Bringing Your Shadow Out of the Dark: Breaking Free from the Hidden Forces That Drive You
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About this ebook
"Our shadow," teaches Robert Augustus Masters, "is our internal storehouse for the parts of us that we’ve disowned or rejected, or are otherwise keeping in the dark."
Everyone has a shadow, but all too many of us are unaware of it. It holds the feelings and beliefs that we are most ashamed of or cannot accept about ourselves. For some, it may contain unacknowledged anger or grief. For others, pain or fear.
Our shadow contains our unfaced conditioning.
And the more unaware we are of our shadow, the more it influences and controls us.
Based upon Masters's four decades as a psychospiritual therapist and guide, Bringing Your Shadow Out of the Dark invites readers to understand and skillfully work with this rich yet neglected dimension of ourselves.
With depth and clarity, he illuminates the process of meeting our shadow in beneficial ways, and how we can embody a more complete and life-giving experience of who we are.
In this book you’ll discover:
• The nature of our shadow and how to optimally work with it—exploring our conditioning and core shadow elements, including in the domains of shame, fear, aggression, resistance, addiction, death, and spirituality
• How to work with the child within, self-sabotage, narcissism, sexuality, dreams, and other matters deeply influenced by our shadow
• Why turning toward our pain is an essential part of shadow work—making wise use of our pain
• Collective shadow domains we share with family, social groups, political party, or nation—bringing them and their associated traumas into the light
When we uncover and work in-depth with our shadow, we free ourselves from its control and gain the opportunity to put its contents to work for us instead of allowing them to work against us.
Bringing Your Shadow Out of the Dark shows us how to navigate the full terrain of our emotions, drives, needs, and depths of who we are.
Foreword by Lissa Rankin, MD, New York Times bestselling author of Mind Over Medicine, The Fear Cure, and The Anatomy of a Calling.
Robert Augustus Masters, Ph.D.
Robert Augustus Masters, PhD, is an integral psychotherapist, relationship expert, and spiritual teacher whose work blends the psychological and physical with the spiritual, emphasizing embodiment, emotional literacy, and the development of relational maturity. He is the author of fourteen books, including Transformation through Intimacy and Spiritual Bypassing.
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Bringing Your Shadow Out of the Dark - Robert Augustus Masters, Ph.D.
PART ONE
MEETING OUR
SHADOW
1 AN INSIDE LOOK AT OUR SHADOW
OUR SHADOW is the place within each of us that contains what we don’t know, don’t like, or deny about ourselves. Calling it our shadow is fitting because of its lack of illumination; what it’s storing is being kept in the dark, to whatever degree. Wherever we go, our shadow goes with us, whether we’re aware of it or not.
Our shadow holds our unattended and not-yet-illuminated conditioning—all the programmed ways we act, think, feel, and choose without knowing why. It also contains all that we’ve disowned, pushed aside, or otherwise rejected in ourselves; whatever in us about which we insist, That’s not me
; whatever in us we’re out of touch with or keeping out of sight, such as the roots of our unresolved wounding. Things we may find in our shadow include:
•Fear, especially in the form of core-level anxiety
•Anger, including anger that’s been converted into aggression
•Shame, particularly when we associate it with humiliation and rejection
•Empathy, especially when we equate it with being too soft
•Less-than-flattering intentions, such as being good
in order to stay in control
•Resistance, especially when our no to something is muted or muzzled
•The child in us, particularly when we’re avoiding or minimizing our childhood wounding
•Our inner saboteur, featuring us playing victim to self-defeating behaviors
•The nonsexual factors driving our sexuality, such as wanting to be wanted
•Grief, especially in its raw depths and unsullied intensity
•Our bigness and beauty—the ennobling qualities we’ve learned to suppress
A quick way to get a sense of what our shadow contains is to identify something we don’t like about ourselves, perhaps a quality we wish we didn’t have and therefore tend to push away or ignore as best we can. Initially we’ll probably only see the presenting surface of this quality—such as an out-of-proportion insecurity or irritability—not realizing that this is but the tip of the proverbial iceberg. However, once we realize there’s more to this disliked quality of ourselves than we’re seeing, we’re likely going to feel more open to exploring it and its origins. And the more we explore, the more likely we are to realize that the quality we’ve disowned is, in fact, a quality that can be helpful to