Questions addressed: What is the relationship between being a spiritual person and doing shadow work? How does shadow work begin? Does shadow work ever end?
I came across this excerpt from a journal I was writing in 1988 (age 36):
"My comprehension of the environment is old-fashioned. I see it as a series of interpenetrating spheres. How it all fuses together is a mystery that isn't likely to be penetrated by me until I have gained more insight into how the individual self-archetype synchronizes psyche and physical processes with universal patterns that encompass my existence. Gaining some kind of perspective on my significance with respect to the world at large and the universe is one of the benefits of a religious viewpoint. A non-spiritual outlook would seem to have no chance of comprehending the scope of the empathy that our world requires to survive the environmental insults wrought by this century. Egoists, atheists need not apply." (1988)
In 1988 I was at the cusp of transitioning to a spiritual perspective which eventually altered my whole approach to how I lived my life and how I reacted to the world. I think that excerpt captured my readiness to find a spiritual path or a practice, and for me that was shamanism. Now (37 years later) shamanism is not necessarily a path or practice for me. It is woven into who I am and how I am in the world.
Becoming a spiritual person followed years of shadow work. I think that, in my case, stepping into becoming a spiritual person coincided with a kind of graduation from the drudgery of personal shadow work. There was a sense of life becoming less muddy, a clarification of both my inner and outer perspective on reality.
Does shadow work always take years? Not necessarily. It depends on the individual. But there are two levels to shadow work. There is the personal shadow, that is our responsibility, and assimilating the personal shadow can take years because until we begin to take responsibility for our personal shadow, we project it onto people and situations around us and we may not even realize that we are dealing with our shadow. Our shadow remains separate from us, it colors our psychology, and by that I mean, how we see ourselves in relationship to others and the world. (The other level to shadow work has to do with assimilating the collective shadow. More on that later.)
A word on trauma: Trauma amplifies the challenge of doing our personal shadow work, but these days trauma is no longer an excuse for living a provisional life or for not doing our shadow work. I am no expert on trauma, but I have learned over the past ten years that everyone deals with some trauma. Luckily trauma is better understood than ever before and it is no longer a sentence or an explanation for why we are not thriving.
If we are suffering from debilitating trauma, that is where the healing has to happen first, and as we heal from trauma, the shadow will come up, as an ally, to help us fully depotentiate our trauma. In other words, as we depotentiate trauma it personifies, it assumes a face, a character, or many faces, and many characters. So you see how freeing ourselves from trauma and doing our shadow work go hand in hand.
Maria Louisa Von Franz is still, in my opinion, the best authority on what shadow work entails, but I dont think she talks much about trauma. I think the reason for that has to do with how, when Jung made his break from Freud, he was staking out his territory. Freud addressed trauma relative to his understanding of the human psyche, and how he defined trauma (i.e., how you were raised), was based on a Greek-mythic / Victorian view of upbringing. When Jung went his own way, he sort of left trauma in the causative camp of the Freudians. Jungs archetypal Psychology was not causative but based on the principle of synchronicity and, yes, the science of future causes. (Aside: Jung took great pains to quantify synchronicity, so that he wouldnt be black-balled by the scientific patriarchy of his day.)
But he acknowledged that personal shadow work is mostly causative to begin with (i..e., how we were raised), but once we dive into it, shadow work becomes future-oriented and has to do with teleology or who we are meant to be. (James Hillman (Souls Code) addresses this with his Acorn theory). At that point in our shadow work, shadow stops being a projected problem and becomes an ally. The past is no longer a sentence, but a story. We learn that the shadow is no longer a negative, pulling us back or downward, but it is there to show us something, teach us, trip us up or turn us around if we are heading in the wrong direction. It is there to confound us, to test us.
Does shadow work ever end? Our personal shadow work doesnt ever exactly end but, if you consider what I have been saying you can see how shadow work passes through three phases: phase 1) As we begin to heal trauma, we are withdrawing our projections of shadow. We own our shadow, taking responsibility. Phase 2) we personify it, we personalize it, so, for example, instead of seeing all homeless people generically, we find out who they are, a person with a name and a story, with specific needs. Phase 3) we regard the shadow as an ally who can help us become more whole.
When we enter phase 3 of shadow work, our dreams become a lot more interesting, creative and productive. We also become more lucid, because we arent projecting as much. We have flashes of objectivity, in that we begin seeing the people around us for who they really are, rather than as the carriers of the projections of our complexes.
Imagine that you are enjoying a quiet moment by a woodland stream where the water pools in the shadows. You are gazing meditatively into the water but your thoughts are agitated, your mind is racing, and the water reflects that agitation. There are little sticks and leaves swirling in an eddy around and around the pool and the water is cloudy so you cant see the bottom. Picture the personal shadow as the muddy water that dims or obscures your view. As you sit there, focusing on the water, the calmness of the place begins to soothe your agitation and your racing thoughts and the sticks and leaves break free of the eddy and flow on. At the same time the water begins to clarify until it is crystal clear and you can see the beautiful stones of the stream bed.
That is my metaphor for graduating from personal shadow work, but once we are clear of our psychologies, we have the greater work to do, that is, assimilating the collective shadow. The collective shadow is the shadow of the Zeitgeist. It is ubiquitous and powerful and needs to be assimilated but that is not the work of any one person. The karma of our race, our culture, our history is a big part of our inheritance, like it or not. The point of this little essay about personal shadow work is this: If we have not done our personal shadow work, we are projecting our complexes and our personal trauma, which muddies our perspective of reality (the world). If we have not done our personal shadow work we dont even know whether we are dealing with our own trauma and complexes or the trauma and complexes of the Zeitgeist. We aren't clear. We aren't lucid. We are winging it, trying to muck along in a projection-house..
I hope this article is helpful and not discouraging. What they say in Jungian Analysis or any kind of questing or pilgrimaging, or serious dreamwork is, its not about arriving, its about the journey. Life is a quest, a pilgrimage a journey and, as shamanism teaches, it is about dreaming. The trick is being fully present for ourselves.
(Article changed on Nov 28, 2025 at 1:42 PM EST)
(Article changed on Nov 28, 2025 at 2:38 PM EST)
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