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As Rosanne
Bane makes clear in the following pages, there are tremendous
personal benefits to realizing and integrating our shadow. One of
the first results, when you begin the fateful work of shadow
integration, is a release and increase of energy. This makes sense.
As we take back our disowned pieces, we are released from the
typical pretense and posturing necessary to conceal what we have
found unacceptable about ourselves. This is a relief, a refund from
energy reserves that we are now free to spend in other ways. What we
once believed were debts are now assets. What are we to do with this
windfall? Rosanne Bane is gently insistent in her suggestion: invest
this energy in self-expression.
Dancing in the
Dragon’s Den is about releasing the creative factor embedded in
the human shadow. What a marvelous recognition by Ms. Bane, what a
useful notion to put into practice: “To express your creativity,
embrace your shadow; to embrace your shadow, express your
creativity.”
What is the shadow?
The shadow is an alter ego that lives just beyond the sphere of our
conscious awareness. To negotiate our way through earthly pursuits,
we need an ego identity, an “I.” What doesn’t fit our ego-ideal, the
idealized sense of self that we each have shaped by family and
culture, becomes shadow.
Having a shadow is
the price we each pay for being part of a family and a culture. In
exchange for the benefits and power of civilized society, we are
asked to suppress or eliminate those supposedly antisocial, inferior
or unacceptable qualities. It is tribute paid to the civilizing
process, a sacrifice made as part of our social contract.
The repression is an
honest mistake – a necessary, unavoidable mistake – that occupies
the first half of life for many of us. Certainly, there are pieces
of our fullest potential that need censorship; but much of the
editing we do is careless and expedient, without the benefit of
experience. My friend, poet and author Robert Bly, calls the shadow
“the long bag we drag behind us. We spend our life until we’re
twenty deciding what parts of ourselves to put in the bag,” Bly
says, “and we spend the rest of our lives trying to get them out
again.”
Because our shadow
is an affront to the self-concept we have created, we have little
tolerance whenever we catch a glimpse of it. This is the challenge
of shadow work. However, it is quite easy to see another’s shadow.
Others can usually see us as we are. Here lies the irony of the
shadow game: In making these distinctions, we haven’t really fooled
anyone but ourselves. We originally agreed to make a shadow in order
to adapt, to win love and approval from others. As it turns out,
most everyone can see that the emperor-ego has no clothes. Only
polite social grace refrains from mentioning the truth that we are
all of a piece, ego and shadow.
Dancing in the
Dragon’s Den is the first book to specifically address the
relationship between shadow and creativity, providing an extensive
treasury of specific, practical answers on how to integrate the
shadow. Rosanne Bane focuses with persistent intelligence on the
shadow imperative that drives self-expression. As you work your way
through these chapters, it will become increasingly evident that the
shadow is a messenger who brings the good news of the treasures
hidden in the depths, who carries the creative vision that has been
growing in the darkness. Ms. Bane, like the Buddhist precept,
reminds us that we should never try to get rid of our demons; in
fact, we cannot get rid of negative energies. They are the very
substance of enlightenment, waiting to be transformed and expressed.
We live in a
perfectly imperfect world. It falls to each one of us to take on our
share of human imperfection. Probably the best contribution one
could make to the world would be to integrate our own shadow, to
lift our personal piece of the burden off the world.
Though we may have
cut ourselves off from our own life force by cutting our world in
half, by creating dualisms of this and that, good and bad, ego and
shadow, we cannot deny that the shadow has a vital function, which
becomes more apparent as we move through life: shadow gives
counterpoint to our idealism; it drives us to re-unify and become
whole; it challenges us to give creative expression – to live the
unlived life. As British analyst and author Liz Greene observes,
“The shadow is both the awful thing that needs redemption, and the
suffering redeemer who can provide it.”
–
Jeremiah Abrams
Fairfax, California
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