Shadow-work at Work: Searching for Soul on the Job

Posted on January 7, 2014 by Dr. Connie Zweig

A first job is a rite of passage that carries weighty meaning: a separation from the family, a step toward independence, a nascent hope for a creative, successful life. We carry our ideals, perhaps our naivete, into the workplace like a new suit of clothes. We imagine that our company will be like a family to us, our colleagues like friends, our boss like a benign parent, who holds our best interests at heart. We assume that our efforts will pay off; our loyalty will bring security; our ethics will be upheld; and our energies will be rewarded.

In effect, we long for meaningful work that is worthy of our efforts, that fills us with enthusiasm or enthousiasmos, which means in Greek to be inspired by the gods. Besides earning a living, many of us feel compelled by Ananke, goddess of necessity, to contribute to the lives of others and to create something larger than ourselves.

If we imagine our own creativity, we long for beauty, novelty, and originality. We dream of getting a day job that permits us enough leisure time to write or paint. Or we dream of leaving our day job to create an entrepreneurial venture that is wholly owned and operated by us, that will not require the compromises of working for others.

Unlike the tight fit of persona work, in which we identify with a one-dimensional role, soulful work feels spacious. Ideally, it permits us to express our authenticity, rather than bury our feelings in the shadow, so that we feel energized rather than depleted. Ideally, it connects us to bodily and environmental rhythms, deepening our internal harmony rather than mechanizing our lives. It allows us to make a unique contribution, which is needed and valued by others. And it connects us to something greater, a nobler purpose or participation in a larger community, which fuels our efforts.

A story about three masons illustrates how much this larger purpose affects the inner experience of  work: When a mason was asked what he was building, he answered gruffly, without raising his eyes from the work, “I’m laying bricks.” The second mason, when asked the question, replied dryly, “I’m putting up a wall.” But the third man, on hearing the question, stood up and said with pride, “I’m building a cathedral.”

In a soul-centered organization, employees can risk some authenticity without fear of losing their jobs. They also can experiment with their creativity to some degree because they feel safe to learn on the job, take risks, make mistakes, and move on. Sometimes called learning organizations, these kinds of companies make room for experimentation and the creative spirit. They attempt to open communication, rather than keep secrets. They attempt to honor diversity, rather than homogenize workers. And they make an appropriate place for Cronos time, such as in manageable deadlines, rather than permitting this god to rule like a despot. In a soulful collaboration, agreements are honored, roles are fluid, conflict is handled through shadow-work, and the Third Body can be felt to contain the project.

There are many ways to fashion soulful work. People who work inside organizations may want to experiment with greater authenticity by expressing shadowy feelings more directly with colleagues and in this way breaking family patterns. Still others may strive to imbue the workplace with their personal or social values, such as empowering employees to innovate, respect racial or gender diversity, create energy efficiency programs, or donate corporate goods and services. Others may attempt to turn a creative passion into an entreprenurial venture, like Mrs. Field’s Cookies, The Body Shop, or Apple Computers, thereby aligning activities that pay the bills and nurture the soul. And still others may decide to accept the limits of a day job and separate their employment from more soulful work by practicing a craft or working in the service arena after hours. Finally, we may detect the archetypal theme of our lives in our work patterns. Armed with this knowledge, we may discover why what we do is deeply matched with who we are, or why we suffer a mismatch.

One archetypal image of soulful work is Kwan-yin, the Buddhist goddess who hears the cries of the world, the sounds of human and animal suffering, and permits herself to be shaped by them. In one of her forms she has a thousand arms; each hand holds an instrument of work: a hammer, a trowel, a pen, a cooking pot. The goddess has developed the skills to become effective in response to the needs of the world.

This fantasy image of soulful work, like the archetypal image of the Beloved or of the special friend, compels us to seek it out, to yearn for it. For a fortunate few, it can become reality. Work can offer the pride of accomplishment and the self-respect of financially providing for oneself and others. A rewarding collaboration can bear the fruit of friendship, as well as an inventive product or service. A smooth-working team, like basketball players in the zone, can bring the exhilaration of group productivity. And a taste of creative intoxication can leave us hungering for more.

However, for many of us, the new suit of clothes, a symbol of our hopes and dreams, begins to wear thin before too long. If we are promoted, we may find that the weighty meaning attributed to a job quickly turns into weighty responsibility: we work long hours to solve problems under pressure. We are forced to cut back on loyal staff to meet budget requirements and to lower ethical standards to adjust to a commonplace business ethos: the bottom line. If we speak up against these efforts, we may step onto a roller coaster ride that leads nowhere.

If we are not promoted but passed over again and again, we may feel that our efforts go unrewarded. Heartsick with disappointment, we may disappear into the corporate grid and become depressed, resigned, or bitter. If we are fired, offered up as a sacrifice during downsizing or forced to retire early to bring in young blood, we discover that we are inessential and feel abandoned. And, because our loyalty was unrequited, we feel betrayed.

In addition, the chances are great that we will have witnessed the power shadow emerge between collaborators, as one steals credit for the other’s work; the sexual shadow erupt between employer and employee, as a demeaning innuendo goes unconfronted; or the money shadow evoke faint grumblings among employees, then cries of mutiny. Inevitably work, which once glowed brightly with promise, becomes tarnished. And it begins to feel Sisyphean.

The loss of soulful work: the myth of Sisyphus

In a well-known Greek myth Sisyphus, the clever king of Corinth, fought in his arrogance with the gods. Twice he achieved the unspeakable: he outwitted death. The gods, to punish his hubris, devised a tortuous task for him in the underworld: to push a stone uphill, watch it roll down upon him, and push it up again. Sisyphus was sentenced to this task for eternity.

Many people experience their work as a Sisyphean task: a monotonous, repetitive chore, a thankless exertion that leads nowhere, a useless effort that is doomed to fail. Whether they are factory workers on an assembly line, inserting the same parts into the same devices day after day; or corporate executives sitting in endless meetings in golden handcuffs; or homemakers washing limitless piles of dishes and laundry; or students doing interminable homework that has no relevance to their lives, they feel as if they are living the Sisyphus myth, as if they embody dutiful but fruitless striving.

There is in this quality of life a sense of fate without mercy, effort without Eros. Like the devastating recurring problems of humanity on a global scale, like the painful recurring downward spirals in every intimate relationship, the work is never done. The tasks probably will not be completed; the worker will most likely go unrecognized; and the stone will inexorably roll downhill again. The stone, like the shadow, carries us down from the heights, forcing us to face limits, loss, and ordinariness. It will not permit us to outwit death. But it will teach us secrets if we can learn to listen.

Perhaps it is our thinking about work that needs to change; perhaps it is our fantasy of work that sets us up for the frustration, even damnation of a Sisyphus. Perhaps it is this, after all, that leads to a deeply felt enmity between life and work. The purpose of this chapter is to question archaic assumptions about work and to bring psychological insights into this arena. We hope to renew a sense of work’s purpose, deepening its connection to soul life. We aim to lift work out of a workaholic culture and set it in the context of a larger life — and to help individuals make of their lives a work.

Archetypal psychologist James Hillman has pointed out that to understand individual psychology in the West we need to understand the ideas and images of business because they provide the inescapable warp and woof on which our behavior patterns are woven. He writes:

To set aside the profit motive, the desire to possess, the ideals of fair wage and economic justice, the bitterness over taxation, the fantasies of inflation and depression, the appeal of saving, to ignore the psychopathologies of dealing, collecting, consuming, selling, and working, and yet to pretend to grasp the interior life of persons in our society would be like analyzing the peasants, craftsmen, ladies, and nobles of medieval society all the while ignoring Christian theology. [i]

Hillman’s analogy is fitting: like Christianity, business is the framework in which we live. Moreover, work itself has become a religion; it is pursued with religious fervor and filled with the idols of a faith. But tragically for many of us work, like much of institutionalized religion, has lost its soul.

What do you passionately desire from work? When do you feel most alive and inspired? What is the stone that you push uphill, that is, the burden that opposes and resists you at work?

The promises of shadow-work: nurturing soul on the job

While shadow-making begins at home and continues at school, it is highly refined at work, where the persona is required to fit tightly if we wish to achieve success. In fact, many workplaces institutionalize individual shadow-making by implicitly demanding adaptive, accommodating behaviors and discouraging authentic emotional exchange. They often outlaw the discussion of certain topics and may try to discourage dissent. They tend to encourage projection to scapegoat troublemakers, uphold denial through workaholism and alcoholism, and typically hoard power in a few hands. The result: a climate that increases shadow and decreases soul.

This is a commonplace context in which we work. And because it is so pervasive and so familiar, like the sea in which we swim, we typically remain unconscious of it. We simply assume that we cannot be ourselves at work. We believe, instead, that we should disappear and become who they want us to be. So, many of us follow orders, even when we don’t believe they will yield the desired result. We protect our superiors, even when we don’t believe they command respect. And we look away from ethical violations, colluding with others in a conspiracy of silence.

This widespread workplace ethos remains unconscious for another reason: we grow up in schools in which we learn to sit still, regardless of our bodily needs. We learn to submit to others without question, obeying outer authority and disobeying the inner voice of the Self. We learn to compete with peers as enemies, rather than as worthy opponents who inspire us toward excellence. And we learn to structure our days around Cronos time: one hour per topic. Rushed to achieve academically, at an early age we are encouraged to leave behind childish ways, including imaginary play and reverie, the deep sources of creativity. At a later age, we are encouraged to leave behind the arts and humanities, all too often banishing our unique talents into shadow.

With this preparation, we enter the workplace and find that, like individuals and families, each company has a persona or public face and a shadow, which may not shine so brightly: HMO’s that purport to be client-centered restrict doctors’ prescriptions to medications bought in bulk discounts; an alternative healthcare group fires women employees who become pregnant; a snack food company that promotes to the gay market secretly funds anti-gay groups; and a highly creative industry takes for granted 70-hour work weeks, disregarding employees’ health, emotional well-being, and family life.

At the individual level, each of us also lives this lie, a split between persona and shadow, a Faustian bargain in the arena of work: We give up individuality to fit into the collective mold. We trade off soul for money. We sacrifice creativity for security. We surrender emotional relatedness for a mantle of power. Turning a boss into a parent, we become childlike and mute to achieve safety and approval. Then we pick up our shields and come to believe that we are what we do, that our function is who we are. We become so identified with the character who sits at the head of the table in the workplace that we create persona work. As one client put it, “I can’t allow my wife to visit me at work because she wouldn’t recognize who I am there.” In this way, we sacrifice our souls and create the very thing that we dread the most: soulless work.

In medieval society, despite primitive living conditions, work was imagined more soulfully: people joined guilds to apprentice with a master of a particular craft — painters, potters, weavers, masons. The guilds brought social order and offered individuals a valued sense of place in the scheme of things. Each craft had a patron saint, who linked the activity of the craft to the divine realm. The doing of the craft became both a source of identity and a way of life that was inherently worthy. In addition, viewed as the transformation of raw material into beauty, of the invisible into the visible, craft was thought to be work of the gods.[ii]

Today, with the swift pace of change, early retirement, and an epidemic lack of mentoring, the lineage of work is lost. In addition, when we think of a craft we imagine a hobby or a pasttime activity that ends in the production of a handmade object, in contrast to a machine-made object that we produce at work. But for some guild members of earlier times, a craft was an initiatory process, a sacred means of self-discovery, a full-time activity that awakens the subject, as well as produces the object.

In a similar way, with shadow-work many activities in the workplace can become sacred or soulful. Despite widespread institutional impediments, they can become opportunities to deepen self-awareness, nurture the soul, and serve others. Certainly, the job needs to get done; at times, the job may seem tedious or fruitless. However, if we can learn to observe ourselves, discover the shadow characters that interfere with our self-esteem and effectiveness on the job, and obey the voice of the Self, eventually we can return the King to the head of the table and regain our equilibrium at work. For example, we may meet a shadow character that is pushy and self-promoting, or greedy and ambitious, which sabotages team spirit with others. Or we may uncover a character that is secretly lazy and indolent, which unconsciously opposes a more conscious desire to get ahead. As we romance this shadow character by tying ourselves to the mast and witnessing it at play, we can discover its deeper need — the gold in the dark side. As a result, it recedes and we become more self-directive.

As we are challenged to learn new tasks and face frightening feelings of incompetence on the job, we also meet the shadow: we may secretly feel like a fraud, as if we are faking it. Or we may secretly feel blamed, as if we are the company scapegoat. With shadow-work, the characters of the fraud and the scapegoat can slowly become more conscious. As we romance them, they have less hold over us; then we have more choices to respond differently.

In addition, when we learn to identify our emotional reactions on the job as projections from the past — “I can’t stand that ambitious co-worker, that power-hungry boss, or that demure, helpless assistant” — we can defuse negative feelings, reduce blame, slow down roller coaster rides, and thereby decrease overall tensions in the workplace. In this way, each of us can become a more empathic, healing presence at work.

As shadow-work continues, inner freedom can grow. As a result of reconnecting with that part of us that has the capacity for soulful work, our dependency on employers and organizations may lessen. Eventually, soulful work can become, like the breath, a mast to which we are tied. As jobs come and go and relationships ebb and flow, our work can be a familiar place for productivity, contemplation, pleasure.

With shadow-work, then, we can use the job to enhance our self-knowledge, instead of permitting it to use us and eventually deplete us. Like the Roman god Janus, whose two-faced image adorned ancient homes, we can look in two directions at once: inside at the process of working and outside at the product of work. In this way, we can make of ourselves a work.

What shadow character sabotages your efforts on the job? What is being sacrificed by your Faustian bargain at work? How can you nurture your soul to make up for this sacrifice?

[i] Hillman, James. Kinds of Power. New York: Doubleday, 1995, p. 5.

[ii] See A Way of Working, D.M. Dooling (Ed.), New York: Parabola Books, 1979.

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Shadow Boxing: Wrestling with Romantic Partners

Posted on October 9, 2013 by Dr. Connie Zweig

(excerpt from Romancing The Shadow)

In a famous Greek myth of romance, Eros insists that Psyche make love to him in the dark. Like Eros, many of us want to remain hidden when our passions loosen the reins of the ego’s control. We long to know the Other, but not to be known. We ask probing questions, but reply with half answers. In a myriad of ways, we run from being seen and avoid becoming vulnerable, disguised in tight personas and baggy clothes, hiding in sordid addictions and clandestine habits.

And yet, right alongside the urgent longing to know the Other and the refusal to be known is the converse longing: the urgency to be known and the refusal to see. Like Psyche, we open our arms to love but may not open our eyes. We consent to temporary blindness, giving our sweet love to unknown others, people who are not what they seem, people who become strangers with the light of dawn. Like Psyche, we follow the lead of Eros, god of love — and when we light a candle in the dark, we are shocked at his Otherness.

For this reason the divinity of desire has been called Eros the bittersweet.[i] With the sweetness of love, the bitterness of shadow is evoked. And our desire, which seems to be such an intimate friend, comes to appear as a hostile enemy that brings longing, envy, and even hate in tow.

We long for wholeness, a greater unity that stems from meeting the Beloved, our other half. Eros, our archetypal longing, causes us to reach for that which is missing; our desire is organized around this radiant absence. And we yearn to melt into the Beloved, to find there the missing piece, and to lose ourselves in a paradise of everlasting love. Jung expressed this universal quest of the human soul in this way: “The soul cannot exist without its other side, which is always found in a ‘You.’ Wholeness is a combination of I and You, and these show themselves to be parts of a transcendent unity whose nature can only be grasped symbolically.”[ii]

Yet, as the god spreads its wings of desire, it blinds us to the reality of what is there. In this chapter we move from the tentative exploration that defines dating to the spell cast by romantic love and the infamous blindness that results. We will learn, through the stories of many couples, how romance leads us through dark alleys to the meeting with the Other, the stranger who appears in our most intimate moments to sabotage our feelings of familiarity, safety, and love. And we will show how shadow-work can transform the painful consequences of romantic blindness, so that eyes blinded by persona can see ever more deeply into soul. By reexamining relationships from romance to marriage in the context of the shadow’s hidden needs, eventually we can move from shadow-boxing with the Other to shadow-dancing with the Beloved. We can pierce the veil of illusory projection and see our partner with clear perception. Then we will discover that the Beloved is both the solution and the problem; the Beloved is the answer and the question to be asked again and again. Who do we spend our entire life loving?

Meeting the Other: Projections hit their targets

When two people meet and feel a deep connection with one another, their hearts open like flowers. So do their imaginations. Five-year-old Ned, a blond-haired blue-eyed cutey, played in the park with his parents when a young girl, about his age, approached. She said, “You look just like John Smith in the Pocahontas movie.” Ned grinned and his little chest filled with air. He announced to his parents that he had a new girlfriend.

Projection begins at a young age. We view it as a natural, unavoidable process, not a pathological problem to be rid of or a symptom to be cured. Through projection, the unconscious mind expels both positive and negative traits, attributing them to other people, whereby they can become conscious. Because by definition the unconscious is hidden, like the dark side of the moon, we need to discover indirect ways to catch glimpses of it. And projection is a primary way of doing so.

Rob, an architect in his forties who has been married to his second wife for ten years, recalled how he met his first in an instantaneous romantic projection. “I walked into a college dorm and saw this blond-haired girl sitting on the couch. She was swinging her legs, wearing bobby sox and loafers, to the music of Simon and Garfunkel. I walked up and told her that we would be married one day. She told me I was nuts. But two years later, we were husband and wife.” Five years later, they divorced.

Carrie described a first date with Vince, who appeared on a motorcycle in black leather boots and jacket. She stood on the balcony above and said to herself, “My Romeo has arrived.”

Projection is like shooting an invisible arrow. Each of us carries a kind of archer’s quiver strapped onto our backs. Every so often an arrow shoots out unpredictably, and we say something nasty or we fall in love. When we turn around to find out where the arrow came from, the quiver moves out of sight.

If the receiver has a soft spot to receive the projection, it sticks. For instance, if we project our anger onto a dissatisfied mate or our seductive charms onto a good-looking stranger, then we hit the target and the projection holds. From then on the sender and receiver are linked in a mysterious alliance, which could feel like erotic passion, intense disgust, or unbearable envy.

Julia, 29, a slight, wirey woman who works as a pastry chef, reported breathlessly that she had found the man of her dreams two weeks before. She knew nothing about him, but because of the look in his eyes and the sound of his voice she was certain that they would be married by the end of the year. The therapist asked her to write a short piece about her internal experience of the moment of their encounter :

Her eyes seek the Fit, the match between her world and his. The parallel lines, the flush corners, the edges that rub up against each other. She feels for the Fit, the mesh, the weave that joins her with him.

She saw him in a moment across the empty, white-walled room. She saw him with her whole body. It cried out with the Fit. It moved her toward him relentlessly on a one-way vector; no return. He sat still, waiting. Her body sat nearby and began to pulse. The air between them felt thick, resonant, palpable. The Fit was screaming from her cells.

She looked into his eyes and said, slowly, “I’ve been waiting for you for so long.” He nodded and said, slowly, “I know.” The Fit smiled in her cells. Nothing had prepared her for this moment. She was perfectly prepared.

We might wonder why the sender shoots these arrows into others. Poet Robert Bly uses the following metaphor: When we were very young, we had a 360-degree personality, which radiated energy from all directions. But the adults around us could not tolerate this much exuberance. So, in their own discomfort, they unintentionally but inevitably betrayed us by shaming and humiliating us for certain feelings, such as vulnerability, or behaviors, such as competition, which we then learned to hide. Our teachers may have scolded us for other behaviors, such as daydreaming, or our priests may have imposed terrible guilt for our sexual feelings. [iii] These denied, disowned parts of our souls –anger or depression, jealousy or resentment, intellectuality or sensuality, athletic or artistic ability — get exiled into the dark. As a result, the full circle of energy that was our birthright is sliced away piece by piece, leaving only a thin, proper facade to greet the world.

When we begin dating, as a natural part of development the shadow goes in search of its lost traits in others in an effort to recover the full range of our personality — the gold in the dark side. Like Star Trek’s doctor Bones, who does a high-tech DNA check on his patients within minutes of their first contact, the shadow scans for a love fit, looking for the “one.” When we find romance and fall in love, our unconscious fantasy image of the Other often is a composite of familiar parental qualities, which we inherited through identification, and our own neglected traits, which we banished into shadow through repression. When we feel a harmonic match with another person, a seemingly magical feeling of familiarity or resonance — the Fit — a part of us begins to believe that our soul’s dream of acceptance and belonging can be fulfilled.

Without our knowing it, the shadow is at work attempting to recreate early childhood relationship patterns with a secret mission — to heal old wounds and feel loved. We view this inevitable childhood projection as the first stage of romance, a kind of fusion[iv] that may feel like living inside of an egg shell, an enclosed form in which the couple feels nurtured and self-contained. Like two chicks in the shell, they feed one another on love, which speeds the growth and development of both. Other friendships may fall away as the partners imagine meeting all of each other’s needs and fulfilling all of each other’s desires.

Then, one day, inevitably the shell cracks — and the relationship breaks down. The old rules, often unspoken, which previously provided security (“You are all that I need” or “I pay for everything so we have sex when I want it” or “You carry the feelings for both of us”) no longer hold, and the partners face a crisis of commitment. Once the shell has been cracked, it cannot be put back together again. The partners may try, but they have entered a new stage of relationship: they are now too well developed to remain fused. For those who do not know that this is a natural developmental crisis, the relationship will end, and the partners inevitably attempt to recreate the egg shell with the next person. But for those who can negotiate the new rules, which allow for greater individuality and authenticity, the partners can go play in the chicken yard — a larger psychic space with more room for individuality and clear boundaries — and yet remain a couple. Then the relationship can begin again.

What traits does your lover carry for you, which creates the unconscious attraction between you? What do you give away to him or her that might be returned to your own treasury? How would that influence the way you live your own life?

[i] Carson, Anne, Eros the Bittersweet, Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1986.

[ii] Jung, C.G. Psych of Transference, pp. 82-83. GET

[iii] Bly, Robert, A Little Book on the Human Shadow  (Ed. William Booth), San Francisco: HarperSan Francisco, 1988.

[iv] For an excellent discussion of the fusion stage of relationship, see The Fantasy Bond by Robert W. Firestone, Human Sciences Press, 1987.

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My Longing for the Light: Spiritual Yearning and Its Shadow Side

Posted on July 3, 2013 by Dr. Connie Zweig

(excerpt from The Holy Longing)

As a meditation practitioner for more than 40 years, I have been insane for the light. Like a moth diving into the flame, I sought to be consumed in the burning, cooked, turned to ash.

At times, on my knees, arms outstretched to the heavens, I beseeched my god.  At other times, sitting still like a yogi for hours on end, my senses switched off, I turned an ear within to hear my god. Occasionally, for moments, the timbre of a celestial voice suggested itself; the horizon of another realm shimmered. But, at other times, disappointed and exhausted, I suffered the indifference of my god.

At age 19, I turned toward the East. The turn back did not begin until 12 years later. Today, in certain ways, I am still struggling to make the turn.

A student at UC Berkeley at the time, enjoying an intellectual, politically active, experimental lifestyle, I learned Transcendental Meditation for no holy reason or higher motivation but to date a man who would not get involved unless I learned the practice. I had no idea how this seemingly light-hearted decision would radically alter the course of my life.

After about a year of sitting twice a day, eyes closed and legs crossed, several internal changes had taken place: My chatterbox mind, usually highly active and alert, was quieting down. At bedtime, it was not full of obsessive or random thoughts, which kept me awake. My breathing, too, was quieter, softer and gentler, so that my body felt calm rather than agitated much of the time. Emotionally I felt more stable inside. Friends commented that I seemed less angry.

As my emotional turmoil subsided, I grew less engaged politically with “the enemy” out there and more engaged with the battleground within. I also grew less interested in saving the world through social activism and more interested in saving myself through the development of consciousness. Increasingly drawn to the meditative state, to the ocean of silence that pulled me away from complicated relationships and toward the simple goal of making that silence permanent — enlightenment — I began to long for god.

I signed up for a month-long retreat that involved meditating for many hours each day and listening to long lectures at night. Sitting in the hall that first morning with several thousand others, whose restless eagerness could not be detected in the stillness, I awaited the guru. I wanted to be calm, yet alert, open, yet unattached — in the correct state of mind for him. I wanted to please him already.

A door opened and a small man with bronze skin that shone through a filmy white Indian dhoti glided into the room. His thin dark hair fell to his shoulders and a bushy beard, just beginning to gray, covered his face. He folded his knees beneath him on the dais and waved a yellow rose in his left hand as he laughed. An infectious giggle rolled through the room.

I beheld the image of serenity, depth, and self-sufficiency. He embodied freedom from suffering, ignorance, even death. A complete, self-realized human being whose mere presence implied that I, too, could be free.

After several weeks, I was at home. I had found a community of dedicated, like-minded seekers, an intellectually sophisticated and compassionate teacher and, most of all, a simple practice that emptied my mind of trivial thoughts and filled my heart with love.

Almost without noticing it, I adopted wholesale a philosophy that ran counter to everything I had been taught: The “real” world is an illusion. The only reality is consciousness. Pure consciousness can be reached only through meditation — this kind of meditation. Enlightenment or liberation from suffering is a result of the regular experience of pure consciousness.

I began to believe that the way I led my life was the source of my pain. My attachment to people and things caused my suffering. The high stimulation of my lifestyle produced the stress in my nervous system, which agitated my mind, which triggered more desires, which led to seeking more stimulation — in an endless cycle of frustration and desire.

Like a key fitting into a lock, this teaching fit into some unknown part of me, and a hole closed seamlessly around it. As this message held a growing numinosity, the rest of life held less shine. The satisfaction of desires through personal love or creative work seemed futile. Working only to save money to go to more retreats, and socializing only with people who shared my worldview and my goal of enlightenment, I burned for god.

Very quickly, the spiritual group became my new family, harmonious and aligned, unlike my family of origin. My parents, from this new perspective, seemed lost to the world of materialism; my old friends seemed lost to the illusions of politics and romance.

I read voraciously in Eastern philosophy, assimilating its ideas until they were a part of me, flesh of my flesh. I found my life purpose and, like an arrow heading for the target, went off to a teacher-training course in Europe. Sitting with 2,000 others in a huge blue tent on a white sandy beach, I meditated . . .and meditated. . .and meditated. When my back ached and my concentration faltered, I wondered what latent, nagging, restless urge led me to shut my eyes to the beauties of the world. But then my mind quieted for a moment, dipping into a delicious silence, and the questions evaporated.

After two months of a rigorous routine, I cast aside any remaining doubts and chose to become a member of a long lineage of Hindu teachers dating back thousands of years. As I bowed before a colorful, deco-style painting of the guru, I heard a whisper from the corridors of my childhood: “Thou shalt have no other God before you.” I turned a deaf ear to the warning.

I could hardly believe my good fortune. Like many before (and after), I felt chosen – and certain that enlightenment would arrive within ten years, if only I meditated enough.

I taught meditation full-time for about eight years in small university towns and large metropolitan centers. Greeting each day with an extraordinary feeling of fullness and a great gift to offer the world, I watched people “transcend” for the first time and listened to their stories of hope. I began to believe we were riding a wave that was sweeping across the planet with the inevitability of a tsunami, washing away suffering and pain in its wake. I was no longer saving myself; I was part of a greater plan that was saving humanity, ushering in a new level of consciousness.

In 1976 I traveled with several hundred American women to Switzerland, where we stayed in a hotel in the Alps for an advanced course for six months. During that time, I practiced yoga, meditated, and ate simple meals. I did not see a man; I did not get distracted by other stimuli. For all intents and purposes, I led a monastic life.

Near the end of that period, I was in an altered state of consciousness: deeply rested, yet hyper-awake inside. I did not need to sleep or dream, that is to go under into unconsciousness. Instead, the inner wakefulness simply continued, whether I was lying down or walking around.

However, something else had changed as well. When I joined this spiritual army, there were no signs of regimentation, authoritarianism, hierarchy, or even rigid adherence to dogma. Perhaps because I knew nothing of the dark side, I couldn’t see it. But I believe  that in its early years this meditation movement was fairly tolerant and open-ended.

This attitude shifted dramatically in the mid-to-late 1970’s when the teacher began to offer a new set of practices — yogic powers — and people clamored for instruction. Then, guidelines set in. You had to have such and such meditative experience to receive the next initiation. People lied. You had to give up therapy, bodywork, chiropractic, or any other practice that could interfere with meditation. Again, people lied.

For me, there was no dramatic violation of my rights, no singular spiritual abuse from which to recover. I simply began to grow uncomfortable with what I witnessed on that retreat — spiritual hubris, an insidious competition, secrecy and hypocrisy in the name of god.

I spoke to friends about my growing discomfort. But no one wanted to hear. Growing alienated from those I loved most deeply, I began to question the teachings to which I had devoted my life. The more I questioned, the more the pain increased; and the questions kept coming:

  • Why doesn’t this community feel like home anymore?
  • What is this gap between the group’s public persona and its inner workings?
  • Does the teacher really foster individual choice or is he seducing or coercing us to obey him?
  • Why doesn’t anyone else admit that something is morally or ethically wrong?
  • What would my life be like without my spiritual family?
  • How can I live without the hope of enlightenment or salvation?
  • If I leave, can I separate the meditation practice from the organization and its beliefs?
  • How do I work through the grief of having invested more than a decade of my life in this community?

Just as upon my discovery of Eastern philosophy the world had become unreal and dreamlike (maya), so now my alternative world seemed like a bad dream.

At that time, I wrote the following poem:

The sacred books are filled

with nothing but words.

The guru is filled

with nothing but water and air.

Even the mantra, holy sound,

is made of vowels and consonants.

What is it that carried me

across the river?

At the end of the training, I stood at a fork in the road, about to make one of those major life choices that quickly rules out other options and forms a certain destiny: to continue my cloistered life with its sole focus on raising consciousness, or to return to the quotidien world, to ordinary people and ordinary dreams. Even then, the choice seemed to mean taking only one of two directions: up to the life of spirit or down to the world of matter; up to god or down to earth.

With a heart clouded by uncertainty, I boarded the next plane home. I never took official action, but other members knew that I had stepped out of the circle. I expected my closest friends to understand; they did not. More than that, they would speak to me no more. I returned to Los Angeles an apostate, without a friend, without a job, without faith.

During the next 10 years, I suffered a deep disillusionment with the meditation community and its teachings. I slowly began to look at each philosophical assumption from every angle, turning it around and around, examining it as if my life depended not on hanging onto it, but on seeing through it. I applied the discipline of mind I had developed in meditation to questioning its premises.

I tried desperately to understand what aroused this intense longing in me, this hunger for spiritual sweets, this thirst for the nectar of the gods – this desire to dissolve. I sought answers in the twists and turns of my family dynamics and in the sweeping vision of transpersonal psychology. I studied the timeless mystical traditions in an effort to find my predecessors there — Krishna’s devoted gopis, the dancing Bal Shem Tov, Sufi poets Rumi and Kabir, the Hindu ecstatic Mirabai, the nuns for god Catherine of Siena and Julian of Norwich.

And, although my disillusionment with my teacher and his teachings was heart-wrenching, I suffered an even deeper disillusionment with god who, I believed, set me on the path only to betray me. For a long time, I railed at my god, pointing a finger of blame at the heavens.

I had believed that a spiritual commitment would save me from shadow suffering. Like a child who believes that if she prays fervently enough, her petitions will come true, I thought that if I meditated diligently enough, fulfillment would result. And not only that: fulfillment without sacrifice.

I had held a simple image of the spiritual path — do your daily practice, purify your lifestyle, open your heart in love – which ended in certain rewards. How was it possible that my practices, my devotions, would leave me with empty arms? How was it possible that god would give me stone when I had earned bread?

I fell headlong into a well of despair, slipping into the underworld that I had struggled so hard to evade. I disappeared into a great blackness, living for a while at the bottom of a dark hole looking.

Eventually, groping in the dark for a thread to lead me out, I found a guide, a Jungian analyst, who was familiar with the back streets of the underworld, a guide who knew that my next key could be found in the darkness, not in the light. She helped me to pierce the innocence that held me in thrall to my teacher, which eventually enabled me to withdraw the spiritual projection onto him and reclaim my own radiance. She helped me to dissect the simplistic framework that held me in blame, which eventually enabled me to think more independently and to hold a more complex, nuanced view of spiritual life. She introduced me to the many gods living in my own soul, so that my former conception of a singular, all-mighty god appeared naïve and childlike. She initiated me into the sacred shadow side of life, where the hidden power of darkness shines like gold.

Today I see my experience of holy longing as my source, my course, and my goal. I see my awakening to this longing in my soul as my awakening to a conscious life, a second birth. I see it as the fuel that drives my ongoing quest for greater understanding and for ecstatic experience. I see this longing behind my other deepest longings. I see it behind my images; I hear it behind my words. I see this longing before me, before I was, and before I become. My goal is not the end of longing; the holy longing itself is my guide.

Perhaps you, too, feel a yearning beneath your other yearnings that gnaws at you, despite the fulfillment of so many other desires. Perhaps you also fled the traditional religion of your childhood and, like me, joined an alternative community hoping to find spiritual values and practices that would deepen your inner life. Or you may continue to be a believer but find yourself in exile from the traditional forms in which your faith is expressed. Or you may have suffered spiritual or religious abuse and disillusionment at the hands of teachers or clergy, resulting in a loss of faith, hope, and trust.

And yet. . .your holy longing stirs. You feel a restless desire for something more, but you lack the words and images to describe your quest.

I have found in my counseling work with hundreds of clients that this essential yearning – a secret feeling with many disguises — lies hidden at the source of each person’s life story. It is the seed of a soul’s desire, which spurs us to take certain actions, which in turn evoke more desire and again more action.

We respond, even unknowingly, perhaps by pursuing a romantic union that we imagine will fulfill our deepest needs. Or we seek a spiritual communion with a mediator for the divine, in a twinship that promises to surpass human limits. Or we serve a fellowship community, a dedicated group of believers who form a surrogate family in which we feel at home. In this way, the obscure object of our longing, like a hidden compass, determines the course of our lives, pointing us in its direction. And our life story unfolds, invisibly shaping our destiny from moment to moment.

With spiritual shadow-work, we can uncover some of the invisible images at the center of the archetype of holy longing, the fantasies of the soul longing for the divine. Together, they help to account for our indescribable yearnings for something Other, something beyond the bounds of ordinary life. Like Jung, who suggested that the gods are in our own souls and appear to us spontaneously as archetypal images – the beloved parent, the beloved partner, the beloved home, the beloved teacher or god — I suggest that by contemplating our own sacred images of holy longing, we can uncover our own gods.

Is there a transcendent God blazing behind the image? That is a question for theologians and people of faith. I am not advocating a position here concerning the metaphysical reality of god. That is why I use the small “g” to indicate the divine image or imago dei as it lives within our souls and as it mobilizes uncanny power in our lives.

You can begin to detect the whispering call of your own soul. You can begin to acknowledge your longing and to reflect on it. You can explore what fuels it and what derails it, what ignites it and what numbs it.

You can discover the particular ways that you override your religious yearning by misplacing it onto concrete objects – sex, food, drugs, and alcohol. When you fail to discriminate between these “idols” and your true object of desire, you are left feeling forever frustrated and dissatisfied. In addition, you silence the urgent message of your soul and hear only the voices of distraction, addiction, and compulsion. Instead, you can learn to attune to your holy longing, to hear its echoes of the past and its portents of the future.

You also may become aware of the dark side of holy longing — the inherent pitfalls that can result when religious yearning goes awry. Countless recent headlines have highlighted the forces of destruction and annhilation that lie dormant in religious fundamentalisms and blind faith of all types – whether Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist or new age. As a result, today we see the painful consequences of religious abuse and disillusionment on the faces of believers everywhere. I will attempt to shed light on this dark corner of religious life by exploring the roots of charismatic personalities, as well as those who are susceptible to them, and by uncovering universal patterns in spiritual abuse that can be used as wake-up calls for the purpose of prevention.

Clearly, the encounter with spiritual darkness throws believers into the fires of doubt. And these fires can either consume us or transform us.  As Fyodor Doestoevsky put it, “The ideal passes through suffering like gold through fire.”

The work of recovery, which I call spiritual shadow-work, cannot save us from suffering. It is not offered as a solution to a problem. Instead, I suggest that when we enter the night sea journey, as Jung called it, we are not off the path; we are on it. In fact, we may be spot on it, right where we belong – ready to face spiritual shadow in ourselves or others.

If that is the case, then our disillusionment or loss of faith is an innate part of the inner journey. And our psychological work to recover our faith and to reclaim parts of ourselves that were sacrificed during periods of spiritual naievete is part of the larger spiritual task. In the same way that our cultural innocence was betrayed by the events of September 11, 2001, and our religious innocence was betrayed by the epidemic allegations of abuse by Catholic clergy, each of us undergoes the betrayal of our own naivete when we face the spiritual shadow.

We also must explore those parts of ourselves that we typically sacrifice in order to participate in a religious community or to obey spiritual doctrine. I suggest that by doing spiritual shadow-work we can reclaim those lost parts and, as the mystics of all traditions teach, develop through the stages of religious innocence toward a more mature spirituality.

By doing so, we can build bridges between our emotional and spiritual lives, which are all too often perceived as separate means for separate ends. Today the inner journey needs to include psychological growth, that is, ego development and shadow awareness, so that our spiritual practices can be augmented with the safeguards of psychology.

***

With spiritual shadow-work you explore the deeply felt desire for union with the divine in whatever faith or language it appears in you. This hidden yearning lies at the root of religious belief and faith. It is the heart of religion, not the mind. It is a feeling for the eternal, a taste of the infinite that sweetly lingers or emotionally seizes us with rapture or despair.

Religion, wrote William James, is the feelings, acts, and experiences of individuals as they stand in relation to whatever they consider the divine. Theologies grow out of these felt experiences, he added. And I suggest that it is the strength of these feelings of yearning and desire, longing and hope that determines the degree of our religiosity and the depth of our soul’s desire.

Spiritual shadow-work is not about the content of theological or philosophical beliefs. Instead, it examines the inner worlds of those who feel holy longing, the experience of the holy, which promises participation in the greater mystery. Therefore, as the inside story of religious longing, it cuts across denominations and links them to a more universal experience.

William James also wrote that as an individual grows in self-awareness, she may begin to be influenced by another dimension through a longing or desire for it: “There is an unseen order and our supreme good lies in harmoniously adjusting ourselves [to it]. This belief and this adjustment are the religious attitude in the soul.”

This inherent need of the soul — to turn to face the holy and to be changed by an experience of it – is purposeful and meaningful, according to Carl Jung. It is an inborn striving to open our limited personal selves to the archetypal and transpersonal realms. Just as Freud posited a will to pleasure, Adler wrote of a will to power, Frankel advocated a will to meaning, and Maslow postulated a will to self-actualization, I suggest that there also lies within us a will to transcend, a longing for the eternal.

Although psychology is my lens, this book does not reduce spirituality to psychology or reduce the ineffable to words. Instead, I intend to use psychology to explore spirituality, rather than to explain it. I believe that our early personal histories and  unmet emotional needs influence our adult spiritual quests and religious desires. They are a necessary part of our exploration, but not a sufficient explanation.

The same is true for biology. In the early part of the last century, before the advent of neuroscience, William James pointed out that “medical materialism” attributes St. Paul’s conversion to an occipital lesion due to epilepsy, St. Teresa’s ecstatic visions to hysteria, and St. Francis of Assisi’s asceticism to a bad gene. Today we know that there are neurobiological correlates to our emotional experiences, such as depression and anxiety. And there are brain correlates to heightened spiritual experiences as well.

In Why God Won’t Go Away, neuroscientist Andrew Newberg described using brain-scan technology to map the inner worlds of Tibetan Buddhists in meditation and Franciscan nuns in prayer. Whether the subjects called their experiences loss of self or unity with god, respectively, they felt a sense of transcendence when activity in the frontal lobes increased and activity in the parietal lobes (which define our feeling of orientation to a physical self) decreased. That is, when this latter area is deprived of information for drawing a line between self and other, we feel a sense of boundless awareness.

This machinery of transcendence can be set in motion by ritual behaviors such as chanting, singing, and drumming, as well as prayer and meditation. That’s why, Newburg concluded, god won’t go away even in our age of reason.

Hard-core rationalists may use this data to support the thesis that god is merely a perception generated by the human brain. Hard-core religionists might argue that these findings offer evidence that the brain is wired to experience the a priori reality of god. But I suggest that neuroscience has not explained away the mystery after all. Biological correlations are not the same as causes. The soul’s longing is embodied, perhaps even wired into the brain. But that doesn’t mean it’s caused by fleeting chemical events in the bodymind, even though it is reflected in those events. Thus the revelations of high-tech brain images can deepen, rather than dispel the mystery of god in the human brain.

I don’t romanticize spiritual experience by singing its praises and cleansing it of all dangers and darkness. Instead, I aim to acknowledge the pervasiveness and worthiness of our holy longing and to place it in the broader and deeper context of human evolution: you will see that your soul’s desire is not separate from the vastness of life, but that it participates as an innate and vital part of it.

The late archetypal psychologist James Hillman posed a guiding question: what does the soul want? He suggested that the soul wants something that is not what we think it wants. So, we seek that wrong thing – money, power, sex, food, alcohol, drugs – and turn up empty-handed. We are left, again and again, with the ineffable, the mystery. And our yearning burns in us.

Words – such as holy longing – evoke feelings and images that activate meaning for us. When I first saw those two words in the title of Goethe’s poem, I felt startled. He had found language to signify what I had always felt: my longing was holy; my longing was for the holy.

What does your soul want? Contemplating this question does not involve finding the object of our desire and satisfying our hunger, like being satiated after a rich meal. Rather, it means holding the tension of our longing, returning it again and again to our own souls, so that ultimately it may reveal its secrets. It means tracking spiritual desire like a faint footprint, not to trap an object but to catch its scent and follow it deeper into the landscape of the soul. Although at times it may be frustrating and even painful to hold the tension of your yearning rather than to submerge it, when you align with it you align with the force of evolution itself.

 

 ***

Read More From The Holy Longing

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Midlife and Shadow Work

Posted on January 17, 2012 by Dr. Connie Zweig

Two decades ago, at midlife, I met my devils. Much of what I had counted as blessing became curse. The wide road narrowed; the light grew dark. And, in the darkness, the saint in me, so well nurtured and well coiffed, met the sinner.

My fascination with the Light, my eager optimism concerning outcomes, my implicit trust concerning others, my commitment to meditation and a path of spiritual awakening—all were no longer  a saving grace, but a kind of subtle curse, a deeply etched habit of thinking and feeling that seemed to bring me face to face with  its opposite, with the heartbreak of failed ideals, with the plague of my naivete, with the dark side of God. At this time, I had the following shadow dream:

I’m at the beach with my childhood sweetheart. People are swimming in the sea. A large black    shark appears. There’s fear everywhere. A child disappears. People panic. My boyfriend wants to follow the fish, a mythical creature. He can’t understand the human danger. Somehow I contact the fish – and discover that it’s plastic. I stick my finger through its end and puncture it – it deflates. My boyfriend is furious, like I killed God. He values the fish over human life. Walking up the beach, he leaves me. I wander off, up into the trees, where a blue blanket awaits.

In analyzing this dream, I realized that I had never taken the archetypal shadow seriously. I had believed, with a kind of spiritual hubris, that a deep and committed inner life would protect me from human suffering, that I could somehow deflate the power of the shadow with my spiritual practices and beliefs. I had assumed, in effect, that it was managed, as I managed my moods or my diet, with the discipline of self-control.

But the dark side appears in many guises. My confrontation with it at midlife was shocking, uprooting, and terribly disillusioning.  Intimate friendships of many years seemed to turn brittle and crack, bereft of lifeblood and its elasticity. My strengths began to feel like weaknesses, standing in the way of growth rather than promoting it. At the same time, dormant unconscious aptitudes awakened and arose rudely toward the surface, disrupting a self-image to which I had become accustomed, creating distrust in my own authenticity.

The meeting of shadow and spirit had ripple effects throughout my life. My buoyant mood and balanced temperament gave way to deep drops into the valley of despair. I descended into depression, living in a mud hell. Unfamiliar feelings stormed out of me, leaving me depleted and ashamed.

My search for meaning, which earlier had led to intensive questioning, psychotherapy, and meditation practice, resurfaced with a vengeance. My emotional self-sufficiency gave way to a stinging vulnerability. For the first time, I dreamed of an intimate, healthy relationship, one based on reality, not projection, honesty, not hiding.

But for a long while life seemed bankrupt. All that I had known as a fierce reality crumpled like a peppier-mache tiger in the wind. I felt as if I were becoming all that I was not. All that I had worked to develop, strived to create, came undone. The thread of my life pulled; the story unraveled. And the ones I had despised and disdained were born in me – like another life, yet my life, its mirror image, its invisible twin.

I could sense then why some people went mad, why some people had marital affairs despite a strong commitment, why some people with financial security stole or hoarded money or gave it all away. And I knew why the writer Goethe said that he had never heard of a crime of which he did not believe himself capable. I was capable of anything.

I remembered a story I had read somewhere in which a judge looks into a murderer’s eyes and recognizes the killing impulse in his own soul. In the next moment he shifts back to his proper self, to be a judge, and condemns the murderer to death.

My own evil had revealed itself too, just for a moment. Rather than condemn it to death, banishing it once more to the invisible realms of the unconscious, I have tried slowly to redirect my own journey in an effort to face it, to face that which, by definition, does not want to be seen.

After a period of despair, I am beginning to feel a more inclusive sense of self, an expansion of my nature, and a deeper connection to humankind. With the gradual acceptance of the darker impulses within me, I feel a more genuine compassion for the struggle with shadow in others.

For this reason, in the footsteps of Carl Jung, I have developed the method of SHADOW-WORK. Its aim is to help those of you who are struggling with dark or difficult unconscious impulses – rage, jealousy, lying, blaming, addiction, depression, anxiety – to make a more conscious relationship to them, to cast light on your dark side. After you meet the shadow, you learn to romance it, to bring it out of the darkness in order to:

reclaim the disowned parts of yourself;

defuse your negative emotions;

release the guilt and shame of negativity;

recognize the projections that color your opinions of others;

heal your relationships through greater openness and authenticity;

and achieve a more complete self-acceptance.

Whether you meet the shadow within, or in your partner, or in a guru or priest, or in a friend or co-worker, you can experience a richer, deeper, more rewarding life with shadow-work.

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Looking for the Beloved: Dating as Shadow-work

Posted on October 4, 2011 by Dr. Connie Zweig

When Cupid struck Apollo with a golden arrow through the heart, he fell hopelessly in love with a nymph named Daphne. But, to Apollo’s chagrin, Cupid had struck Daphne with a leaden arrow, causing her to abhor the thought of love and despise marriage as a crime. So, Apollo pursued her, inflamed by the chase and pleading his intentions. And Daphne fled, her hair streaming behind her and feeling no wish to be caught, even by the god of song and healing.

As Apollo gained upon her and her strength began to fail, Daphne called on her father, the river god, for aid. Instantly, her limbs grew stiff, her body enclosed in bark, her hair turned to leaves, her arms to branches, and her face to a tree-top. Apollo embraced the nymph, now a laurel tree, and proclaimed that he would wear her for a crown.

Our myths and fairy tales of first love and its pursuit motif contain some of the themes and images of many people’s early dating experiences: They act as if they are under a spell. One person, longing for love, chases the Other. He or she, longing for separateness, runs away. There’s very little authentic contact between them. If they meet to spend time together, the first typically pursues intimacy while the Other keeps a distance. In generations past, this dynamic typically occurred along gender lines, with the male pursuing and the woman holding the boundary. But today that distinction has broken down. Some women aggressively pursue a man, while some men run in flight from getting involved.

Here we will explore these ideas in the context of shadow and soul. First, we will consider dating and some of the painful shadow issues that single people face today: the feeling of being unacceptable, the terror of being hurt and rejected, and the fear of commitment. Dating, as the timeless search for a romantic partner, may be led by the persona in its quest for the image of the perfect Beloved in human form. In its search for image, the persona also seeks companionship, pleasure, and sexuality from dating partners.

But, with a deeper understanding, dating can become an ideal forum in which to explore unknown aspects of ourselves by doing shadow-work. Whether as one who is not yet married but remains hopeful, or as one who is divorced or widowed and suffers with feelings of grief, we can view being single as an opportunity to cultivate self-knowledge. Rather than avoid the cycle of living as a single person by frantically looking for someone — anyone — to date, we can use these periods to find our own internal sources of stimulation, build sustaining friendships with both women and men, and draw upon our creative inspirations, all of which may get eclipsed with the demands of a full-time relationship.

Romance, the divine madness of finding an erotic partner, may be choreographed by the personal shadow in its quest to recreate the familiar feelings embedded in the way we were raised as children. For this reason, people abused as children often find abusive partners; children of alcoholics often are attracted to drinkers; children who suffer neglect by parents may find themselves with neglectful lovers. When the shadow arranges a marriage, it puts us face to face with our unresolved childhood issues.

We consider dating, then, typically to have less depth and entail less commitment than romance, which emerges when a mutual attraction is acknowledged and a shadow projection finds its target. In dating, we long for an end to loneliness, a companion in joy and sorrow. But the shadow also contains those missing parts of our authentic nature that were rejected in childhood. So, beyond the persona connection, in romance we long to complete ourselves in the Beloved. And the shadow leads us to retrieve those rejected parts, which seek acceptance so that we can feel whole again.

So, we re-imagine committed relationship and suggest that, with shadow-work, it can become something larger than the sum of its parts — a transpersonal field in which love and consciousness grow. At that time, the object of the quest changes: from the beauty of image and the ideal Beloved to the beauty of depth and the real Beloved.

In these ways the search for an authentic relationship mirrors the search for the authentic Self, as told in the Sufi tale in our introduction. During dating the Master leaves the Butler in charge of the house; that is, the Self goes dormant and the ego takes over. But as the romantic relationship deepens and becomes increasingly conscious, the Self returns and demands more recognition and authenticity. If the ego resists relinquishing control and continues to dominate the dating process, we seek again and again an ideal image of the Beloved that reinforces its fantasy expectations. As a result, the relationship ends, and we search for yet another partner.

However, through the pain and frustration of failed attempts at bonding, the Master’s henchman, the shadow, eventually may force the ego to see its limitations and to relinquish control. With shadow-work, we then hear the call of the Self, the Master. And, as a result, a conscious relationship really can begin.

Whom do you desire and pursue? Which character in you desires which character in the Other?

(Learn dating as shadow-work with Connie via Skype from anywhere in the world.)

Shame and the single person

Some people, of course, enjoy the light side of dating: they view a single life as an opportunity to experiment socially and sexually, to feel the freedom of their own rhythms and to maintain their own privacy. They may wish for a committed relationship in the future but recognize wisely that they are not ready for it. Or they may dread commitment, imagining it as a jail sentence.

But for others the dark side of dating is oppressive: they suffer with feelings of isolation, alienation, and sexual frustration. For many people, to be single in a culture of couples is to be a carrier of shadow projections, to feel the pain of being seen as strange, a loser, an outsider. It is to feel the banishment of the one who is not chosen. It is to feel perpetually awkward, caught in a sustained adolescence, not yet belonging among the grownups who have mated and formed families. To be a young single is to be seen as inexperienced, naive, one who has not yet begun to live. To be an older single, especially if he or she has never married, is to be seen as eccentric, tainted, one who has failed the test of maturity. In a culture that defines people in relation to others even on simple institutional forms—single, married, divorced, widowed—the life of the single person is filled with daily reminders of being tainted with shadow.

Even though they may enjoy several intimate, ongoing friendships, some single people suffer terribly because they feel the stigma of being alone. Feeling lonely, they may devalue their deepest friendships rather than cherish them, as if these heartfelt connections cease to exist and the only valid relationship were a sexual, monogamous one—a couple.

Some observers of single people eating alone in restaurants or sitting alone in movies may feel uncomfortable as well, projecting their own fears of solitude or abandonment. The singles may, in turn, sense this attitude from others as discomfort, disdain, or even pity. On the other hand, married observers may feel the mournful discontent of envy around singles, imagining the joys of free time, free choice, and self-reliance. One woman, unmarried into her 50s, noted that her close married friends frequently imagine that she has a busy, fascinating social life that is off limits to them. She chuckles as she recounts this and then, turning serious a moment later, tells us that she is so ashamed to be home on Saturday nights that she never answers the phone.

Of course, the single person at 25, whose college friends have coupled and cocooned, has a different perspective than the single person at 45, whose friends have married, perhaps divorced and remarried, and given birth to children by then. But in both cases, the single person may feel the same pain, raging against others (“All of the good men are taken”) or against social institutions (“The women’s movement has made women hard and angry.”). For them, potential partners never match the internal romantic images. Each one fails to meet their standards of beauty, intelligence, success, or sensitivity, as they project their own inferiority onto others. If a relationship forms and they continue to judge and blame the other person for being inadequate, they risk becoming critical, nagging mates.

Instead of blaming others, some single people may blame themselves for their fate, feeling inadequate, unlovable, even hopeless. In this case, they themselves are not enough—thin enough, successful enough, smart enough, sexy enough. For some, this shame leads to endless routines of diets, workouts, therapy, singles events, and self-help books. All of this compulsive activity may cover up a deeper self-loathing and a desire to fix some secret flaw, which feels as if it’s been there forever. This feeling — it’s been this way forever—signals the legacy of a family shadow, a self-hatred that is absorbed from one or both parents, whether spoken or unspoken, and passed down from generation to generation.

Some singles reason that they have been cursed by an incident, such as molestation or abandonment, that bars them from trusting anyone. Or they have been branded with a bodily trait that makes them feel unattractive, thus undermining their confidence and capacity to make contact with potential partners. Bonnie, an Artemis-style father’s daughter and art director in her mid-40s, disclosed that she had never felt comfortable in her own body. After years of feeling ashamed for her failure to mate, she noticed that her mind would move around her physical form at times, becoming obsessed with various bodily traits. In her 20s, she felt intensely embarrassed about her large breasts and was convinced that they kept men away. Later, her legs became the problem: they were too short, too muscular, too pale to be seen as attractive. Finally, at midlife, as small lines appeared around her mouth and her cheeks began to sag, the voice of her inner critic concluded that the aging in her face held the key to her isolation and loneliness.

Bonnie’s mother had told herself the same critical messages about her own body. She felt chronically overweight, stodgy, unfeminine, and very different from the cultural standard of beauty. Although her Mom had never spoken critical words to her daughter concerning her appearance, Bonnie unknowingly had absorbed this aspect of her mother’s shadow as her own critical voice.

When she became aware of this pattern and began to witness it, learning to root her identity in her Self, she grew able to laugh at the noise of her own mind, which told her that the “moving fatal flaw” had ruined her life. Gradually, she separated from this character and grew more accepting of her body image, felt more attractive, and as a result became more attractive to men.

But, to her surprise, Bonnie then found herself rejecting those men who desired her. She became judgmental as her critic turned the negative inner-directed messages outward toward her pursuers: He’s not smart enough; he’s not rich enough; he’s not psychologically developed enough, the critic told her. With the advent of real opportunities for a relationship, Bonnie uncovered a previously hidden shadow figure, the Assassin, who unknowingly protected her Artemis nature. With even more judgmentalism and perfectionism than the critic, this character would maintain her independence at any cost by killing off those who wished to share her life.

In order to pursue her dream of a committed relationship, Bonnie needed to find a place at the table for the assassin, the protector of her vulnerability and independence. She needed a way of relating to this character so that it would not push away the very men she might truly desire. Eventually, she found the gold in her dark side when she realized that the perfectionistic assassin could be useful at work, where she critiqued the fine detail of award-winning television ads. But in her love life it sabotaged her deepest longings, eliminating potential romantic partners.

What is it about you that you fear will be rejected? What do you fear that others will find out about and consider unacceptable?

Contact Connie now to find your beloved and discover your Self in the process.

 

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