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Video Description
There is a version of you that has been running things since before you could speak, and Carl Jung called it the shadow. This opening episode from the Conscious Radical channel begins the Shadow Series by clearing away what most pop psychology gets wrong about the term.
Most talk about shadow work captures only half of the idea. The video’s foundation is gentler and harder at once: the shadow is not just the bad parts, but every part that was pushed out of sight to keep the story of self intact. Meeting it again is less about fixing yourself and more about seeing what you have been carrying.
Full Video Transcript
Out of all the people you haven’t met yet there’s one who is so much a part of you but you just keep
missing or avoiding each other and i’m not talking about your soul mate although that could be a
really interesting way to think about this i’m talking about the version of you that shows up
when you take off your mask and you stop performing in the theater of this world it’s the
part of you that shows up in a nanosecond the moment you get cut up in traffic when your anger
takes over before you remember who you’re supposed to be. It’s the flicker of satisfaction
when someone you’ve had trouble with for years gets taken down a peg or two before the almost
as instant guilt arrives to cover it up, reminding you that that’s not the person you are or should
be. Most people have heard Carl Jung describe it as the shadow. But what is shadow? A shadow needs
two things to exist a light and something solid the light can’t fully pass through so consider
yourself as the solid thing and the people around you as the light picture the ones who raised you
as that sun they shine on the parts of you they approve of and those parts get to live in the
daylight but the parts they don’t approve of get left in the dark and I’m using approve very loosely
here and we’ll come back to why whatever the light turns away from falls into a shadow that stretches
out behind you where you can’t see it now you didn’t get to fully decide what could stay in
the light and what stayed in the shadow this is the first episode in the series we start small
and personal and we end on the scale of whole civilizations and by the time we get there you’ll
see polarization differently and you may see your own country differently too but it starts here
today with a bag now robert bligh was an american poet and gave us the image of the long invisible
bag that we dragged behind us from the moment you’re born you drag a bag behind you and before
you know it this bag gets filled by the others that are around you as they sort out the parts
of you that are welcome and the parts of you that aren’t be good settle down don’t be over sensitive
don’t show off don’t be angry don’t cry don’t want so much every one of those things goes in the bag
and by the time you’re fully grown you’ve got decades of disowned material back there and
you’re hauling it around every single day which as you can imagine if you don’t already know
can be quite tiring imagine performing on stage day in day out you’d get really good at it you’d
possibly mistake the character you’re playing as the real you and it almost becomes effortless
almost bly gave us the bag metaphor and jung gave us the clinical term along with a framework
except jung didn’t discover it out of nowhere he discovered it from his own experiences
his work with patients and through his comparative study of religion and mythology that there is a
universal archetype in the collective unconscious. He found language for
something we’d always known that followed a theme of monsters and
adversarial figures. But just as the body isn’t the full story of who you are
neither is the shadow. What makes it intriguing is that across time and
cultures among people who had no contact with each other there is a recurring
motive I came across the shadow self from two different angles my work with
people and culture and through my love of history and anything magical and
mythical so if we were to step inside the time machine and dial back 2,000
years before John we will land at the mystery schools of the ancient world
which were already teaching this in a lucis which is modern-day LF Cena just
outside athens there was a secret annual initiation ceremony dedicated to demeter and persephone it
was centered around the myth of persephone’s abduction to the underworld now the highly
secretive ritual promised initiates who were bound by an oath of silence a better fate in the
afterlife and although we’re not really clear on the ritual itself we know it was about a descent
into the dark underworld where the daylight couldn’t reach they experienced the descent
physically and believed you could not become fully human by only standing in the light now come
forward again pre-christian europe had its own version and it was predominantly led by women
the wise ones who understood the cycle of life and death who knew herbs interpreted dreams and
and walked through the various thresholds of light and dark.
When the church became organised,
these traditions were deemed heretical
and the work of the devil.
Centuries of knowledge and wisdom was lost
and many thousands were silenced or driven underground.
I think we all grew up with the knowledge
of the witch trials as they spread across Europe
and the Americas, but it’s so easy to feel far removed
from these stories and to become complacent
about the real terror that swept through those villages
with neighbours pointing at neighbours.
The term witch was used to silence people,
to steal land and make sure that everyone aligned themselves
with the powers that be, which at that time was the church.
But underneath this terror, knowledge was being destroyed.
The whole traditions of shadow went to ground.
Curated knowledge became centralised
alternative wisdom and knowledge was silenced 500 years on we have inherited that loss we’re
a civilization that has forgotten how to look inside the bag and i think that could be why
the parts of us are coming undone now you could tell me hang on we’ve been aware of the shadow
self for years now there’s nothing new to see here and you would be partly right you would have come
across it it’s also doing the rounds on wellness instagram right now but it does get one fairly big
thing wrong the popular version says your shadow is all the bad stuff the rage the jealousy the
cruelty the greed and you’re invited to go in to meet your monsters and learn to live with them
and that is about half true but going back to Bly’s bag it holds everything that got disowned
but the majority of that was never dark were you the child who felt everything so intensely
and were told you were oversensitive did it result in you trying to switch off your feelings
and emotions so as not to bother others and does that make for a healthy human maybe you were the
loud one who got shushed into quietness or the clever ambitious one who was picked on
or the working class person who was told there’s a ceiling and you’re never going to get past it
none of these things constitute darkness if anything they’re the aliveness that the room
you were in didn’t want or didn’t understand how to hold space for the original thinker and the
artist the dreamer and the deep feeler the ambitious and the loud all placed in the bag
tightly closed with no chance of daylight creeping in bly said that going back into the bag was like
reclaiming the gold and i want you to imagine how you sift for gold there may be a lot of dirt and
crud but within that there are the gold nuggets under the shame and the fear and
the old instructions sits the boldness the sensitivity the appetite the talents
the world competence you packed away in childhood because the people around you
couldn’t hold it and you’ve probably spent your whole life building a self
that the world would accept and you got really good at it but there’s a huge
chunk of you missing and it’s also where a huge amount of your actual life force is stored sitting
in the dark this entire time so the work is in part a recovery mission to uncover everything
you were before you learned what you were allowed to be so one more thing before we close what’s
true for you is true for a country refusing to look into the bag or looking under the ground to
see the foundations of how something was built will eventually surface whole nations carry a
shadow and when a nation refuses to look at its own it has to go somewhere and it’s usually aimed
at a group and before long becomes politics and we’re going to go into that in more detail in a
future episode but in the meantime just hold the idea that the shadow runs at every scale from the
individual to the family to the community the nation and civilization and when you do choose
to look through the bag consciously rather than something spilling out the energy that you’ve
spent on suppressing it can come back to you the hidden programming becomes something you can
access you can read you can understand you can catch your own patterns halfway through or early
enough to choose something else and you also become harder to manipulate because as long as
your shadow stays unexamined you will project it outwards usually onto a target that someone else
has chosen for you and once you start looking that projection loses its grip so that’s where
we begin and i’m not going to pretend that the bag ever fully empties what changes is that you
turn around and face the thing you’ve been dragging since before you could speak the mystery
schools faced it and the witches faced it and they were silenced for it young faced it and gave it a
name and the knowledge survives because people keep going back for it the next episode looks at
why we work so hard not to look at the shadow and the answer has more to do with politics than you
would like to believe if this resonated or if you have felt the weight of your own bag for a second
there let me know I’ll see you in the next one
Source: The Conscious Radical