Here's my understanding of "shadow work", which I believe was invented by Jung. Unpleasant thoughts and emotions are made conscious. In this way, the energy behind them is released and they no longer influence you subconsciously. This ties in nicely with the Buddhist Vipassana mindfulness meditation technique, although they are separate processes.
In practical terms, I notice that something is bothering me, or that there is some unhelpful pattern in the way I live my life, and I sit down and pay attention to how I feel. I do this on the level of individual physical sensations. When thoughts arise, I let them go. When painful feelings arise, I notice the automatic urge to flinch away from them, and I simply allow them to be there, and I experience them fully.
In this way, their function (as "messengers") is fulfilled, and they disappear. As a result, I feel relief and "lightness", a feeling of being relieved of burdens.
The meditation / Buddhist phrase often used is that of "two darts".
The first dart is the "real" affliction. So an easy example is - you wake up with a migraine.
The first dart is real. It's an actual thing.
The second dart though is your response. So in the case of a migraine you might feel all sorts of things: anger that it's happening again, irritation that it's today when you've got so much to do; worry that you've got a brain tumour; sadness that you're going to miss lunch... Insert a hundred similar responses here...
What a meditation practice can do - and what Jung was sort of talking about - is make yourself much more aware of your responses. Although the first "dart" may be "real" and (in our example) you're gunna have a headache no matter what you do, you can relieve the suffering by lessening or even removing altogether the second darts.
There's an often used quote which is attributed to Viktor Frankl (I'm not sure it was actually him...), but:
“Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.”
This is where some (only some in my experience and opinion) of the power of meditation is realised.
I like how Ken Wilber puts it (the consequence of practicing awareness): "hurts more, bothers you less." As someone else here mentioned, the dentist is a great place to practice mindfulness and surrender to pain.
The key distinction seems to be between "pain" (the first dart) and suffering (the second, which is created by resisting the first). The Buddha defined enlightenment as "the end of suffering" (not the end of pain). The pain is still there, and you feel it more keenly than ever -- but it doesn't bother you.
Well put - lingering and unprocessed emotions don't go away, they fester.
Shadow work often refers to dredging up feelings you have pushed down as "unacceptable" - anger being a common one. The idea being that shadow work helps you move towards total emotional development by embracing all of your emotional faculties.
Yeah that's a more accurate way of putting it - things like accepting your repressed sexuality would also count as working towards being a more fully defined and self accepting person, for instance.
>[...] certain areas of thoughts that tend to recur can be set aside and the feeling associated with them identified. The feeling can then be worked with by first accepting that it is there, without resisting it or condemning it. And then one begins to empty out the energy of the feeling directly by letting it be what it is until it runs out. Somewhat later, the former thoughts can now be looked at and their character will be observed to have changed. If the feeling has been totally surrendered and let go, usually all thoughts associated with it will have disappeared entirely and been replaced by a concluding thought which handles the matter quickly.
From Letting Go: The Pathway of Surrender by David R. Hawkins (Chapter 3: The Anatomy of Emotions)
This is sublimely deep and the root cause of the worlds problems. In cases where you cannot attain this naturally, mother nature has given psychoactive plants you along.
I don’t think “to make something conscious” means to make it clear, but rather to personify it:
* “Hate the sin, love the sinner”
* “Don’t hate the player, hate the game”
* “People don’t have ideas, ideas have people”
* “Memes should be considered as living structures, not just metaphorically”
So, morally, it is profound (“enlightening”) to admit a reality of evil as conscious.
To become conscious of all things a person must look for that which they are unconscious of rather than focusing purely on that which they are already conscious of. Most people prefer to see themselves as competent, but to be a master one must always see oneself as a beginner.
"imagining figures of light" implies trying to believe in a goodness that doesn't really exist, while "making the darkness conscious" implies making an uncomfortable effort to become aware of the darker aspects of reality, to know it better.
I think, it implies that following an ideal (light) is futile, only seeing what is (darkness) works.
The most popular religion in the world is based on fall from grace, original sin that we must attone for to become pure again. Alternative is that there is no going back and no perfect world or state of mind ahead, only the reality, which is sometimes dirty and messy and for many of us hard to see clearly.
I don’t think so. Jordan Peterson is heavily influenced by Jung, and he said something that might be closer to Jung’s point:
> In some sense, I believed in the devil before I believed in God.
To unpack that a bit, he said suffering is the most real thing there is, and was obsessed with understanding how the unprecedented evil of the 20th century happened. That led him to reason that if evil like that can exist, its opposite might also exist, and has been finding his way to God ever since.
"Stand at the brink of the abyss of despair, and when you see that you cannot bear it anymore, draw back a little and have a cup of tea" ~Elder Sophrony of Essex
