The Long Black Bag

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.