Darkness and Light: Embracing Our Shadows

This week we’re talking about the darkness and light inside of us. We will be looking at ways to acknowledge our shadow-selves. Not just acknowledge, why it’s worth the effort to embrace your shadow and unleash its power! Darkness and light. You hear it all the time, that we’re made up of both. I think the best visual representative of that is the yin and yang symbol. Black and white. Each has a dot of the other inside. Balanced. Perfect. Visually pleasing.

Why does darkness or specifically, shadow get such a bad rap?  It’s weird because when I make art, I need shadows AND light to define shape. Both are of equal importance, there’s no value judgment. So, why do we judge darkness and light attributes of ourselves differently?

Show Pros and Socials:
Art Director – Nora Hotes, graphic designer, multi-media artist extraordinaire

Link to Audio Engineer—Aidan Conners

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Host, Jennifer Hotes, on Twitter

Episode Materials: 

Sermon by Reverend Pat, Unity Church of Portland:

Wild Mind, a field guide to the human psyche by Bill Plotkin

Shadow-Self article, Lonerwolf

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Transcript

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You are listening to Curious Cat, a podcast that examines the shadowy space, where science and the supernatural collide. And I'm your host, Jennifer Hotes. Join me every Friday to examine what it means to be a soul in a meat suit. Welcome to Curious Cat.(Intro music) Hi, thanks for being here. I hope you're well. This week we are talking about the darkness and light inside of us. We will be looking at ways to acknowledge our shadow selves will not just acknowledge why it's worth the effort to embrace your shadow and unleash its power. Just a quick reminder off the top, you'll find a link to the sources I cite in the show notes. So darkness and light, you hear it all the time that we're made up of both. I think the best visual representation of it is the yin and yang symbol, black and white. Each has a dash of the other color inside, it's balanced. It's perfect. It's visually pleasing. It's weird, though, because when I make art, I need shadows, and light to define shape. Both are equal in importance. There's not a value judgment. It just is. So why do we judge the darkness and light attributes of ourselves differently? I think I'm getting ahead of myself. Maybe it's the author and me, but I'd like to be intentional with our language and look at what I mean by darkness and light. I've seen darkness or the shadow self defined as repressed ideas, instincts, impulses, weaknesses, desires, and embarrassing fears. Our darkness or shadow can show up outwardly through anger, vengeance, control, fear, shame, competitiveness, jealousy, lust. So in a nutshell, our shadow self is our wildness. So how about the light selves? Pulled mostly from religious archetypes, where this concept is fleshed out? I think the most light is synonymous with noble values like love, peace, patience, joy, harmony, generosity, compassion. I mean, you can almost hear the sweet sweet heart music can chew. This is the stuff of the saints and of the pure of heart. seems clear, though, after looking at both definitions, why we show off our lightness, you know, put it on our front billboard, and hide those shadows, doesn't it? I'm just not sure we should. And I'm hoping after having a listen, you are sure you should never hide your shadow. So poet, Robert Bly said this,"We have a long bag that we dragged behind us. We have spent the first 20 years of our lives stuffing 90% of our wholeness into it, and the rest of our lives attempting to retrieve those items." So how do we retrieve those items and take back our wholeness by descending into those dark places to retrieve the lost pieces? I definitely relate to this, especially the last part. I've been retrieving the last pieces of myself this last year, and it's like a breadcrumb trail. It all traces back to my younger self, to little Jen. But let's break down what poet-Bly conveys. We hide 90% of ourselves, and then spend the rest of our lives looking for the last pieces. That's a damn shame. I mean, why? Why did we feel the need to hide the majority of ourselves in the first place? Before I got ready for this podcast I could only guess but after doing some research I I feel strongly that I have an answer and it really stems from our western upbringing. I think the first part of the story is that we're born babies helpless and without any language. Parents taught us using simplest terms to convey information fast. Hot, cold, good, bad. They taught to the extremes, right? Subtleties come later. But the impact of that early learning is to conditioned us to pay most attention or sole attention to the extremes. That good, hot, cold, nice, mean safe danger. Soon the stuff in between becomes invisible or just basically unnoticed. Religion tends to do the same, it teaches to the extremes. Good and Evil, angel and devil heaven in hell, sinful and sinless, forgiven and damned. It is a world created of black and white. It's a simplistic way to look at the world. I mean, it's pretty divisive, isn't it? Because so quickly it becomes us versus them. Democrat versus Republican, I mean, fill in the blank, we are hard wired to have two camps for everything, and one is perceived as good and one is perceived as not good. Both the cultural and religious influences they tend to see lead us to see ourselves in the world through this biopic lens. I don't think it's healthy to exclude that mass, that chunk that exists in between the gray area, I mean, that makes up the bulk of reality. But notice how we, as we grow older, it's the in between stuff that tends to captivate us. I mean, it's a salty, sweet factor, Moviemaker Pixar, has made this their sweet spot. They were some of the first to do it rolling out a tragic scene. Like when Ellie dies in the movie UP, but then while we're still dabbing our tears, they hit us with a joke. And the laughter comes in rolls and it is all the sweeter for the preceding pain. I'm not sure why that is, is it because they catch us with our guards down or vulnerable? It just hits different. But going back to you and me? If we value only half of ourselves and banish the other parts to our soul basements, well, seems like we may be missing out on the best of us. The combination of feeling two things at the same time? It highlights how beautiful and complicated we are, us humans. There's compassion and ire, love and fear, faith and concern, certainty and surprise, kind of the nitty gritty of life, isn't it? Remember, again, that yin and yang symbol, perfect balance, that includes darkness and light. author Bill Plotkin warns us not to dismiss the importance of our shadows in his book, Wild Mind, which is excellent, and probably worthy of an episode on its own. But in his book, he says, "The shadow is not what we know about ourselves, don't like and keep hidden. Rather, the shadow is what is true about us that we don't know at all. And if accused of would adamantly and sincerely deny." I think what he's saying there is that our shadow self is our untapped potential. It's kind of our superpower. I'll go further and say it's not healthy to hate half of yourself, or duct tape its mouth and stuff down to the basement. Again, thinking of the yin and yang, picture that symbol. Without the black. It's unbalanced. The symbol would cease to mean anything, it would collapse. So what are we doing to ourselves if we ignore, neglect, deny half of who we are? In a recent sermon, Reverend Pat from the Unity Church of Greater Portland said, "True healing means to make whole." I'll say it again. True. Healing is to make whole! Doesn't that make the pursuit of marrying our darkness with our light seem worth the trouble? Put another way, Carl Jung said, "Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate." So if you want to live an intentional life, better learn to live with your shadow self. Embrace it. Put simply, own your shadow. Reclaim the things you hate about yourself. What would it feel like to reclaim everything you hate about yourself? Reverend Pat that I referenced earlier had parishoners do an exercise. During the sermon she had everybody pause. And she asked people to spend the next few days noticing their shadow selves, noticing the parts of themselves that they hide. That's an education in and of itself. So let's go back. My challenge is reclaim the attributes you hate about yourself. What would it feel like to do that? Well, I'm living proof of it. I still have shadow, oh, my goodness, my voice is in my shadow. But here I am doing a podcast. If I'm honest, I haven't really bored deeply into that yet. Let's look at the benefit of reclaiming all of yourself. It's powerful. Many spiritual advisors will tell you your power lies in your shadow. Like Plotkin said, it's your superpower. So here's something in my shadow. It's my negative body image. I remember the minute I went from being a confident, blissfully unaware, teen to this perpetually self doubting me, that basically defined the rest of my life up until recently, in the spirit of helping us to break those old cycles online tell you the full story. So at the time, I was a three season athlete, which meant I participated in sports every season volleyball in the fall, gymnastics in the winter, and softball in the spring. And during my free time I do the run along the Columbia River, which was like a two mile sprint. Basically, I was in the best shape of my life. When I was blindsided by a family member. I'll never forget I was in the kitchen, I had just come back from a run. I'll never forget the pattern of the carpet. I think I was getting water. And they said that they would pay me a quarter per pound to lose weight. They were going to pay me to lose weight. We weren't even talking about weight. And it just came out of the blue. At that moment. Everything changed. My confidence was completely gone and went from being feeling healthy and strong to oh my god, like sick and paranoid and anxious. I stood there. And just, I remember wondering for I don't know how long after, how many people think I'm fat? How many people think that I'm unhealthy. I've carried that self hate up until recently, I promise it goes back to the powerful part that I'll loop back to it, I promise. So reclaiming every part of yourselves is also clarifying. Going back to my experience, now that I've brought that into the light, I'm no longer comfortable saying I hate my body. It crosses a line, partly because I've been doing inner work to heal but also because this body brought two amazing children into the world. These lungs and legs and heart. They're hearty enough to carry me during my daily runs. In fact, taking that shadow self and shining a light on it has led me to create this new ritual, which I haven't even said out loud until now. As I run I think my body from my toes to my head. I express gratitude. And when I injure myself, I thank my body for its resilience, its ability to heal. And when that old voice rattles through my head telling me I'm chubby, I say something positive and allowed her inner voice. I'm definitely a work in progress, but it is clarifying. It's also energizing to reclaim your shadow. Really, our shadows are the part of us that we deem unfit for public consumption, you know, just unsavory to society. So it's no surprise. we expend a lot of energy keeping that stuff secret. When we bring our shadow self into the light of day, it's an instant ego shrinker. Another benefit it is emboldening now their story during the lockdown Wattpad which is an online reading and site I'm sure you're probably aware of it, but they had a call out for horror stories. So I wrote one called Drive. It was about a woman that had been abused, it was a ghost story, you know. Sometime later that night after I'd published the piece, I received a DM and I'm paraphrasing but it said basically how can a lady as nice as you write things that are so horrible? And it wasn't a stranger, it was somebody that I'd known for years. But that text it led me to examine myself and my penchant for all things spooky. And I realized, I'm nice, because I found a way to express my fears, anxiety, curiosity, darkness, through my storytelling. I don't tamp it down and bottle it up and explode in strange places. Or, I'm not a aggressive driver, you know, taking out my aggression on other people. I literally am just processing my emotions in a safe, productive way with my storytelling. An author, friend of mine, Alex, may he rest in peace. He embodied that and we talked about it a lot, this dichotomy. He wrote horror, and was a loving stay at home parent to his two kids. The more I thought about that DM, the more furious I became, I would wager my last nickel that no one has slid into Stephen King's DMS to ask him how such a nice guy could write such horrible stuff. So embracing my shadow has made me bolder. Thanks for being here to discuss darkness and light. I want to know what this has meant for you. Are you examining all of yourself? Are you committed to reclaiming the power in your shadow? Tell me about your journey. And hit me in the comments. Next week, please join me for a conversation about spiritual hygiene. The topic was inspired by my very favorite podcast, A Psychic's Story. It was just a simple comment during the podcast last week, and it caused me to ask is the daily care of your spiritual self as important as brushing your teeth? And the short answer? Yes. Thank you for listening to Curious Cat. Huge gratitude for my art director, and audio engineer. If you are in need of those services. Please find their links in the show notes, contact them. Also, be sure to subscribe so you never miss an episode. Join the conversation on Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook. I'm asking for you to like and review Curious Cat on your favorite streaming service in hopes it will help us jump up in the search. If you DM me on social media, Twitter or Instagram, a photo of your Like or review, then I'll send you a free decal if you're one of the first 100 and live in the US. Until next time, be well, stay curious, and know that I love you.