Owning Your Own Shadow: A Jungian Approach to Transformative Self-Acceptance, Exploring the Unlit Part of the Ego and Finding Balance Through Spiritual Self-Discovery

by Robert A. Johnson

Whenever we pluck the fruit of creativity from the golden tree our other hand plucks the fruit of destruction. Our resistance to this insight is very high! We would love to have creativity without destruction, but that is not possible.

Example: If I do my shadow upkeep after having difficult guests, I will not land my shadow on some unsuspecting stranger. I have to honor my shadow, for it is an integral part of me; but I don’t have to push it onto someone else. A five-minute ceremony or acknowledgment of my shadow accumulation after my guests depart will have satisfied it and safeguarded my environment from darkness.

Apparently, the collective need for shadow expression supersedes the individual determination to contain the dark. And so it happens that an era of disciplined creativity is always followed by an astounding display of annihilation.

You can refuse a shadow projection and stop the endless cycle of revenge if you have your own shadow under conscious control. To be in the presence of another’s shadow and not reply is nothing short of genius. No one has the right to dump his shadow on you, and you have the right to self-protection.

William Blake spoke about the need to reconcile these two parts of the self. He said we should go to heaven for form and to hell for energy—and marry the two. When we can face our inner heaven and our inner hell, this is the highest form of creativity.

I have written of the shadow as the dark, unacceptable part of oneself. But I also have noted that it is possible to project from the shadow the very best of oneself onto another person or situation. Our hero-worshiping capacity is pure shadow; in this case our finest qualities are refused and laid on another. It is hard to understand, but we often refuse to bear our noble traits and instead find a shadow substitute for them. A fourteen-year-old boy hero-worships a sixteen year old and asks him to carry what the fourteen year old is not yet capable of doing; in a few months he has assimilated that capacity and is living what he relegated to shadow only shortly before. Probably an eighteen year old then is his hero that he soon catches up with. Development generally takes this means of introducing the next stage of its progress. Today’s hero is tomorrow’s character. Early in my analysis I had a startling dream in which I ate Albert Schweitzer, a hero of mine at the time. If one can reduce the exaggerated quality of the dream, it was saying that I must accept a Schweitzer-like quality of my own and stop projecting it onto an outer hero. Of course it is a matter of degree, but the dream was correct in saying that I had to become an Albert Schweitzer. All heroes need internalizing. Of course, the childish part of me resisted this development with all its power. At the time I wondered, “How is it possible to live out so many aspects of the human personality?” Schweitzer had doc...

The ego is…primarily engaged in its own defense and the furtherance of its own ambitions. Everything that interferes with it must be repressed. The [repressed] elements…become the shadow. Often these are basically positive qualities.

Jung warned us that it would not be too difficult to get the skeletons out of the closet from a patient in analysis but it would be exceedingly difficult to get the gold out of the shadow. People are as frightened of their capacity for nobility as of their darkest sides. If you find the gold in someone he will resist it to the last ounce of his strength. This is why we indulge in hero-worship so often. It is much easier to admire a Dr. Schweitzer from afar than to be my own (lesser) version of those qualities.

Two things go wrong if we project our shadow: First, we do damage to another by burdening him with our darkness—or light, for it is as heavy a burden to make someone play hero for us. Second, we sterilize ourselves by casting off our shadow. We then lose a chance to change and miss the fulcrum point, the ecstatic dimension of our own lives.

A wise woman once showed me how to get more energy when I complained that I was exhausted before lecturing. She instructed me to go to a private room just before the talk, take a towel, dampen it so it would be very heavy, then throw the towel, wrapped up into a ball, at the floor as hard as I could—and shout. I felt infinitely foolish doing this, for it is not my style. But when I walked out to the lecture platform after such an exercise there was fire in my eyes. I had energy and stamina and voice. I did a courteous, well-structured lecture. The shadow backed me but did not overwhelm me. If you can touch your shadow—within form—and do something out of your ordinary pattern, a great deal of energy will flow from it. There is a curious fact based on this dynamic. Parrots learn profanity more easily than common phrases since we utter our curses with so much vigor. The parrot doesn’t know the meaning of these words, but he hears the energy invested in them. Even animals can pick up on the power we have hidden in the shadow!

In Eastern Europe there is a system of teaching languages to adults that also taps this energy to good advantage and calls upon the unlived life. In this concentrated course of study, one chooses an identity completely opposite from one’s actual life. The college professor might present himself as a pirate, the conman as a priest. The most astonishing eruptions of energy occur in this way! That energy aids in the assimilation of a new language—a task that might be just another drudgery if done from one’s ordinary personality.

Who knows how many outwardly destructive things might be averted if we gave voice to the shadow in a ceremonial way?

While contradiction is static and unproductive, paradox makes room for grace and mystery.

Example: Every human experience can be expressed in terms of paradox. The electric plug in the wall has two prongs, access to a positive and negative electrical charge. From this opposition comes the usefulness of the electric current. Day is comprehensible only in contrast to night. Masculinity has relevance only in contrast to femininity. Activity has meaning only in relation to rest. Taste is a matter of contrasts. Up is only possible in the presence of down. What would north be without south? Where would I be without you? Where is joy not bounded by sobriety?

I am tempted to describe such a solution, but that would be misleading since every such solution has to grow from the unique situation that one faces. Formulas or devices are never enough at such a moment. The solution must rise from the dynamics of the opposing energies that are facing each other.

If we stay with the paradox we will find that single eye that is beyond a quarrel and a compromise. We will find instead a unified attitude that marshals all our energy to a fine focus. This is worthy of the term enlightenment.

Most of the recrimination between quarreling lovers or spouses involves the collision of power and love. To give each its due and endure the paradoxical tension is the noblest of all tasks. It is only too easy to embrace one at the expense of the other; but this precludes the synthesis that is the only real answer.

Fanaticism is always a sign that one has adopted one of a pair of opposites at the expense of the other. The high energy of fanaticism is a frantic effort to keep one half of the truth at bay while the other half takes control.

Ligare, the heart of the religious experience, is to bond, repair, draw together, to make whole, to find that which is anterior to the split condition. Our future lies in this religious vision.

there can be no paradox—that sublime place of reconciliation—until one has owned one’s own shadow and drawn it up to a place of dignity and worth.

It is a miracle to listen to someone (even oneself) say, “Perhaps this, perhaps that, maybe, it follows that, I wonder if”—all like a dog chasing its tail. But gradually, the two disparate circles begin to overlap and the mandorla grows. This is healing. This is ligature, the essence of religious experience. All good stories are mandorlas. They speak of this and that and gradually, through the miracle of story, demonstrate that the opposites overlap and are finally the same. We like to think that a story is based on the triumph of good over evil; but the deeper truth is that good and evil are superseded and the two become one. Since our capacity for synthesis is limited, many stories can only hint at this unity. But any unity, even a hint, is healing.

Whenever you have a clash of opposites in your being and neither will give way to the other (the bush will not be consumed and the fire will not stop), you can be certain that God is present. We dislike this experience intensely and avoid it at any cost; but if we can endure it, the conflict-without-resolution is a direct experience of God. A mandorla is a prototype of conflict resolution. It is the art of healing, if you will.

Here Shakespeare is reconciling heaven and earth and giving a place and a name to the human faculties that can cope with this wide vision. To reconcile so great a span as heaven and earth is beyond our ordinary way of seeing; generally, two irreconcilable opposites (guilt and need) make neurotic structures in us. It takes a poet—or the poet in us—to overlap such a pair and make a sublime whole of them. Who but Shakespeare could bring the airy nothing of heaven into consonance with the heavy reality of earth and give it a form that ordinary humans can understand? Who but the Shakespeare in yourself? Take this and take that—and make a mandorla of them. In your own poetic struggles you may make only the tiniest sliver of a mandorla that will vanish a few minutes later. Where is the inspiration of yesterday that was so thrilling? But if you repeat this often enough it will become the permanent base of your functioning. It can be hoped that by the end of your life the two circles will be entirely overlapped. When one is truly a citizen of both worlds, heaven and earth are no longer antagonistic to each other. Finally one sees that there was only one circle all the time. This is the true fulfillment of the Christian goal, the beatific vision so prized in medieval theology. The two circles were only the optical illusion of our capacity—and need—to see things double.

An artist makes a mandorla with form, color, visual tension.

If you find a person who is particularly peaceful or has a healing presence around her, it is probably because she has done her mandorla work. If you want to affect your environment, don’t get lost in your activism. Stop for a moment and make a mandorla. Don’t just do—be something.

I think the loveliest lines in our Scripture are, “If thy eye be single, thy whole body shall be filled with light” (Matt. 6:22). The right eye sees this, the left eye sees that; but if one comes to the third eye, the single eye, all will be filled with light. Indian people put a spot of rouge in the center of the forehead to indicate that they are enlightened (or on the way to enlightenment). In the system of chakras that is the highest point attainable by human consciousness. One more chakra, the seventh, exists, but that is beyond our ordinary ability to experience.

Encouraged by Christian practice, most Westerners invest the energy that might go into a mandorla in useless guilt. Guilt is a total waste of time and energy. I used to tease my Baptist grandmother, telling her guilt was a sin. She would get very angry since I was depriving her of her favorite pastime. She thought she was not doing her duty to Jesus if she were not wringing her hands in guilt at her (or my) sinful condition. Guilt creates nothing; conscious work constructs a mandorla and is healing. The mandorla has no place for remorse. It asks conscious work of us, not self-indulgence. Guilt is also a cheap substitute for paradox. The energy consumed by guilt would be far better invested in the courageous act of looking at two sets of truths that have collided in our personality. Guilt is also arrogant because it means we have taken sides in an issue and are sure that we are right. While this one-sidedness may be part of the cultural process, it is severely detrimental to the religious life. To lose the power of confrontation is to lose one’s chance at unity—and to miss the healing power of the mandorla.

It is good to remember that the old symbol for Christ—the two lines indicating a stylized fish—is a mandorla. By definition, Christ himself is the intersection of the divine and the human. He is the prototype for the reconciliation of opposites and our guide out of the realm of conflict and duality. Early Christians would make themselves known to one another in this way: upon meeting, one would scratch a small circle in the dust. The other would make a second circle that was slightly overlapping—thus completing a mandorla. This way of greeting—at a time when Christians were severely persecuted—was powerful and eloquent. It also has meaning for us today. If one ha...

One can view a human life as a mandorla and as the ground upon which the opposites find their reconciliation. In this way every human being is a redeemer, and Christ is the prototype for this human task. Every glance between a man and a woman is also a mandorla, a place where the great opposites of masculinity and femininity meet and honor one another. The mandorla is the divine container in which a new creation begins to form and germinate.

If we have a powerful mandorla experience (and what a joy it is!), we can be sure it will be brief. We must then return to the world of dualities, of time and space, to continue our ordinary life. The shadow is created all over again, and a new experience of transformation is required. The great individuals in history have only momentary glimpses of wholeness and they, too, return very quickly to the world of ego-shadow confrontation. There is a Hindu proverb: “Anyone who thinks he is enlightened certainly is not!”