A Little Book on the Human Shadow [Paperback]

It is a wonderful, digestible, brief introduction to psychological concepts that are new to me for understanding my motivations, anxieties and frustrations in such a way that I can begin to create positive, conscious change in my life.

His premise is that we are born with "360-degree radiance." Our spirits shine in all directions, good, bad, indifferent. Over the first 20 years or so of our lives we learn to stuff the "bad" parts into a bag so that we become well behaved, more polite, and able to manage our anger etc. We also stuff other things in there too, like our "feminine" or "masculine" sides and our "witch" or "giant" archetypes, among others. And to explain why these parts are missing, we learn to say things like "oh, I'm not really a creative-type person."

This process continues up to about age 35 wherein we begin to "rattle" a little, we begin to miss parts of ourselves. This often surfaces as resentment of others or depression. Basically, the masks we project onto ourselves and others don't seem to fit as well and this spooks us as the slipping masks reveal things that don't fit with our world view. We begin to lose tons of energy putting masks back on, dragging our shadow bags behind us and emotionally struggling to deal with the changes we feel. At this point we have a choice, we can either eat our shadows and reintegrate them with our personality/psyche or we can devote increasing amounts of energy to our rigidity, becoming more controlling toward and intolerant of others.

This is exactly the point I find myself at ... mid-thirties, misty-eyed at sappy commercials, tired of being grumpy, much too quick-tempered with annoying little situations, frustrated with my hesitations to apologize, confused by how hard it is to be more happy and spontaneous and generally struggling to understand myself with frameworks that simply don't work anymore. Now I must choose whether to open my bag of cast-aways and begin reacquainting myself with the rest of myself.

Eating a shadow is like eating your words ... it is hard work and not always appreciated by people who have come to recognize you as "not creative" or "not assertive" or "very polite" or "very strong." Moreover, these stuffed pieces of our personalities have become moldy and bent in the bag, so they often come out as ugly and angry. But it is wise work. Bly makes recommendations on the process for integrating our shadow selves. The result is that we become more balanced in our personalities, more tolerant of the struggles of others, more able to see both the half-full and half-empty glass at the same time. As we become more wise, more sage, more melancholy, we have more energy and more innate authority -- in short we stop giving our power away.

This is a path I can now choose to walk, that I now have the vocabulary to understand. I highly recommend this book for anyone else seeking to understand the shadow in themselves and hoping to dance with it.

Bly notes that "when one 'projects,' one is really giving away an energy or power that rightfully belongs to one's own treasury." From a young age, we learn to project outward, ridding ourselves of the inner tyrants, giants, and witches of the psyche. We may project onto individuals (parents as well as husbands and wives receive a lot of projections), onto any number of "them's" (the government is a favorite "them" in
America) or onto other cultures and races. While there is always an initial gain (by projecting the witch outward, we don't have to deal with her), unowned shadow material eventually comes back to haunt us. The more parts of the inner world we give away, the more diminished we become.

At a certain point in life, however, when we are no longer interested in blaming or projecting onto others, we begin the long, lone journey of searching for our shadow. Bly speaks of
"eating the shadow," retrieving its power from its projected place and reclaiming its energy. No small feat, but a damn worthy endeavor. By honoring the shadow, we honor ourselves.