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

Many people fail to find their God-given living water because they are not prepared to search in unusual places. It is likely to turn up in Nazareth again—and be as ignored as before. One such unexpected source is our own shadow, that dumping ground for all those characteristics of our personality that we disown. As we will see later, these disowned parts are extremely valuable and cannot be disregarded. As promised of the living water, our shadow costs nothing and is immediately—and embarrassingly—ever present. To honor and accept one’s own shadow is a profound spiritual discipline. It is whole-making and thus holy and the most important experience of a lifetime.

The shadow is that which has not entered adequately into consciousness. It is the despised quarter of our being. It often has an energy potential nearly as great as that of our ego. If it accumulates more energy than our ego, it erupts as an overpowering rage or some indiscretion that slips past us; or we have a depression or an accident that seems to have its own purpose. The shadow gone autonomous is a terrible monster in our psychic house.

Some of the pure gold of our personality is relegated to the shadow because it can find no place in that great leveling process that is culture.

Generally, the first half of life is devoted to the cultural process—gaining one’s skills, raising a family, disciplining one’s self in a hundred different ways; the second half of life is devoted to restoring the wholeness (making holy) of life.

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.

The more refined our conscious personality, the more shadow we have built up on the other side.

Unless we do conscious work on it, the shadow is almost always projected; that is, it is neatly laid on someone or something else so we do not have to take responsibility for it.

We are left as less than whole personalities when we invest our own darkness into something outside ourselves. Projection is always easier than assimilation.

The evolution of consciousness requires us to integrate the shadow if we are to produce a New Age.

Probably the worst damage is done when parents lay their shadow on their children. This is so common that most people have to work very hard to throw off their parent’s shadow before they can begin their own adult lives. If a parent lays his shadow on a young child, that splits the personality of the child and sets the ego-shadow warfare into motion. When that child grows up, he will have a large shadow to cope with (more than just the cultural shadow that all of us carry), and he will also have a tendency to put that shadow upon his own children. The Bible tells us that “the sins of a man shall be visited unto the third and fourth generation.” If

It is very puzzling to examine our capacity for projecting our best qualities. It is as if we fear that heaven might come too soon! From the point of view of our ego, the appearance of a sublime trait might upset our whole personality structure.

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.

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.

Heaven and skid row are separated only by an act of consciousness.

In this ritual you must find one of the left-hand contents of your personality and give it expression in some way that satisfies it but does not do damage to anything in the right-hand personality. You can draw it, sculpt it, write a vivid story about it, dance it, burn something, or bury it—anything that gives expression to that material without doing damage.

Remember, a symbolic or ceremonial experience is real and affects one as much as an actual event.

To suffer one’s confusion is the first step in healing.* Then the pain of contradiction is transformed into the mystery of paradox.

A huge amount of energy is wasted by modern people in opposing their own situation. Opposition is something like a short circuit; it also drains our energy away like a hemorrhage.

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. This always yields a brittle and unrentable personality. This kind of righteousness depends on “being right.”

Take the roof off any human life and one will find the paradoxes that are the preparation for a religious life, a vision of that which is greater than the personal. Conflict to paradox to revelation; that is the divine progression.

When the unstoppable bullet hits the impenetrable wall, we find the religious experience. It is precisely here that one will grow. Jung once said, “Find out what a person fears most and that is where he will develop next.”

Dr. Marie-Louise von Franz puts it in her straightforward language: Jung has said that to be in a situation where there is no way out, or to be in a conflict where there is no solution, is the classical beginning of the process of individuation. It is meant to be a situation without solution: the unconscious wants the hopeless conflict in order to put ego-consciousness up against the wall, so that the man has to realize that whatever he does is wrong, whichever way he decides will be wrong. This is meant to knock out the superiority of the ego, which always acts from the illusion that it has the responsibility of decision. Naturally, if a man says, “Oh well, then I shall just let everything go and make no decision, but just protract and wriggle out of [it],” the whole thing is equally wrong, for then naturally nothing happens. But if he is ethical enough to suffer to the core of his personality, then generally…the Self manifests. In religious language you could say that the situation without issue is meant to force the man to rely on an act of God. In psychological language the situation without issue, which the anima arranges with great skill in a man’s life, is meant to drive him into a condition in which he is capable of experiencing the Self. When thinking of the anima as the soul guide, we are apt to think of Beatrice leading Dante up to Paradise, but we should not forget that he experienced that only after he had gone through Hell. Normally, the anima does not take a...

To consent to paradox is to consent to suffering that which is greater than the ego. The religious experience lies exactly at that point of insolubility where we feel we can proceed no further. This is an invitation to that which is greater than one’s self.

To make any well formed sentence is to make unity out of duality. This is immensely healing and restorative. We are all poets and healers when we use language correctly. One makes a mandorla every time one says something that is true.

You can give another person a precious gift if you will allow him to talk without contaminating his speech with your own material.

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.

our own healing proceeds from that overlap of what we call good and evil, light and dark. It is not that the light element alone does the healing; the place where light and dark begin to touch is where miracles arise. This middle place is a mandorla.*

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.

To balance out our cultural indoctrination, we need to do our shadow work on a daily basis. The first reward for this is that we diminish the shadow we impose on others. We contribute less to the general darkness of the world and do not add to the collective shadow that fuels war and strife. But the second result is that we prepare the way for the mandorla—that high vision of beauty and wholeness that is the great prize of human consciousness.

The ancient alchemists understood this process. In alchemy one goes through four stages of development: the nigredo, in which one experiences the darkness and depression of life; the albedo, in which one sees the brightness of things; the rubedo, where one discovers passion; and finally the citrino, where one appreciates the goldenness of life. After all this comes a full-color mandorla. This is the pavanis, the peacock’s tail that contains all the preceding hues. One cannot stop this process until one has brought it to the pavanis, that concert of colors that contains everything.