Shadow Boxing
“Someone I loved once gave me a box full of darkness. It took me years to understand that this too, was a gift.”― Mary Oliver
My path of self-discovery has taken me to some pretty dark places these past few weeks — and if you’re just tuning in now and want to know more, you can read “Motivational Dogfooding”, “Postcards from the Chrysalis” and “I surrender…”.
I’ve been doing deep shadow work — a term I honestly didn’t really understand until now — journeying to the center of my being to discover and shine light on my core wounds. All the while chronicling the experience week by week and sharing it with the world as it’s unfolding. A project I call Contagious Vulnerability.
As many of you have noticed, it’s been a real struggle lately. One that has left me in a raw and emotionally vulnerable state.
A state which is super uncomfortable for me because it doesn’t fit with my ego ideal at all. I’ve always been the strong one. The light in the darkness. Joy personified.
The past week has been especially challenging. I felt like I’d fallen into a deep, dark hole. A hole I wasn’t sure how to get out of.
I felt lost and overwhelmed. Like I’d completely dismantled my psyche and wasn’t sure how to put the pieces back together again.
I reached a point in my heroine’s journey of self-discovery where I could finally see and deeply feel my core wounds but wasn’t sure what to do with this awareness.
Where to go from here.
How to reconnect with joy.
What now, what next?
The experience has broken my heart and soul wide open and brought up an ocean of sadness which has at times been overwhelming and all-consuming and which I’m still sitting with and making sense of.
It feels like I have shed more tears in the past two and a half weeks than in the rest of my life combined.
These are not the tears of a romantic relationship that didn’t go the way that I’d hoped. I’ve come to realize that experience was merely a catalyst for this latest deep dive of self-exploration. One for which I am deeply grateful.
These tears feel ancient and stem from ancestral wounds passed down generation to generation through my mother’s side of the family.
I’ve been exploring these wounds since I resumed the Contagious Vulnerability project at the end of 2019. But I’ve been doing mother shadow work — and Jungian shadow synthesis — for much longer.
I was my mother’s shadow until she became mine.
As a little girl and her first born, she did her best to teach me how to be just like her, to make me in her image. And I was a willing and enthusiastic participant, embodying the good girl archetype with perfection.
When I hit puberty, our paths began to diverge and I started to break away from her model.
To be not her.
To be anything and everything but her.
She became my shadow — the embodiment of all the aspects of my psyche that didn’t fit with my ego ideal.
I pretended to be sexually liberated because she was a prude. I earned lots of money and spent it freely because she was the poster child for parsimony. I was outspoken, provocative and brassy because she was timid and never expressed an opinion directly.
I projected all my shadow traits onto her, making for a fraught mother-daughter relationship.
At some point in my early 30s, a friend gave me a book on Jung called The Symbolic Quest” and told me to read the chapter on the shadow. This catalyzed my first round of Jungian synthesis.
I came to accept that though my mother and I shared similar essential ingredients, we weren’t the same. Because my unique expression of those shared personality traits when combined with others that were mine and mine alone differentiated us.
I learned that our shadow traits only define us when we obsessively focus on them or try to deny their existence.
I was finally able to accept and reintegrate my shadow self. I found deeper peace in my soul. I gave myself a gold star and thought I’d completed my mother shadow work. Little did I know that it was just round 1.
Fast forward 20 years and I find myself shadow boxing again. I’ve lost track what round I’m on at this point.
This time around, catalyzed by her suicide, I embarked on a crusade of self-discovery and personal transformation in an effort to address the unhappiness I was feeling with my life at the time and avoid a similar downward spiral in the second half of my life that I’d witnessed in hers.
One by one I identified aspects of my life that were obstacles to joy and overcame them. I didn’t have any time or space for sadness because I was on a mission to find the light within.
It seemed like a positive, even noble thing. Like I was finding the gifts in the tragedy of her experience. Like I was redirecting the course of my life, turning pain to purpose.
What I didn’t recognize at the time was that underneath all this positivity, I was doing it again, denying aspects of my shadow self — the unworthiness of love, my own inner sadness, the darker aspects of my psyche— and doing everything in my power to not be like her once again.
The awakenings of the past few weeks have brought all this to the light of my awareness, confronting me with my own core wounds and shaking the very foundations of my identity.
I’ve been steeped in sadness to the point of feeling like I’m drowning in it at times. Like it might never end.
I had no idea how to reconcile this profound sorrow and the core wounds it comes from with my joy-based self-identity, an identity I’ve worked so hard to bring to life.
With help from my Hakomi therapist and conversations with beloved friends, I’ve come to realize that I have to make space for both the joy and the sadness.
They both need witnessing.
They both need loving curiosity.
They both need a home.
Another round of Jungian shadow synthesis. Synthesis that is starting to bring peace to my soul.
So, what’s the purpose of all this shadow sparring? Our opportunity in doing shadow work is to understand and make room in our psyches for all our traits, both the dark and the light.
To love and accept all of ourselves.
To live as balanced, fully integrated beings.
Because only when we love and accept all of ourselves can we truly love and accept all of those whose hearts we hold dear.
I’m happy to report that I’m emerging from the darkness into the light. The joy is returning. The sadness diminishing.
Not because I joyed it out of existence.
Because I sat with it, witnessed it and gave it love.
I so appreciate all the love, support, encouragement and beautiful, humbling reflections you’ve showered me with lately. I know I haven’t always been able to receive this in the moment but I am deeply grateful and want you to know that you’ve each brought a beacon of light into my darkness that has given me the strength and courage keep going.
If I can return the favor and be of service to you on your journey of self-discovery, please book a curious conversation to explore how the Vulnerability Doula can be of service to you.