Speaking Shadow
speaking about shadow, scapegoating, shame and sin eating, indigeny and mystery.
It is Yule, the winter solstice today — a time when darkness (in the northern hemisphere) is most present in the physical world. I rose before first light to go up the hill, led by the birdsong prophesy of dawn...drummed as sky blushed and sun peaked the hill top...offered my nightdreams into that night/day threshold…their mysterious message was heard within me and around me and wove into the cold morning. It is also dark moon , so the annual sun and monthly moon cycles into darkness are a confluence of two black-watered rivers and I am taken by their current. I write from that flow today.
Firstly, I have to say that if you are holding the binary of light=good and dark= bad then the cosmology that I speak for may be confusing, disturbing even. I am a lover of darkness and light. There is beauty, nourishment and necessity in both, as well as damage done when we align ourselves with either polarity and neglect to tend and honour the other. Balance is my north star (and don’t I forget to follow its guidance at times?!).
As I receive uploads from the threshold where I either find myself or, like this morning, seek to place myself, I’m going to share them here. I hope that they are worthy of your time and sifting (sensing, imagining, feeling and thinking).I also hope that they stir you, even upset your apple cart if it needs upsetting. I hope that when that happens, these words land like love spoken by one who will risk the friendship for the sake of the friend.
I’ll be meandering off into other speakings about sin eating , shame, types of shadow, scapegoats , indigeny and death ritual in later writings - if there are particular terrains in that region that you’d like my siftings on then please do let me know and I’ll see what I can unearth.
And who are you ? You may be someone who also feels a pull to know rich fertile darkness in your psyche and in the world – to be in relationship with “…dark, too [who] blooms and sings ” as poet Wendell Berry puts is. You may be curious about the particular element of darkness that is shadow. You may be one who has an uncanny ability to sniff out the seedy, seamy side of being human in these times, or one with a moth-like draw to the black flame of what is taboo, repelled, repressed. You may be what is often called a black sheep – one who is of your people, yet also seen as odd and is sometimes maligned for that...or maybe you are a scapegoat – one who, perhaps since childhood, is on the receiving end of projections, attacks and misrepresentations...an outsider.
May this writing be a strong stone fold on a barren hillside for black sheep and scapegoats and those who wander at the margins. Welcome. Please, lick your wounds, drink and eat your fill and then, when you are rested and ready, feel your power - you have a sacred job to do in these times! (I’ll be writing more about this soon - I am a Sin Eater, which is a British version of an indigenous practice that many healthy nature based cultures have that offers a different way of tending shadow, darkness, death and ending thresholds so that scapegoating, othering etc isn’t needed and the balance of the life/death cycle is tended…)
What is shadow ? I could get into the academics of this question, of “who-said-what-about-shadow”. Part of me would enjoy nerding about all that with you. Go ahead and do your own nerding and find your own innerstanding on your definition of shadow. Being shady, the definition of shadow is a little fuzzy round the edges and having your own intimacy with it is recommended. For now I’m going to share my current perception, which is largely shaped by tracking shadow for a long time (even as a child when I didn’t know what I was sensing that moved in the space between people) and from learning with Bill Plotkin, Sage Magdelene and the underworld-loving folk of Animas Valley Institute. Listen in and sift what feels true for you:
What we don’t know about ourselves individually and as a society/collective is in Shadow. It is what we are not consciously aware of.
Personal shadows are the parts of ourselves that as young children we deemed so threatening to acceptance in our family and/or wider community that we didn’t just suppress them, we exiled them out of our own awareness. They often show up as things we project onto others – both sinister and amazing traits.
Collective shadows are the parts that we don’t know about ourselves as a group and come to us through the consciousness of whatever society we are raised in. We can be spectacularly unaware of them because they are so “normal” to us that we can’t imagine how it could be otherwise - often it is only when we consciously and humbly learn about/ crash into other human cultures ( past or present) that have a different consciousness that we may be able to see things differently.
There is also “the Shadow” which is not a human-centred thing. In simplest terms, in my cosmology everything is made from love...and love is like a big fire – and big flames make big shadows...so the Shadow is the natural flipside of love. All our human shadow is part of it, yet the Shadow is cosmically big, black-hole- big, because love is cosmically big. And there is a balancing needed in the cosmos in which we each play a small part...ie if we don’t tend to our personal shadows and our collective shadows then things can get out of kilter on this planet and in all the worlds ... And so I write here in service of love and its shadow at a time when the kilter feels pretty “out”.
Sifts on the nature of shadow A thing about shadow is that its hard to see. We all have capacity to notice shadow and welcome its gifts back into our own psyche. However, there are parts in us that don’t want to see it in ourselves – as a child we unconsciously decided that a part of our nature was a threat to our belonging so we hid that part from ourselves. Those young parts may still be scared and/or ashamed , and so we fervently deny it/condemn it if someone mirrors back to us something of our personal shadow. Shadow comes very often with shame and unless we are well resourced psycho spiritually and can meet it with the parts of our psyche that are adult, the shame can feel intolerable...we don’t want to feel that and so we don’t go looking for it.
Also, I believe that the Shadow is its own thing and has its own agency...and thus its own reason for not wanting to be seen. Many indigenous cultures recognise and focus much energy on guardianship and protective practices around “dark entities”...ie I sift that these entities are part of “ the Shadow” rather than all of darkness being sinister or malign. I wonder (respectfully) about where that polarity arose i.e is something lost in translation as indigenous culture was communicated through the lens of colonised consciousness with its “either/or” binary ? Or maybe I’ve got something to learn here ... In a nutshell, Shadow can be tricky to grapple with.
An impact of imbalance Luckily, there are some people who have a heightened ability to sense shadow in other people and in groups and thus could be extremely helpful in alchemising the more difficult aspects of shadow for individuals and for groups of people. (If you are one of those people then you have my condolences and gratitude)
Unluckily, us moderns are raised with a colonising consciousness that leans heavily towards valuing the light and has actively demonised darkness for centuries. So, those people with the heightened awareness don’t get guidance in cultivating and working with this much needed and potent gift.
Those in the past who were in relationship with darkness and had practices to alchemise shadow in Europe were intentionally destroyed ( along with many people who were scapegoats for their community and called witches.) The kind of awareness that can track shadow was formally “othered” as the Age of Enlightenment rolled in – when science/ ration and what is conscious was crowned king whilst the intuitive, sensing, imaginal and mysterious realms that help keep humans in communication and balance with the wider web of life were relegated to the territory of “lesser” humans i.e women, children, the mentally disturbed, old fashioned/superstitious people, savages, indigenous etc.
Today the people with these sensitivities to darkness and what can be within it (wild creativity, shadow etc) are vulnerable to being scapegoated in their family/community, betrayed and maligned in many ways, as well as becoming mentally ill. They can be manipulative, troublemaking and difficult people who leave a wake of energetic disruption wherever they go too...or both! Occasionally you come across people who’ve managed to feel their way in the dark; that have picked up the thread that leads them towards a way to be of service with this sensitivity and are no longer identifying as victims of it. I’m one of those people ( though I can say that part of my path to here has been through experiencing all of the above difficulties too.)
Seeing shadow Most folks ( including me) feel uncomfortable being seen from a shadow angle by someone who is sensitive to shadow …I’ll write more about the cultural mechanisms of scapegoating another time, yet that kind of “othering”, especially within families is often focused on the person who can see through the performance of the family myth to what is shadowy and supressed. In my own experience , I became the family scapegoat before I had any capacity to speak about what was hidden in our family…and naturally being the scapegoat made me more sensitive to vibes/shifts in people as hypervigilance to avoid attack was necessary. My presence and energy of anxious doubt/mistrust was sufficient to draw negative attention.
Here’s a memory from the first time I consciously realised that I had an uncomfortable knack of sensing stuff about others. I was 24 when I met a man who’d moved to the Welsh village I lived in — all the non-Welsh incomers tended to know each other and welcomed new folks to parties, gatherings etc . His outward presentation was friendly, courteous, funny and I had no objective reason to feel so disturbed by him. He was always pleasant to me and I returned this as authentically as I was able, yet there was something about him that put my hackles up.
He bought a house in the nearby town and invited my partner and I over to show us round and have some food. We went, and I couldn’t shake this sense of disturbance around him. Yet I had no way to check it out so continued to be curious and kind whilst on alert. I noticed he had a big camera with a long lens at one window that looked towards the backs of other houses and a school playground. I asked him what he was looking at with it and he said “ I like watching the birds”. There was a tree or two in the backyards, so I didn’t question further.
A few months later he came to my leaving party at which we all got rather merry. I went upstairs and he followed me. Suddenly, cornered in my room by this man, the disturbing sense I’d had of him resolved into me recognising aggression, sexual energy and an aching loneliness. His face was about 2 inches from mine when he snarled “ you spend so long looking at peoples shadows you don’t see their light”. I felt in danger physically, yet I was momentarily shocked by some truth in his words...at no point previous had I heard him speak in any way that was revealing of him or of his perception of me. I felt seen in that moment of terror. I also realised that, though I’d been friendly and polite, he must have sensed my tracking something in him. He left the party pretty swiftly after that and I never saw him again. I didn’t tell anyone about the encounter as it was my wounding to blame myself and to imagine that I was being over-dramatic and to accept male aggression as the norm.
Months later, I heard from mutual acquaintances that he’d been beaten up very badly and was in hospital .He’d set up a gymnastics club at the local church hall for young girls and had been sexually inappropriate with 3 of them. There seemed a universal surprise amongst the folks who knew him that such a pleasant man could do something like that… yet I felt no surprise. I wasn’t happy that my constant discomfort with him proved to be something as damaging as active paedophilia ,yet there was some relief in recognising that when I have that weird stirring sensation in my body around someone which seems out of sync with their presentation and manner and/or my own inner state of composure, then something shadowy is around.
Though I now trust my sense of something shifting in the dark is a real thing, it took a long while for my ego to hold lightly and with curiosity the hunches I have about what that hidden thing might be! For example, I often labelled the discomfort I felt in the presence of others as something like judgement or threat because, growing up as a scapegoat in a family that had a strong practice of shaming and violence, that’s what I had learnt to expect...whereas sometimes it turned out that it was actually something more welcome like sexual attraction, envy or grief etc. After much self- healing and wholing work, my hunches are fairly accurate. However, I am still humbled regularly by how far-off I can be and strive to be curious rather than certain !
Also, key to being one who sees shadow is Love — to sense Shadow with ruthless compassion. As a counsellor /life coach/mentor for 30 years, I’ve been privileged to hear 100’s of personal stories and confessions that have never been spoken to anyone else….without softness and curiosity I doubt I would have been entrusted with them…and without that faith I have in the value and necessity of shadow, I wonder if they would have been surfaced at all.
Dark Waters — paintings by Thierry de Cordier