The Shadow Self

 

I'm exploring this concept at the request of Kathleen V., who is leading a Crone workshop in which I'm participating.  She asked whether I'd ever written about any aspect of my shadow self in my journaling over the years.

I immediately thought of one experience I had in my early 20's.  I had just left a difficult relationship and had moved to a house with two friends near Bass Harbor, Maine.  The small house was rural, built above the rocky shore facing the harbor.  Behind it the forest rose up into the hills.  

One winter night I was dropped off on the road.  As I trudged up the lonely driveway to the house through the snow I realized the house was empty.  

I had not lived there long, and I had not been home alone before. 

I kicked the snow from my boots and opened the kitchen porch door.  As is the case for many farm houses, the small enclosed back porch stored coats and boots and when the outer door was closed an inner door helped protect from the cold entering the home in the winter.  I took off my boots, stowing them under the bench, and as I hung my coat I saw a movement through the glass of the kitchen door window.  Was someone in the house, in the dark?  I felt fear rush through my body and my mind leapt to high alert.

I turned to face the door and saw a face looking back at me through the glass.  My body and mind froze in terror.  I realized it was my own face, yet I was not not me, somehow. What I was looking at was my own visage but a self I had not previously met face to face, and she terrified me.  I sensed that this entity beyond the glass was more than my match in every way.  She had equal body strength; but more than that, she knew everything about me, all my inner thoughts and memories, and if she had the intent to harm me, I would be helpless if I lacked equal intent.  

We looked at each other for a long minute.  

Somehow I found the courage to go in to meet her.  But as I slowly opened the door to enter the space within, she disappeared.  

I laughed to myself at my silliness, yet she haunted me from the dark corners of the house as I made my way upstairs to my room, turning on every light along the way.  I closed my bedroom door firmly and leaned against it, exhaling deeply.  I held my hands out in front of my body to examine them:  not shaking.

Why had I met my shadow self that night, I wondered?  I knew she was real, and a part of me, yet not a part of me I knew.  And that she felt dangerous to me.

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Today while looking for others' writings online about the Shadow Self to inform this response to Kathleen's query I immediately came across therapists' writings about the Jung's work with the shadow.  

But the work that spoke to me most compellingly in relationship to the themes of my Rising Above Ageism blog here was a piece by Dr. Connie Zweig in her blog, The Inner Work of Age.  In a post there titled "The Shadow Knows: It's Preparation for Death" she posits that our acceptance of being an elder we allow our Shadow Self to do its helpful work of preparing us for our eventual transition from this life to the next: to learn to not fear the transition: to become ready for it.

Dr. Zweig writes:  

"... beneath the ego’s dread and foreboding, behind the fortress of denial, something in the shadow is preparing us for the end. This something is separate from our conscious will — but it’s purposeful, helping us to orient to the tasks of aging and death.

This something, I would add, is the soul’s evolutionary impulse or holy longing, which is carrying us to the great return. This something is not imagining Death as intruder, but as homecoming. When we align with it, we are aligning not only with the cycles of nature but with evolution itself.
So, there is an intimate link between our relationship to shadow and our relationship to death. This link is embodied in Hades, Greek god of the underworld, known as the Good Counsellor, who helps the dead cross the threshold to the afterlife. Hades teaches us to be quiet and listen to the inner voices that direct us to the gold buried beneath. Hades calls us to the depths, to our own underworld.

When we resist the call, we deny the shadow of death. In denial, the ego does not open to the preparation occurring in the shadow. In denial, we live as if we will never die. So, we fail to do life completion. We fail to become an Elder. We fail to cross over from role to soul. In denial, we die as if, in some ways, we never lived.

What if, instead, we were to open a channel of communication between ego and shadow so that the wall between them became more permeable? This, after all, has been our exploration with shadow-work. We have allowed the ego to recede and the silenced voices from the darkness to be heard. We have coaxed them gently into awareness and discovered their precious gifts.
Now, we meet the shadow of death, an impersonal force that is out of our control, with a purpose all its own. What messages might we hear in the whispers of Hades? What if we met Death as a counsellor? What if we released our heroic strategies to defy it — and instead coaxed Death to speak to us?"

https://medium.com/@conniezweig/the-shadow-knows-its-secret-preparation-for-death-e2009149164d

   I encourage you to read Dr. Zweig's entire post there in order to have the full context of her thoughts.

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My reoccurring theme in this blog is that if we resist accepting our role as elders, if we try to pretend we are not "really" aging, or that our own aging process is miraculously unlike that of our peers, that we appear younger than we are, that we really ARE younger than we are, that we value being younger than we are ... if we do those things, then I believe we are wasting energy that could be put to a better purpose.  A terrifying purpose in many ways, but a purpose that would open us to the wisdom available to us as elders:  as crones.

I accept my Crone self in order to allow my Shadow Self to be my guide to the mysterious transition we call death.  Eventually, death will come.  I do want to be ready to cross that bridge when I come to it.