Understanding Your Shadow
Your ability to liberate yourself from
the fears and doubts that have held you back is a vital part of your
growth and development. Here is Jon Kabat-Zinn to explain how these
fears and doubts accumulate, and how you can free yourself from them. Robert Bly, the poet, has a wonderful
image of a little black bag — a Jungian image of a little black bag that
we're born with attached to our hip. As we grow, and people don't like
certain things about us, and we want to please our parents, for
instance, they say, "Well, good girls don't do that" or "Good boys don't
do that." To please our parents, we might take that part of us and
stuff it in the bag. We're very sensitive to how society looks at us and
how our peers look at us, and so forth.
As you get older, there is a
tendency to take all those parts of you that you get the message are not
really acceptable, and stuff them. By the time you get to high school,
your bag might be a mile long, filled with all sorts of aspects of
yourself that you don't show to anybody else. Then, after a while, you
forget they are there yourself.
It brings up a lot of feelings of
inadequacy and trepidation — "Oh, I could never do that" or "Oh, you
know, that's not for me" — because we've whittled ourselves down into a
very reduced aspect of this extraordinary genius and flowering of being
that's called the human baby, a human infant, before they start to get
the message that they're only okay if they sleep at night or they're
only okay if they do this or they're not okay if they do that. We take
those messages literally even before we understand language. We pick up
on those messages nonverbally, and it does something to our self-esteem.
So
by the time you're in the work force, your bag might be four miles
long, with all the things you're not willing to look at and you don't
want to show other people, or you might not even show to your spouse or
admit to anybody. And when you go to work on Monday morning, you're
dragging this long bag behind you. It may be invisible, but it's there
nevertheless. It weighs you down. You wonder why you don't feel like
going into work on Monday. Well, you're carrying a lot of darkness and
grief, and a lot of it is toxic. And the more it stays shut in there,
the more toxic it gets. It just festers.
So, is it valuable to
peek in the bag every once in a while? Maybe open it up and let some of
that stuff out? It is. Do you want to let it all out at once? Probably
not. But practicing mindfulness, you can probably let out large amounts
of it, and do well with it, because the mindfulness instructions keep
you balanced.
If it comes up, just watch it. See it as thoughts in
the mind, or feelings. They're not you; they're just feelings. They're
just thoughts. If you identify with them — that's my thought, my feeling
or my pain — then you're in trouble. But the "my" isn't necessary. It's
extra because that "you" doesn't exist any more unless you want to keep
it there.
So this is a
profound area of self-liberation, and usually we have regulatory
mechanisms so we won't get any more deeply into the black bag than we
can prepare. So, maybe you just want to get your little toe in there,
just for 30 seconds, and then back off. But after time, you start to
actually absorb your own shadow material — your own dark side, so to
speak — and open it up. And the more you're open to it, the more those
shadows just dissolve. It's not that you have to solve all these
problems of 30 years of horror in your life. They will start to dissolve
by themselves. Why? Because human beings are intrinsically
self-regulating, self-healing organisms, not just bodies.
Now, here are two things you can do on a regular basis to become a more spontaneous and happy person.
First,
recognize that you were born with no fears, doubts, hesitations or
reservations at all. Everything that holds you back today you have
learned as a result of childhood conditioning. Within you there is a
happy, liberated spirit yearning to be free.
Second,
resolve today to stretch yourself to act in a way that is more
consistent with your true self. Do something out of the ordinary. And
don't worry about what other people may think about you, because they're
probably not thinking about you at all.
