Usually when we talk about parts of ourselves that we have disowned and placed into the shadow, we're referring to less desirable material such as fear, rage, shame, and despair. The shadow is seen as the dark repository for all of the so-called negative aspects of ourselves, i.e. our unhealthy dependency, unacknowledged narcissism, unmet hopelessness, and the looming ghosts of our unlived lives.
But it is not only negative aspects that we defend against, dissociate from, and place into the unconscious. Many of us have lost the capacity to access, embody, and express more “positive” experiences such as contentment, pleasure, creativity, sexuality, intimacy, and connectedness.
While it is a bit harder to wrap our minds around, some of us have disconnected from the simple experience of joy, a spontaneous sense of elation at being alive. For example, if the very natural, raw, human experience of joy constellated complexes in our parents – say it brought up anxiety in Mom, anger in Dad, or caused others to shame or pull away from us – we learned quite quickly that joy is not okay, and even potentially dangerous. This reality can be very confusing as we come to associate the experience of joy with being unsafe.
As a little one, with a developing brain and nervous system, we learn to disown or dissociate from any state of mind which has the potential to disrupt the tie to critical attachment figures. This capacity of repression is intelligent and creative, and in many cases saved our lives. But many of us long to know joy again, to feel alive, to fully participate here.
To re-train ourselves to feel joy is not an easy path as by definition we will have to step back through that anxiety, panic, and sense of annihilation that the repression of joy has served to protect us from. But it is a path well worth exploring. To allow ourselves, as part of our inquiry, to see the ways we have placed not only “negative” material into the unconscious shadow, but how we have split off from the positive as well.
In close relationships there may always be ruptures which arise in the field of lovers and friends. When we take the risk of allowing another to matter, when we open our bodies and our hearts to them, a call is sent out to the lost ones of the inner family, an invitation to return home.
Relationship has an uncanny ability to illuminate those parts of ourselves that we have lost touch with – the orphans of the emotional world, and the emissaries of our unlived lives. As wisdom-guides, they remind us of the two great relational fears, of being abandoned or overwhelmed by the other. We’re just not sure if we want to take that kind of risk.
As we deepen along the way, we may discover that the “other” is not only those fellow travelers that we meet, but that there is also an “inner other” who also longs to be known, to be held, and to be a part of the love story of our lives. This “other” yearns more than anything for intimacy, to no longer be shut out, and to enter into union with us exactly as we are.
The lost sadness, the disallowed joy, the unmet rage, the repressed grief. The barely remembered peace, the dissociated despair, the forgotten beauty. These ones are alive and will continue their journey to find you. They will never give up and will continue to take form as your lovers, family members, and friends, including those who irritate you the most.
The invitation of the beloved, in each of its forms, is to step fully into the crucible of relationship where we no longer limit the mystery of love’s expression, resisting the temptation to have the fires of love conform to our requirements. And to open to the reality that perhaps the purpose of relationship is not to provide consistent feelings of safety, certainty, connection, and validation.
The beloved has not come to confirm what we think love is – or the ways we have come to believe we must be seen - but rather to introduce us to the creative terrain of the unknown, and to the poetic depth of our own hearts. To reintroduce us to the inner family and the soul parts that have become lost along the way.
As we reunite with these ones and allow them safe passage, we remove the burden from the external other to take care of this sacred task for us, which was never theirs to carry. They are able to return it to us, as the ultimate act of love, where it will be safe enough for them now to come closer.
In the contemporary self-help world, we are often admonished to “let go” of difficult states of mind that we do not like, those that emerge out of the darkness and dwell in the underworld, and are not deemed valid by a more solar/ transcendent spirituality. Anger is bad, confusion is a sign we’ve failed, fear is fantasized as some “opposite” of love, and so forth. As a result, these only get pushed further into the shadow where they will eventually come out, often in ways that further suffering for ourselves and others.
As with all teachings and medicines, there is wisdom in letting go, however as always the invitation is into subtlety and into depth, not into bite-sized fast-food spiritual clichés. In my clinical work I have seen how the project of "letting go" for many can be yet another manifestation of unconscious self-aggression and the abandonment of parts of ourselves that were not acceptable in our families of origin. In this sense, the demand that we let them go is often an enactment of the way our emotional world was related to at an earlier time: “Just get over it. Snap out of it. Stop crying. We’ve given you everything, stop being so sad. Don’t you dare get angry with me.” Another way that we end up attacking our own vulnerability, in ways that are remarkably similar to the way it was met when we were younger.
From this perspective, anger does not need to be "let go of," nor do jealousy, shame, sadness, despair, fear, or a sense of unworthiness. The invitation is to step off the battlefield and into curiosity, relationship, kindness, and meaning. We are never going to find the intimacy, connection, and freedom we are longing for as long as we are subtly at war with parts of ourselves, deeming them invalid and splitting off from the thoughts, feelings, and impulses that the world has said are not okay, including the spiritual world which is oriented in its own conditioning. But only by providing a home and a sanctuary where the entire inner ecology of what we are can be held, contained, and its rightful place can be found.
These parts of ourselves need not be “let go” but will “let go” of us when their function is no longer needed, when we no longer require the protection they have provided, and when we have fully turned toward them, listened to their meaning and called off the war. When we have allowed them to share their essence. When we have allowed their wisdom nature to come through the symptom and for its messages to be decoded. When the figures of the inner landscape have been met, tended to with soul, and touched with presence.
In the Dzogchen tradition, it is said that the nature of all experience is to "self-liberate" in open, compassionate awareness. It does not require our efforts to transform it, including “letting it go” in order to experience the freedom and aliveness that is the birthright of all beings. We do not need to get rid, of shift, or even heal these difficult states, or convert them into their opposites. But to hold these parts and provide them with space, as we begin to discover that they are not enemies to do battle with, but as allies come to remind us of how vast we truly are.
