your uniform/but you can’t get it out of your eye”

-Joni Mitchell The Boho Dance

“strange days have found us/strange days have tracked us down”

-The Doors Strange Days

Every one of us wears some kind of a mask, a persona[1] to help us manage social situations, family tensions, political and economic stressors, religious thoughts and aspirations, a personality to meet the day and face the world, we all “prepare a face to meet the faces that [we] meet” in T.S. Eliot’s words[2].

Long ago we learnt to wear this mask, tie it on tight and disown those parts of us that do not fit the persona of the mask-disowning the imago, as it is often known[3]. Thus, we identify and further cram our future identifications into a reduced part of us in order to get by. Our life may become a tense collusion with what is essentially an inauthentic life. This cascades into our whole being in an effort to fit in with this conditioned and self-conditioned identity. We become-in the words of the French philosopher Foucault[4]– docile bodies, ripe for relational, religious, economic, political and social control.

We live split off from our shadow, that part of us we have shoved into the dark cave of our unconscious, where is still lives as suppressed or repressed, barely processed psychic energy that occasionally erupts in a flame of anger, hate, greed, lust or shame, a litany of desires that do not fit the image we have assiduously created; the mask cracks and we appear as a stranger to the world and ourselves: the vegan chews on a bloody steak, the 17 year old varsity princess now wears ripped tights and black lipstick, hungering for a tattoo, the 45 year old faithful husband confesses to dozens of affairs. The levee breaks and the shadow shows its face.

Of course, this might not occur with such brutality. Our shadow side is very old and it’s learnt a trick or two. It’s learnt to express itself in ways that are socially acceptable (therefore it becomes stitched into our persona as a whole) so it might express itself as a kind of strangeness such as eccentricity or an addiction, depression, guilt, or a justified intolerance, especially of the political kind (if politics is The Grand Theatre of Shadow then online comments boards might constitute a kind of mass Off Broadway) and psychological projection, where the shadow side of us projects onto the other in othering and victimises (the poor, the mentally ill, single mothers, refugees). Our shadow might express itself by what is known as parapraxis, Freudian slips which express an unbidden truth papered over for years, such as a slew of racial slurs committed one tipsy night out, as if a sudden Dionysian truth breaks though our Apollonian control freak, our mask; we then seek to justify and reassert our image, deny it ever happened or it meant anything at all.

The nature of our shadow is that it needs to come out of hiding by any means at all, the nature of our mask is to stop this happening, for if the shadow erupts this constitutes slaughter-an ego death-for the mask.

Ever gone on holidays and tried to submerge that ball in the pool? You can, but it comes back up with some force. This is analogous to the sheer psychic force it takes to suppress and force into shadow the things we cannot tolerate.

So, we live in tension, between the need to bring our shadow out of hiding into a right brain spaciousness and the desire for our Control Freak or mask to stay in the data stream of our left brain.

We need to meet the shadow, our shadow, to encounter and engage with what we have disowned: we need to walk into our strange days.

[1] See http://journalpsyche.org/jungian-model-psyche/

[2] T.S Eliot The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

[3] Jung Psychology of the Unconscious and https://vimeo.com/95856382?outro=1

[4] Foucault Discipline and Punish

We often look to the similarities and differences between therapy and mindfulness. At times it can be puzzling, since it seems that the two are very similar; certainly, this claim that they are very much the same thing might come from highlighting approaches such as MBCT, mindfulness based cognitive therapy or CFT, Compassion Focussed Therapy. How is mindfulness any different from the hundreds of (very good) therapeutic approaches to wellbeing?

To illustrate the difference, we could look at a common therapeutic technique: reframing. Reframing is, to put it in a nutshell, where you take a difficult or negative experience, thought or belief and cast it into a more positive light; indeed, systemic therapists might use a similar technique of “positive connotation” whereby problematic issues are denoted in a more positive way.

An example might be:

Client: I get really angry at my brother who refuses to get a job

Therapist: wow, I can really hear the anger in your voice

Client: it’s strong, so strong

Therapist: you have said you are really close to your brother?

Client: yeah, which makes me feel bad about being angry

Therapist: you sound passionate

Client: passionate?

Therapist: well, your anger could be passion for his wellbeing

Client: oh, I hadn’t really thought of it that way. Passion. That makes a big difference. Yeah.

So “anger” has been reframed as “passion”-very useful. But wait: nothing much has really changed, or at least perhaps only this story of anger, this episode of anger, has altered. Every time the client experiences a story of anger he or she will have to take part in a cognitive reframing exercise in a bid to make what’s happening more positive. Episode after episode, story after story. Phew! That’s a lot of hard thinking going on!

Neurologically there is a problem, too, in that whatever the neural pathway we go down it becomes strengthened by precisely that activity: there is a short verse that sums this up:

Where attention goes

Energy flows

Something grows

As we bring attention to the negative thought (which we must do) we then turn away from it and construct new, positive thoughts. But in doing so we still feed the negativity by bringing the attention of turning away to it. Viola! It’s stronger: the brain is not really that bothered about negativity or positivity, it just wants attention, food and to stay alive; if this occurs negatively or positively it makes little difference.

Mindfulness offers us a different option: we can lean in to anger. If we develop the capacity to allow our minds to settle and accept what’s happening, while it’s happening, without judgment we can allow anger to be as it is…and it self-liberates, because left alone or met with somatic acceptance that’s what all our experiences do; they come, they make a show of themselves, then they go, it’s paying them attention and working to turn away or against them that causes more problems due to this repeated myelination that habituates neural pathways.

Note that this means that anger, not “anger at…” liberates; in mindfulness, we sit in acceptance and allow our experience to be as it is; there is the minimum of energy used to practice this letting go by training ourselves down to a somatic level to let the feelings of anger ripple through our physiology and leave, which is allowing the impermanence of the experience (in this case anger) to work its way through us, rather than attaching to a story of anger which in turn fuels the fire, so to speak.

A formula or structure for doing this might be an adaption of the RAIN practice popularised by Tara Brach and which is used to great effect in the Mindfulness Association’s training. In practice, we might

Recognise anger

Allow anger to be as it is

Investigate the felt experience of anger in all its varieties

Nonidentify with anger, let it liberate

The neuroanatomist Jill Bolte Taylor in her book: My Stroke of Insight suggests that anger as a felt experience lasts only 90 seconds: make those 90 seconds count, lean into anger and bring on the RAIN!