4 levels of Shadow Work from the book ‘The Inner Marriage’ a guide to masculine & feminine polarity work.
Through my work and practice I identified two main schools of shadow work, the second school I break up into three categories, so it’s easier to say 2nd-, 3rd-, and 4th-level shadow work although all of these levels are of the 2nd school.
1st level: Integrate your shadow.
2nd level: Maintain a healthy amount of shadow to generate power.
3rd level: Develop purity of heart.
4th level: Working in the collective consciousness.
The first school is to love, integrate and heal our shadows, turning darkness into light. This is the more mainstream approach and for many people shadow work stops here. The second approach, school or level of shadow work often creates negative reactions as it is teaching us to maintain a healthy amount of shadow which we draw power from.
3rd-level shadow work is about developing purity of heart, and should never be taken lightly and 4th-level shadow work is in the realms of the collective consciousness.
In all shadow work, we are working to make the unconscious conscious, reducing the veil between our subconscious and conscious mind and also our higher self. As we reduce the barrier between the subconscious and conscious mind communication with ourself changes: we understand ourselves better, the reality and the matrix that we live, the nature of time, and we are likely to become more psychic. Meditation helps with this too but shadow work takes the fear of who we truly are away, while transforming the parts of ourselves that we may be afraid of.
Listening to our intuition means allowing more encompassing and higher parts of ourselves to teach and guide us. Shadow work supports this process by teaching us not to be afraid of our lower self but to make it healthy and integrate it.
2nd- and 3rd-level shadow work are related and interchangeable and 4th-level shadow work happens in the collective consciousness. You don’t need to work up through the levels as in 1, 2, 3 and 4, you just need to trust yourself to apply what is best at any given time.
4th-level shadow work is teaching us compassion, to understand others, the pain that drove them to bad choices and some of the soul and life lessons that lay beyond their pain. 4th-level shadow work teaches us oneness and non-separation beyond a mental concept and starts to give us an embodied understanding and true knowledge, unexplainable knowledge as to what oneness is. Working in the collective consciousness is also a great way to learn more about and develop ourselves, reducing our ego and coming to understand more of how reality is created.
Shadow work in general teaches us to appreciate paradoxical situations and find wisdom within them and to live our life from a multidimensional perspective, with a non-dual mind that is committed to both evolution and balance. By always focusing on evolution and balance together in shadow work we remain safe—with the polarity framework being a useful mental guide or map for managing evolution in a balanced way. The polarity framework teaches us to use polarity with duality in order to suffer less and to ensure that when we do suffer we evolve, eventually changing our relationship with suffering entirely though developing a non-dual mind.
To deny suffering completely, or to be afraid of suffering is foolish. Our rejection of suffering will make us suffer, our attachment to suffering will make us suffer and even our non-attachment to suffering can work out badly as until we are living in an enlightened Buddha-like state, non-attachment to suffering is very often our rejection of suffering.
To be happy we actually need all three: rejection, attachment and non-attachment to our suffering (remembering that body de-armouring teaches our body non-attachment to suffering). None of them are right and none of them are wrong, it’s just about looking at how and when we apply each: attachment, rejection and non-attachment, and still being fluid, with no hard and fast rules.
One of the hardest parts of finding alignment is looking at our shadows. To keep alignment between our heart, mind and sex, we cannot have any resistance to our desires, on any level.
But the truth is that we often have resistance, and if we always resist a certain part of ourselves, what we judge as bad and deem to be incorrect, then our energy becomes stuck and stagnant. So when we are in a stuck place, often doing the wrong thing, becomes the right thing.
The Shadow Work chapters in this book, in my mind, build on from Jungian phycology (you could call Carl Jung the Godfather of shadow work psychology, who I would say was more of a mainstream mystic thus some people prefer Sigmund Freud’s work over Jung’s) and both are a good introduction to some of the more controversial approaches in the world of shadow work, while still covering the basics.
NEXT CHAPTER: Emphasising Our Shadow
The Inner Marriage, by Elliott Saxby
Or maybe try this free video on YouTube on the relationship between Buddhism and transcending suffering through body de-armouring and Kundalini Bodywork
