Romancing the Shadow

Your emails, DM’s and texts from last week’s essay were deeply affirming. I feel privileged to be in community with all of you experiencing these bigger than us moments. One reader who recently lost her father, shared a correspondence from 2020 where her family members had chosen signs for when they leave this spinning blue marble… her father chose hummingbirds. It felt like a sign for her, for me, for us. A sign on top of a sign on top of a sign… beyond my computing ability, actually. The world is far more magnificent that I can sometimes comprehend. Another reader shared this,

I hope you’ll consider sharing your moments too.

Last week, you learned about a tough time I had almost two years ago. Today, I tell you how I got out of it.

“There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle.”- Albert Einstein

One of my favorite people, Sheree, (you can listen to her on my former podcast here) embodies this way of living. She talks about joy as a responsibility. I’m in awe of her, she finds magic in everything big, small or the seemingly mundane. I have aspired to Sheree’s level of bliss since I met her. To live a life on that frequency feels like the greatest way to live. Being around her, the energy is so contagious, she makes you love life that much more. I want to be someone who makes people happier to be here, more enchanted by the little things, someone who appreciates each and every person that they come into contact with. Her wisdom feels ancient and effortless, it’s jedi-like. Perhaps by eighty, I’ll grasp it. And the past few years, I have been, admittedly, very far from living into this concept.

I’m reminded of Sheree while I’m driving home one of my oldest friends, Vance, both of us in a food coma induced by gluten-free chicken milanese and a chocolate budino. I am literally and emotionally full, gluttonous even, as one is after a scrumptious meal with an old friend.

“Denise, fun has always been one of your core features but I haven’t seen it at full volume for awhile…”

And he’s right. While recovering from my life breaking down and trying to rebuild it in a new way that would actually fulfill me, I lost some of my sparkle. The part of me that believed in infinite possibility had been muted, the dial turned down by the boogeyman of adulting.

“But I see it wholly on display tonight. You’re back.”

“I’m back baby!” I retort, acknowledging myself in addition to his assessment. I know how hard I worked to get back here, to recapture parts of myself that I thought had died with the fifty previous versions of me. This summer, in my new reality, she had returned. My energy was higher, lighter, and I was finding the zest for life I had once taken for granted.

“How did you find your way back?”

It’s a really good question. How do we find our way back?

The reality is it got messy before it got good.

My first step was verbalizing and naming every single, ugly, disgusting feeling that I felt to my trusted inner circle. And they were pretty grotesque! Jealousy, anger, resentment, lack. Let me be clear: I was far from proud when I shared them. But I chose curiosity over shame. Our highest self doesn’t live in the darkness, I had to see if the feelings held up in the light. I held up my magnifying glass and asked what was the note beneath the note?

I discovered that these emotions were leading me somewhere important. Jealousy became a guide. It points us to what we really want and signals where we feel unresolved. It was showing me what I yearned to claim and the future I craved. When I probed deeper, I started to see that I wasn't actually jealous of the specific thing I was staring at but of the idea. My ego was activated not my truth.

Anger, I learned, is a secondary emotion, it masks something hidden. What was it telling me? I often found parts of my inner child asking to be held or acknowledged. Resentment pointed to repressed feelings coming to the surface to be addressed. Where had I silenced myself? What needed expressing? And lack, sweet lack, pointed to where I didn’t feel worthy, offering an opportunity to see where I wanted more or where I didn’t feel safe.

Each emotion coupled with scrutiny, became clearer and clearer, like wearing glasses after your eyesight has been diminishing for quite some time. If I allowed myself to stay curious, they were an invitation to a truer version of me. By naming them without judgment, I could finally hear what they were trying to tell me and relinquish their weighty burden.

Unbeknownst to me, what I was doing was romancing my shadow. Connie Zwieg, a pioneer in shadow work, describes the shadow as a “cavern in your mind that holds your dark, forbidden feelings, secret wishes, and creative urges. Dr. Carl Jung coined the term Shadow to refer to this area of the unconscious mind, which is outside of the light of awareness. Over time, these unconscious forces take on a life of their own, building charge and forming shadow figures, which emerge as limiting and self-sabotaging feelings and behaviors.”

Our shadows often operate as blind spots, usually living in the realms of power, sex, and money. By courting them, we can actually begin to move through them. Though, this type of investigation requires radical honesty with yourself. I had to get really real. What did I want? What was enough for me? Would I be okay if my current reality was the rest of my life? What does contentment mean to me? How do I find it? What are my values? Was what I thought I wanted in alignment with that values system? By getting granular with these questions, I was able to arrive at an accurate understanding of myself and the life I was actually trying to build, not the one I thought I wanted.

The second mechanism that really helped me was I started to treat writing as a practice. Over the days and months of this rhythm, it became fun. Becoming so in love with the process is a really great way to avoid existentialism. When I’m writing, I’m so focused on getting the thoughts out, finding the right words to describe what I’m trying to convey that I am nothing but present. And that is what Eckhart Tolle says is the key to life, supposedly.

The writing practice worked in tandem with examining my shadow. Together, they allowed me to slowly move through what was happening rather than bypassing it. Eventually, day by day, moment by moment, you change. It’s slow and deliberate. Until one day I felt like myself again, the version of me that believed anything was possible before the world told me otherwise. I have these flashes, I’ll be at dinner with a friend and find the champagne so overwhelmingly delightful or the waiter is just *chef’s kiss*, or the sky produces searing pinks that I become joy incarnate. I start to morph into the part of Sheree I most admire, this thing that felt so hard to attain and was reserved for my geriatric years is starting to peek through. That is the fun at my core that Vance recognized. I see why Sheree describes it as a discipline. It demands cultivation. The more we train ourselves to find the mundane bewildering, the easier it is to find. It feels amazing to touch that state for a mere second. I'm now imagining what it would be like to live in it more permanently. The path back to joy, to fun as I've learned, runs directly through our darkness. If we take advantage of the darkness, invite it in, look at it, like really look at it, we can come out the other side and leave it behind. It’s a magnificent opportunity, if we let it be.

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