Where does the term “Shadow” come from?       

Carl Jung
1958

“Beneath the social mask we wear every day, we have a hidden shadow side: an impulsive, wounded, sad, or isolated part that we generally try to ignore. The Shadow can be a source of emotional richness and vitality, and acknowledging it can be a pathway to healing and an authentic life. We meet our dark side, accept it for what it is, and we learn to use its powerful energies in productive ways. The Shadow knows why good people sometimes do “bad” things. Romancing the Shadow and learning to read the messages it encodes in daily life can deepen your consciousness, imagination, and soul.”

from “Romancing the Shadow,” by Connie Zwieg, PhD., and Steve Wolf, PhD.

Jung’s Theory of The Shadow

“The Shadow describes the part of the psyche that an individual would rather not acknowledge. It contains the denied parts of the self. Since the self contains these aspects, they surface in one way or another. Bringing Shadow material into consciousness drains its dark power, and can even recover valuable resources from it. The greatest power, however, comes from having accepted your shadow parts and integrated them as components of your Self.”

from John Elder

WHAT WE DO NOT DARE LOOK AT, WITHIN OURSELVES, WE TEND TO PROJECT OUT ONTO OTHERS………..

“Shadow wants to be heard, simply that.  But if it isn’t, it turns nasty.  It becomes a veritable demon, witch, or son-of-a-bitch, demanding its pound of flesh….in very painful real time, not dreamtime.  

Pay attention to your shadow.  If you keep distancing yourself, saying “Heavens, it’s not my fault!”—-then heaven help you. Hell won’t.”

Katya Walter

Jung continued:

Everyone carries a Shadow, and the less it is embodied in the individual’s conscious life, the blacker and denser it is. At all counts, it forms an unconscious snag, thwarting our most well-meant intentions.”

“One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious.”

Who has not at one time or another felt a sourness, wrath, selfishness, envy and pride, which he could not tell what to do with, or how to bear, rising up in him without his consent, casting a blackness over all his thoughts, and then as suddenly going off again, either by the cheerfulness of the sun or air, or some agreeable accident, and again at times as suddenly returning upon him?  Sufficient indications are these to every man that there is a dark guest within him, concealed under the cover of flesh and blood, often lulled asleep by worldly light and amusements, yet such as will, in spite of everything, show itself… It is exceeding good and beneficial to us to discover this dark, disordered fire of our soul; because when rightly known and rightly dealt with, it can as well be made the foundation of heaven as it is of hell.”- William Law, The Grounds and Reasons of Christian Regeneration (1739)

More Quoteables

The range of what we think and do
is limited by what we fail to notice.
And because we fail to notice
that we fail to notice
there is little we can do
to change
until we notice
how failing to notice
shapes our thoughts and deeds.
—R.D. Laing

” The shadow is both the awful thing that needs redemption,
and the suffering redeemer who can provide it”

—Liz Green