This weekend, I’m at the wedding of two dear friends and teachers of mine, Tani and Leslie, the founders of the Light Dark Institute.
So it seems like a good time to tell you about one of the most important things they’ve taught me:
You need your darkness.
What is shadow work?
There’s a term in Jungian psychology called the shadow: the parts of ourselves we’ve rejected, hidden, or decided are NOT ME.
And shadow work is, broadly speaking, the practice of getting curious about those disowned parts and bringing them back into conscious relationship with ourselves.
We tend to think of our shadows as the obviously undesirable stuff:
Anger. Selfishness. Neediness. Arrogance. Cruelty.
But when we exile a part of ourselves, we don’t only put away the qualities we don’t like.
We lose access to that part’s gifts, too.
Sometimes qualities like power, assertiveness, confidence, desire, creativity, or the capacity to set a really clear boundary get banished right along with whatever we decided was unacceptable.
Which is why exploring your darkness isn’t really about becoming darker.
It’s about becoming more whole.
What happened when I reclaimed my cruelty
I learned this in a particularly confronting way years ago through some shadow work I did with the Animas Valley Institute.
One of the prompts was:
I may be a lot of things, but I’m definitely not ________.
Two words came immediately to me:
Cruel.
And stupid.
I decided to start with cruel.
Fun!
The premise wasn’t that I should go forth and become cruel.
It was that cruelty exists in the human experience, and therefore the insistence that I am definitely not that was worth getting curious about.
What had I banished along with my capacity for cruelty?
It turns out: quite a lot.
Force.
Power.
The willingness to say no.
The willingness to disappoint someone.
The discernment to recognize when something isn’t mine.
The ability to do something another person might experience as hurtful without immediately concluding that I must therefore be doing something wrong.
It has taken years to reclaim that territory.
And I haven’t become more cruel, exactly.
I’ve become more whole.
More powerful.
Less ashamed.
More capable of clear boundaries.
More able to choose truth when truth isn’t particularly nice.
Shadow work isn’t about indulging your worst impulses
This distinction matters.
Reclaiming my cruelty didn’t mean deciding cruelty was good. It didn’t mean giving myself permission to hurt people indiscriminately.
It meant becoming willing to acknowledge:
Yes. That exists in me, too.
Because the parts of ourselves we refuse to recognize don’t disappear.
We just lose our ability to be in conscious relationship with them.
And when something has to remain outside your conscious identity—I’m not angry. I’m not needy. I’m not selfish. I’m definitely not cruel—you don’t get much choice about how you relate to it.
You can’t consciously wield a capacity you refuse to admit you possess.
And there’s almost always a surprising amount of life force hiding in the places we’ve labeled NOT ME.
How to approach your shadow with curiosity instead of shame
Tani and Leslie teach a map of what they call the Darketypes—characters with names like the Violent Destroyer, the Needy Wretch, and the Arrogant Disdainer.
I won’t attempt to teach their work here. They occasionally offer courses on it, and if you ever get the chance to study with them, I highly recommend it.
But one thing I’ve learned from them is how useful it can be to bring what I call my Inner Naturalist to these creatures inside me.
Instead of:
Oh God. Not THAT. That’s horrible. That’s not me.
I can crouch down beside it with my metaphorical magnifying glass.
Huh.
Look at that fascinating little beast.
What does she eat?
When does she come out?
What is she really good at?
What happens when I stop trying to make her go away?
What can I love about her?
That’s a very different relationship with yourself.
You don’t have to obey every creature you find in there.
You don’t have to let her drive.
But you can stop pretending she isn’t in the car.
And when you do, you may discover that some of what you’ve been trying hardest to get rid of contains exactly the capacities you’ve been trying to develop.
What if you’re actually afraid of what you want?
Our shadows aren’t limited to traits we think are bad.
Sometimes we’re also surprisingly afraid of our own desires—and of what might happen if we actually got what we say we want.
That’s another place where looking directly at what we’ve been avoiding can be incredibly freeing.
I’ve written about one of my favorite exercises for this, Carolyn Elliott’s Deepest Fear Inventory, which helps uncover the hidden fears underneath the things we consciously say we want.
Once you can see those fears, you have a very different relationship with them.
Light work and dark work: why we need both
This brings me back to something Tani and Leslie teach that has deeply influenced how I understand all of this.
They make a distinction between two kinds of work we can do in our lives and in the world.
There’s light work.
Light work looks at what is and says no.
This isn’t okay. This needs to change. I’m going to make it different.
Light work is incredibly powerful.
It’s how we set boundaries, fight injustice, leave bad situations, create things that don’t exist yet, and make our lives and our world better.
But it’s only half the spectrum.
There’s also dark work.
Dark work looks at what is and says yes.
Not a defeated yes. Not gritted teeth and held breath and, Fine, I guess I can put up with this.
A real yes.
The kind where we stop trying to fix, improve, transcend, or get rid of what’s here—and instead become curious about what happens when we fully consent to its existence.
Can I find my pleasure here?
Can I find my power here?
Can I love even this?
Think of the yin-yang.
Neither half is the answer.
Wholeness requires both.
And wisdom is partly knowing which one is called for.
I think most of us are wildly overdeveloped in the light.
Find the problem.
Fix the problem.
Become a better person.
Get rid of the parts of yourself that aren’t enlightened or generous or kind or evolved enough.
There are absolutely things in ourselves, our lives, and our world worth changing.
But there are also times when the attempt to change what’s here is precisely what keeps us stuck.
Sometimes the work is to say no and make something different.
And sometimes the work is to stop saying no long enough to discover the richness of saying a real, whole-self yes to what already is.
So, in honor of Tani and Leslie getting married this weekend:
Here’s to the light.
Here’s to the dark.
Here’s to having the wisdom to know when to change what is—and when to stop trying to change it long enough to discover the richness of loving it.
And if you’ve never explored the parts of yourself that scare the crap out of you?
Well.
You may have some extremely fertile territory waiting.
To light and darkness,
Rachel
Want support exploring the parts of yourself you’ve learned to reject?
This is very much part of the work I do with coaching clients: becoming more able to meet what’s actually here without shame or self-rejection, so you have more of yourself available to create the life you want.
If that’s work you’re hungry for—or sense you need—book a free consultation here.
