Post one of seven, in section Hard Truths
This post describes how including shadows is a fundamental part of any spiritual or personal development path and some different aspects of that.
My understanding of everything here has been informed by my experiences of Cliff Barry’s Shadow Work.
Uphill, Downhill and Mastery
One of the really helpful distinctions that Cliff Barry’s Shadow Work makes is the difference between the phases of uphill, downhill and mastery on a personal development path.
The uphill is the first phase in developing any new skill. In the uphill phase there is an end goal that exists outside of you that you are working towards. Going uphill requires discipline and working hard, even when you don’t feel like it, and committing effort to long-term goals.
For example, if you’re learning a new language you need to start by studying a lot of vocabulary and the rules of that language.
In spiritual practice, the uphill phase for someone may be learning a specific skill, for example a meditative technique. Or more broadly going uphill can be about putting certain values on a pedestal, like purity or kindness, and working towards embodying them.
Ultimately uphill is the phase when people are moving away from what is considered bad or worthless and towards what is considered good or valuable. Importantly, the goal that you are working toward exists outside of you.
The downhill phase can come when enough competence has been achieved from the work in the uphill phase.
For example, once you have done enough language study in the classroom or from a book, you need to go out and start having conversations with people. At this point proficiency becomes less about being grammatically or technically correct and more about whether you are able to express yourself and understand others in your new language.
In spiritual practice an example of the downhill phase for someone may be making a meditation technique their own by integrating it more fully into their life and bringing more aspects of themselves to it.
More broadly, going downhill is about things like wholeness, integration and authenticity.
Often the shift from uphill to downhill happens when someone realises that the external successes they have achieved have left them feeling a bit empty. They realise that no matter how hard they work, they still feel incomplete, dissatisfied or like they are wearing a mask.
This realisation causes people to look elsewhere for satisfaction and if they are lucky they will realise they need to turn inwards and connect to how things feel on the inside, rather than how they look from the outside.
One of the biggest changes when shifting from uphill to downhill is that good and bad are no longer so clearly distinguished. In order to start going downhill people need to understand that wholeness and including challenging emotions or experiences are important for things like feeling self-worth and living a meaningful life.
Shadow work is the ideal tool for working with this phase because rather than dividing experience into good things and bad things, it works with the underlying energy of what is present. It recognises that all experience is valid and that through welcoming the full spectrum of experience the shadow can be reintegrated.
The things that are valued in the downhill phase, like authenticity and wholeness, aren’t really ‘things’ that exist outside of you that you are moving towards. They are more like a quality of being able to attune to your own depths in the present moment and connect fully with what is there.
“The first half of life is devoted to forming a healthy ego, the second half is going inward and letting go of it.”
― Carl Jung
The timing of this shift is important, because if it comes too soon the person won’t have enough of the skills they need in order to be whole. If you bypass the uphill and go straight to downhill you get a state of collapse, rather than wholeness.
People need to go uphill for every new skill they learn in life, but there is also an overall narrative arc of which phase someone is in. The mid-life crisis is a classic moment in the shift from uphill to downhill.
After the downhill phase, once someone has integrated their shadows and cultivated wholeness, they will reach the stage of mastery. At this point they are able to move between the full spectrum of experience, without having to climb the mountain. They can visit or hang out in the ‘bad’ or ‘worthless’ aspects of experience and bring back what is meaningful from them. While they can also be in touch with the ‘good’ and ‘valuable’ parts of experience without putting them on a pedestal. Mastery is the zone of genius.
In the language example, this would be about really being fluent and creative in your expression. People who can use language to illuminate previously confusing or unseen dynamics, are a good example of this.
In spiritual practice a specific example would be that you have cultivated enough equanimity in your meditation practice that anything can arise and you can make space for it to be present.
On a more broad level, this fits with the realisation that there is no difference between the sacred and the profane. You are able to navigate life in a skilful and centred way that is in connection with your deepest values without being too deeply perturbed, even when really challenging stuff arises. You may even be able to find the gold in the darkest of experiences.
One of the signs of being in mastery is that you are able to hold space for these qualities in others, as much as you are able to connect to them in yourself.
Each of these phases – uphill, downhill and mastery – plays a really important role in someone’s spiritual development. It’s important that someone goes through each of the phases, none of them are skipped, and that they don’t get stuck in one of them.
Lots of spiritual traditions and practices miss out on this meta-perspective of learning and try and teach everyone in the same mode.
Zen Buddhism, for example, often tries and skips people straight to downhill and doesn’t always give people the technical meditation skills to actually be present with their experience first.
Theravadan Buddhism in comparison is mostly focused on the uphill. It is teaching people practices to develop better meditation skills and to be more able to see the ultimate truth, while it misses out on the nuance of wholeness and integration with the full messiness and multi-dimensionality of life.
All of the phases hold value and being able to see where they fit into a wider arc of someone’s development or life story is really important.
Having a teacher who is a master can mean that you don’t necessarily have to climb the mountain or integrate all the shadows. Masters can sometimes show you the direct way through.
Form, Storm, Norm, Perm
‘Form, Storm, Norm, Perform’ is a very useful model for understanding how challenge can be a very rich part of experience.
It describes the phases that groups of people go through, when they are working on something together:
- Form – people come together
- Storm – all the challenges emerge and hopefully are worked through
- Norm – the new ways of working are incorporated
- Perform – the group functions in an effective way
Some groups will skip the storm phase altogether and others will break-down during the storm phase and not make it to the norm phase. One of the key things to make it through the storm phase is that there needs to be enough resource and capacity to navigate the challenges that emerge. Some storm phases break a team because the challenges are too overwhelming or because some or all of the team aren’t willing or able to recognise the truth of the challenges.
When there is enough capacity within the group, the storm phase can be incredibly rich. Issues can get unblocked, new ways of working can be uncovered, energy can be freed up and deeper levels of understanding about the team and the work can be discovered.
The process can be iterative, with teams cycling through it as they take on new challenges.
The model describes how groups function, but it’s also possible to notice this pattern in your individual experience, both when you are learning something new and just in how you are going through life.
Seeing the ways in which both the storm phase and the downhill phase are valuable can open un a new paradigm for people. It allows you to see suffering as meaningful, as part of wholeness and as an opportunity for alchemical transformation. This understanding allows people to be more present with experience because they are less afraid of the things that are bad or challenging and more able to show up whole-heartedly.
“You have been assigned this mountain to show others how it can be moved.”
Mel Robbins
Working With Shadows
Hopefully these two models have started to reveal how shadows aren’t bad things to be avoided, but that engaging with them can create opportunities for growth, development, wholeness, maturity and even genius.
Working with shadows requires an ability to work alchemically. You have to be willing and able to meet the challenging experience whole-heartedly and to allow that to transform what is present. It requires a lot of humility and often you need other people to be able to hold space for this process.
Shadows can give you a very skewed perspective on reality. When shadows are in the subconscious they become things that you just assume to be true about the world and you would never think to question them. This is a large part of what ignorance is.
There isn’t a simple formula for shadow work. It’s a highly personal process that requires you to face your stuff as it emerges. Most of it will emerge in your interactions with the world and you have to be willing to go inside and see where a part of you may be in shadow, rather than to judge, blame, control or in some other way externalise your challenges.
Shadow work often requires you to pull a completely counter-intuitive move in order for you to be present with the truth of the experience. One that has never been modelled or taught to you before.
Cliff Barry’s Shadow Work is incredibly effective for this because it has identified four key archetypes that people experience the world from and through – lover, magician, warrior, sovereign. Different people will have different capacities to embody each of these archetypal ways of being.
At the foundation of the modality is the belief that everyone is born whole, but they have learned ways of being or ways of coping with life that are more limited or oppressed and this is expressed in these different archetypal modes.
For example, someone who struggles to feel their feelings has an oppressed lover archetype, or someone who struggles to feel their anger and set boundaries has an oppressed warrior archetype. This limits their range of how they can experience the world and be in it.
The therapy takes people through an embodied process that gives people access to the counter-intuitive moves for the archetypes that are in some way oppressed in them. The process is symbolic so it increases range and wholeness, not only for the specific situation that that person is working on, but across their entire life.
The therapy is done in a group container and being able to witness and take part in other people’s processes can also be profoundly insightful. It can help you see many different moves and ways of being that could seem completely counter-intuitive to you.
Ultimately shadow work is increasing the amount of range and freedom that you have in your being.
“Learn to see the shapes of things, rather than the stories.”
Cliff Barry
Shadows and Golden Shadows in Spiritual Practice
I have created a model for awakening that identifies 16 vital aspects of experience that you need to awaken if you want to be present with the full spectrum of reality. You can read more about it here.
Every part of the framework plays a key part in being able to feel and understand the depths of true nature. If an aspect is excluded, a shadow emerges. I have identified the shadows that are present when an aspect is excluded so that people can notice which parts of experience are shut down in themselves.
There is also something called a golden shadow, which is where you idolise a quality and project it outside of you. These are common in spiritual practice where people will project things like perfection onto a teacher or the Universe itself, in order to not feel the fullness or the vulnerability of what is present in their experience.
The point of highlighting the shadows and golden shadows isn’t to say that everyone needs to have awakened every single part of themselves at all times, but to be able to show how your experience is created from an eco-system of different aspects of being. When a part of this is in shadow it impacts what you are experiencing and how the world seems to you.
A key example of this is that there is an ongoing debate about whether meditation and therapy are both needed on the path and the reality is that they are opening up different aspects of experience, both of which are fundamentally shaping what you believe and experience reality to be.
For example, meditation may be giving you deep insights into the non-dual or impermanent nature of the world but unless you’ve opened your subconscious emotions you might, for example, still be subconsciously relating to every woman you encounter with the same relationship template you have with your mum. This sort of thing shapes your entire worldview and experience, not only on a relational level but also on an archetypal and energetic level. Unexamined beliefs can shape how you experience feminine or yin energy across the entirety of reality.
Just like insight into the nature of reality has endless depths that requires many hours of meditating to unravel, the layers of emotional content between you and true nature also has endless depths and requires a lot of work to process to get you closer to true nature.
You don’t have to do this work if it’s not calling you, but it’s good to have some humility and ability to recognise the ways in which all these things shape your experience and your understanding of the world.
One of the important things to recognise with shadows is that you can’t see them until you can see them.
Awakening Framework
Here are the 16 aspects of experience.
Shadows
Here are the shadows that emerge when an aspect is excluded.
Identifying your own shadows is tricky because you are looking for the ways that you implicitly believe reality is. You’re stuck in the behaviour and it’s so ingrained that you don’t even think to question it.
An example of this is that someone who has never experienced authentic connection to themselves or others might be so stuck in posturing and performing all the time that they think that that is the only way to relate. It can be so deep in someone that they can’t even begin to imagine that this isn’t what everyone else is doing all the time, too.
The shadows that are identified here aren’t necessarily bad in every setting, they can be a normal part of life, but it’s worth recognising when you are stuck in them and maybe even unaware that you are stuck in them. It’s a sign that there is something you need to integrate or include or that more freedom can be found in your experience.
Identifying and releasing one of these shadows can create anything between a mini to a major fundamental paradigm shift in how you relate to the entirety of experience.
Golden Shadows
Golden shadows emerge when an aspect of experience is idolised too much, or when it is held up as an ultimate source of truth or goodness.
It’s really meaningful to work towards these qualities, to stand up for the importance of them in the collective and to reclaim these parts of yourself, but it’s not healthy to either get stuck in them or get stuck worshipping them.
Wholeness
These are the qualities that tend to emerge once an aspect of experience has been integrated in a balanced way.
Wholeness is about connecting to qualities inside of you rather than specific things outside of you. The point with this map isn’t to start idolising these values, they are more like a compass to help you identify when you have integrated something inside of you in an honest, engaged and meaningful way.
They are more like ways of being that you become an embodied expression of.
Uphill, Downhill and Mastery
Each of the aspects of experience is a whole world of experience that can be explored and developed. An interesting way to relate to them is to map each of the aspects of experience, with its shadow and golden shadow to the uphill, downhill and mastery model.
Below is an example of doing this with Authentic Connection. Before this has been awakened in someone, they are likely to be stuck in the shadow of posturing. This is the ‘bad’ thing that you are trying to learn how to move away from in the uphill phase. The ‘good’ thing that you are moving towards is the golden shadow of harmony.
An example of how the uphill might look is doing more relational practices or therapies where your true expression is welcome. You’re invited out of the need to pretend and it’s made safe for you to share an aspect of your true self. You are moving towards the golden shadow, which in this case is harmony. This phase can be really important to help people get out of the shadow. They need to learn the skills and get the embodied experience that it’s possible to connect with people in both an authentic and harmonious way, otherwise they won’t ever start.
However it’s important that the concept of harmony isn’t adopted too strongly by people or communities or they will get stuck in it. People start to believe without question that it’s always possible for everyone to speak their truth in a way that will feel unquestionably good and sync up in some magical way. This can cause people to change their behaviour to match the expectations. The focus on harmony means that people lose touch with authentic connection.
At this point, it’s important to shift to the downhill. For Authentic Connection this means moving towards honesty, even when that is challenging for both you or others. The downhill consists of doing the shadow work that deals with the things that stop you from being honest in a straight-forward way.
Using the Shadow Work model of four archetypes, some examples of things that you might need to work on in order to be able to be more honest: process some grief (lover), find your self-worth (sovereign), get better at setting boundaries (warrior) or finding words to put to your experience (magician).
Once you have processed your shadow you arrive at honesty, which is a more whole expression of authentic connection. At this stage you can start to develop mastery, where you can notice posturing in experience – either yours or others – and cut through it by modelling or inviting whole-hearted, integrated honesty.
At this stage, you can be honest, even in challenging circumstances, without it being shadowy or some kind of holier than thou golden shadow trip. You have mastered the skill of authentic connection.
All of the aspects of experience on the map can be mapped to the uphill, downhill and mastery model in this way.
Another example is when a connection to the Metaphorical & Mythic aspect of experience hasn’t been awakened, someone will be stuck in the shadow of rational dominance. When rationality dominates the way you see the world, it limits your perception of what reality and experience is or can be.
Ian McGilchrist has done a ton of great work understanding and describing this societal shadow, through the lens of right hemisphere and left hemisphere ways of being.
Once you have identified this shadow, the uphill phase is moving to a more poetic way of being and understanding. It’s seeing the ways in which the world is made of myths as much of as logic, how things can be described by metaphor as well as they can be described by science.
However, if you take it too far, a poetic way of being and understanding the world can start to become unsatisfying. An example of this is people who have gone down a dharma path and can no longer describe anything precisely or who have completely lost touch with the benefits of being rational.
Recognising this unsatisfactoriness is where the downhill phase begins and you can start to remove the shadows of everything that is getting in the way of you connecting with the things that are actually meaningful.
Once this has been integrated, mastery is being able to stay connected to what is meaningful and to relate to the rational and logical aspects of experience without letting them dominate your worldview.
Summary
It’s important to recognise the shadows and golden shadows that are present in people’s conceptions of spiritual practice. Not because people need to be perfect all the time, but because a more inclusive, less ignorant and more holistic approach leads to less suffering, a deeper understanding of true nature and more freedom.
I believe that the whole thing becomes easier to navigate and more sane when people are aware of this model on a meta level.
The different phases all have value in them and being allowed to be in the phase you are in, without feeling shame or ego-inflation, makes the path a lot smoother.
It’s also possible for masters to share ways of being where people don’t have to climb the entire mountain – there are direct ways through to wholeness and depth that don’t bypass the shadows.