Shadow Play (Escape Suffering with CG Jung, The French Impressionists, Joseph Campbell & My Rescue Dog)

ENLIGHTENMENT PROMPT #6

REPORTAGE HAIKU

Strong light fills the mind,
shadow ghosts come out to play-
blur of joy, no fear.

Shadow self-portrait today at the Nice Airport, France.

I'm grateful to the powerful gold light in the South of France. The famous light that inspired Cézanne, Chagall and Monet to create art with colors and shapes that had never been seen in the great galleries of Europe before. Part of what gives these paintings their striking character is the contrasting shadow that that light provides. When the light of the Côte d’Azur reflected my own shadow in an interesting way I captured it with my camera phone. Over time, I’ve created a series of shadow self-portraits. 

Juan-Les-Pins Claude Monet, 1888

I've posted some of these on Instagram and every now and then a follower will comment that a particular shadow photo seems “creepy” or “unnerving”. I never intentionally frame my shadow portraits to appear that way (see some samples below), I try to pose the shadow to take advantage of the environment in which it appears, and try to communicate with nothing but a black outline, how I’m feeling at the time. What others see in the shadow form is, of course, up to them. The idea that a shadow image is in some way frightening is perfectly valid and also, perhaps very useful. 

The Swiss psychologist Carl Jung was famous for lecturing on the shadow, which he used as a symbol to represent our unconscious selves, the repository of our deepest fears and desires.  

Dr, Carl Jung in his office. Photo by Yousuf Karsh. Taken in 1958.

“Everyone carries a shadow, and the less it is embodied in the individual’s conscious life, the blacker and denser it is. If an inferiority is conscious, one always has a chance to correct it… But if it is repressed and isolated from consciousness, it never gets corrected, and is liable to burst forth suddenly in a moment of unawareness. At all counts, it forms an unconscious snag, thwarting our most well-meant intentions.”

Carl Jung, C.W. Vol. 11: Psychology and Religion: West and East

I mentioned briefly in the last post (on momento mori), that our organs have a consciousness of their own. Imagine a series of small animals, all connected via nerves, hanging like fruit from the tree trunk of our spinal column, communicating their fears and desires upwards to the seat of consciousness and physical action—the brain. 

When we physically injure ourselves—a “frozen shoulder” is a perfect example—the muscles around the injury lock in place to  give it time to heal. Unfortunately, unless you possess a very young body, there is no automatic mechanism for releasing and resetting the frozen musculature once the injury has cleared up. Tension lingers, hardness has a tendency to set in. This is because, once past adolescence the body is, at its most primitive level, all about survival and reproduction. 

A psychic injury has the same mechanism—the injured mind moves into a protective mode and freezes to buy survival time. This is because in reality, the body and mind and not separate but one functional unit. As such, it’s not unusual to have mental trauma manifest itself in the body, or bodily trauma manifest itself as a problem with the mind.

This pain can manifest itself in endless forms: obsessive eating or starving the body, excessive hand-washing, alcohol and drug addiction, even daily doom-scrolling on a mobile device. Repetitive behaviours that pull us out of balance and cause imbalance with our health and relationships because, hidden in the depths of the shadow are unresolved complexes: bundles of memory and experience bound up with strings of fear and desire.

Worse, these shadow characters on the unconscious landscape, when feeling threatened or anxious that perhaps the same trauma that initially hurt them might reoccur, will come to the fore and override our conscious mind to ensure our survival.

I believe that because of the lack of an effective channel of communication, our shadow self is harming us, our greater consciousness, because it is a being of limited consciousness and perspective and simply doesn’t know any better. The shadow takes command for what it wrongly believes to be the survival of the whole . Unfortunately, it’s not equipped or qualified to captain the ship.

The power of the shadow force will catch us out time and time again unless we start to open the lines of communication.

So, how can we work with our shadow to help heal ourselves and the world instead of constantly engaging in combat with our unconscious self? 

Read on for today’s Practical Enlightenment Method and an anecdote about my beautiful rescue dog…