| Illuminating the Shadow: An Interview with Connie Zweig |
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| Written by Scott London | |||||
Page 2 of 3 London: I remember a conversation I had with the writer Phil Cousineau. He distinguished between spirit and soul. Spirit is in the heights, he said, while soul is in the depths. While we tend reach for the heights, it's usually in the depths that we find that sense of aliveness. As he put it, "You don't tell Aretha Franklin to `Get up,' you tell her to `get down.'" [Laughs] Zweig: Yes. I think that what has happened in our eagerness to be more spiritual, more conscious, more aware, is that we've only gone up. And some of us have been left floating up there in the skies, just over the mountain tops, like helium-balloons. We've lost the contact with the lower worlds, with the passions, the instincts, sex, desire. We've made desire wrong and have wanted to be free of our attachments and our cravings, as the Buddha teaches. London: This may have something to do with our Judeo-Christian heritage which teaches us that our lower half represents original sin, unworthiness, and all our evil impulses? Zweig: Yes. The traditional purpose of religion is to teach us the difference between the dark side and the light side, what is moral and what is immoral behavior. In the Judao-Christian tradition, those sides are very cut off from one another. So we have God and the Devil and never the twain shall meet. But in many other cultures, that is not the case. I spent time in Bali a number of years ago, which is a Hindu culture. Over every doorway there are masks of demons to greet you, as if to say: "The shadow lives here, it's part of our life, it's part of our home." That is very different from a Judeo-Christian orientation, which says: "Banish the demons. Keep them as far away as possible. Don't let them in the doorway." London: You say that we must learn to "romance" the shadow. Zweig: Yes, what my co-author Steve Wolf and I mean by romancing the shadow is this: if you can begin to coax it out of hiding, almost seduce it like a shy lover, then you can begin to make a more conscious relationship to your own shadow. The more the shadow hides, the more it's outside awareness, the tighter its hold over us. London: We've heard a number of variations of this phrase in recent years -- "embracing the shadow," "befriending the shadow" and so on. Zweig: Well, It doesn't feel like a friend. It feels like a damn opposition. [Laughs] In the 70s and 80s, people used terms like "integrating" the shadow, and "embracing" the shadow. My sense of it was that it was as if the shadow material could be taken on by the ego, could be synthesized somehow, eaten. We used to say "eating the shadow." London: A friend of mine who has been wrestling with his shadow for some time quipped that the title of your book, Romancing the Shadow, misses the point. "Forget about romancing it," he said, "I want to annihilate it!" [Laughs] Zweig: I really don't think the point is to get rid of the shadow. The point is not to eliminate the unconscious. The point is to become increasingly aware of what we call the shadow-characters -- those aspects of the unconscious that are erupting and leading us to destructive or self-destructive behaviors. So the goal is not to get rid of it, but as Robert Bly would say, to begin to take the material out of the bag. Carl Jung used to talk about "holding the tension of the opposites" as a basis for working with the shadow. But if you've ever tried that in your own life, you know how hard it is. If you can hold the tension of opposite points of view in your intimate relationships with people, instead of making somebody right and somebody wrong, you are really taking an evolutionary step. London: Jung said that we don't conquer our problems, we outgrow them. Can we outgrow our shadow? Zweig: If you begin to do shadow-work and uncover the character that is hiding there, and see what it's needing, what it's saying to you, what you feel the moment it comes up, you have a way to relate to it. It loses its compelling quality and doesn't drive you so much. As it recedes, you can again hear the voice of the self, the voice of your own intuitive wisdom, the part of you that knows what is right action. Carl Jung used to say that if we can shed a little light on our own darkness, it will remove some of the larger darkness from the world. This interview was adapted from the radio series Insight & Outlook, hosted by Scott London. It appeared in the August 1998 issue of Kindred Spirit, a British journal. Copyright ©1996 by Scott London. All rights reserved.Illuminating the Shadow: An Interview with Connie Zweig by Scott London print article email article Connie Zweig's last book was called Romancing the Shadow. It's the follow-up to her bestselling anthology from a few years ago called Meeting the Shadow. Zweig is the founder of the Institute for Shadow-work and Spiritual Psychotherapy in Los Angeles. In psychology, the dark side of human nature is often described as the alter ego, the id, or the lower self. The great Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung called it the "shadow." By shadow, he meant the negative side of the personality, the sum total of all those unpleasant qualities that we would prefer to hide. While Carl Jung coined the term "the shadow," the idea of a dark side of human nature dates back to antiquity and has figured in some of our most famous stories and myths, from the dark brother in the Bible to Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Scott London: Of all the metaphors that have been used to illustrate the shadow in recent years, my favorite is Robert Bly's image of the big bag that we drag behind us. Connie Zweig: Yes, he said that we spend the first half of our lives putting everything into the bag and the second half pulling it out. London: What did Carl Jung have in mind when he formulated this idea? Zweig: He believed that everything that is in our conscious awareness is in the light. But everything of substance which stands in the light -- whether it's a tree or an idea -- also casts a shadow. And that which stands in the darkness is outside of our awareness. As Jung saw it, the shadow operated at several levels. First, there is the part of the mind that is outside of our awareness. He called this the personal unconscious or personal shadow. That is the conditioned part of us that we acquire from our experiences in our childhood when that which is unacceptable, as determined by the adults around us, is cast into shadow. It may be sadness or sexual curiosity. Or it may be our creative dreams and desires. That's personal shadow. But there is another level as well. Jung also talked about the "collective unconscious" or the "archetypal shadow." London: What are some of the most common manifestations of the personal shadow? Zweig: The personal shadow is that part of us that erupts spontaneously and unexpectedly when we do something self-destructive, or something that is hurtful to someone else. Afterwards, we know it's been around because we feel humiliated, ashamed, and guilty. For example, one of my patients -- a young woman in her 20s -- has had a series of brief relationships in which she very quickly has unprotected sex with men she does not know. She feels so devastated afterwards, filled with shock and self-hatred. She says, "How could I? I thought I saw this the last time. I thought I'd never do it again. I thought I really understood why I was doing it, and that it would never happen again. And here I am. I can't believe it." This is her shadow -- her sexual shadow is acting out in ways that are bringing her terrible pain and grief. I would say the personal shadow is that part of us that feels like it can't be tamed, can't be controlled. For instance, many parents who struggle with their children with impulses of rage that rise up, and they yell, or maybe even hit the child. Then, afterwards, they say to themselves, "Oh, my God, I can't believe I did that. Who am I?" That's the shadow. London: There have been a spate of books and conferences about the shadow in recent years. Why do you think this subject has become so popular now?
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