Spiritually, What is the Shadow?

Undoubtedly you've heard or read about spiritual gurus who get busted for sexually or financially abusing their followers. Drug abuse, violence, sexual abuse tend to get amplified in highly energized spiritual communities. My own teacher of Buddhism, many years ago, took his own life.

What is going on with these spiritually evolved people?

The answer lies in the shadow.

Your Shadow

The shadow, as recognized by psychoanalytic though, are the disowned parts of yourself. They are the parts of you that are present but are too painful to look at. Poet, Robert Bly, refers to the shadow as a black bag you drag behind you.

Let's say that you grow up in a household where sex is treated as taboo. As a child, you receive messages that sexual urges are naughty and good people repress them. You might suppress those urges and desires, which are a natural part of human development.

Those suppressed urges might become part of your shadow. You don't look at them, but they are still there under the surface. Without addressing them, they are going to surface - sometimes in powerfully negative ways.

The same is true for any part of your personality that you disown. 

The Negative Effect of Shadow

Some spiritual development involves releasing an enormous amount of psychic energy. But power is power. You can use a hammer to build a house, or you can hit your neighbor over the head with it.

I believe that large amounts of power, combined with an unincorporated shadow, create a recipe for disaster and abuse. Imagine giving a machine gun to a toddler. 

If you're not a guru with a following the shadow may still manifest in lots of unpleasant ways. For example, you might experience highly dysregulated emotion under stress, or certain mental illnesses. You may have addictions or sexual problems. Shame is as common as sand on the beach.

Addressing the Shadow is an Ethical Imperative

Besides the psychological relief and freedom one gains from shadow work, there is an ethical drive to make peace with the discarded aspects. As you develop spiritually and gain more personal power, you need to "clean up." The key is in re-owning the discarded parts of yourself.

Note that owning and integrating your shadow pieces doesn't mean you lose control of your urges. You lose control when you don't own them.

Shadow work has been some of the most rewarding development I've done. It's a practice I return to again and again. It is a tree which bears much fruit.

Is Shamanism a Religion?

Shamanism is a set of universal spiritual techniques overlaying a belief system. But in any modern sense of the word "religion" it is not a religion.

The ways shamanism is different from religion

Shamanism has no organization other than loosely organized learning circles and organizations dedicated to research. There is no head shaman. There is no book or doctrine. Shamanism is primarily dogma-free.

There is no organized shamanic religion. There's no tithing, no churches, no hellfire.

There are no requirements to practice shamanism or to employ the services of a shamanic practitioner. One can be a Buddhist, or Christian, or nonaffiliated person and still practice.

How are they similar?

In religion and shamanism, there is usually a spiritual intermediary. The shaman, in this case, is the initiated expert who helps one to access spirit. This isn't to say that anyone can't access spirit, but people would usually contact a shamanic practitioner because of spiritual illness or disconnection. The practitioner might help to restore that connection, instead of reinforcing the dependency.

Shamanism includes ceremony and ritual. Ceremony and ritual are important because they address the person at the level of body, mind, and spirit. Shamanic ceremony tends to look different than traditional Western religion, in that it involves the practitioner accessing altered states of consciousness, and traveling via intention and imagination, to other spiritual realms.

What's the difference between spirit and soul

It may be useful to think of human beings like onions, with many layers. We each have a mind, a body, a spirit, and a soul. Our bodies are made of many interconnected parts, as is our mind and soul. Each of these systems also overlaps. You cannot separate mind from body or spirit without disintegration. 

One of the areas that confused me, as a fledgling spiritual practitioner, was the difference between spirit and soul. Many practices and beliefs seem to use these terms interchangeably. They are both non-physical components of us and our world.  

I'd like to break it down a little, for the spiritually confused. Here's the take on soul and spirit from the shamanic perspective:

What is spirit?

In the view of the shaman, everything is spirit. You might say, everything has a spirit. You can think of spirit as the nonphysical essence of everything. Every object, every animal, every person has a nonphysical counterpart in spirit.

Further, the wind has spirit. The planet has spirit. There is the spirit of fire.

Spirit is formless, but during a shamanic journey, spirit often appears as something. A power animal, for instance, is the spirit of a deceased animal.

Your spirit is luminous to those who can "see in the dark" and unchanging. Your spirit is not affected by lifetimes here on Earth. It is that piece of divinity that is represented in "ordinary reality" by your body. Yes, everyone and everything is divine - even that guy that cut you off in traffic.

So, what is soul?

Your soul is that nonphysical part of you that animates the body and carries the lessons you learned from lifetime to lifetime.

Your soul can be affected by the things you do, see, feel, and think. Pieces of your soul can get lost during trauma. You can unwittingly lend away pieces of your soul. Soul loss is one of the major causes of physical and mental illness. 

Soul retrieval is a healing ritual in which a practitioner brings back lost soul essence with the aid of helping spirits. It's a gentle but powerful practice which can lead to profound healing.