It occurs to me that how we experience the shadow is unique to us. We can't really generalize about it. The shadow is very experiential. How it manifests is totally based on who we are, what we are seeking, where we have been, how we have been hurt and loved and a myriad other factors. The shadow is highly personal but also collective, and some of it is karmic (it came with us.)
When I was just a little kid, brought up during the cold war in the early 1950s, because I was empathic, my shadow was the whole repressed terror of the ever-impending threat of WW3. It was a shadow because none of the adults were talking about it. It was also a personal shadow in that there was usually a strong capable adult in my dreams who showed up to help me and everyone else to seek shelter. Usually it was Walter Cronkite. My WW3 shadow was much more manageable than my poor father's WW3 shadow, which stalked him in the form of feeling helpless to be that strong capable protector for his own family. One time the whole family went to shop for a bomb-shelter which a local welding company was building from 3000-gallon oil tanks, equipped with hand-cranked air suctions. As a 5 year old I could easily imagine living in an underground 3000 gallon tank, as long as I was with my family! My father on the other hand was probably horrified by the thought of where the world was heading.
Today we face a different kind of catastrophic fate -- the end of nature as we know it: rising oceans, heating climate and accelerating global extinctions. What's similar between living with the climate-change shadow and the WW3 shadow, (as collective shadows) is, they can't be avoided, we can't make them go away by ignoring them. How we experience our collective shadows has everything to do with how consciously and proactively and mindfully we approach this work -- and it is work!
People who are in denial are going to be dealing with the worst kind of shadow. People who are good at centering and staying with their emotions, and expressing how they are feeling when they feel grief or even rage, are going to be dealing with less of a shadow problem. (Covid represents another collective shadow, as does the specter of the surveillance state or the "dark state", which is both real, in a limited sense, and psychically real in a much more sinister way.) But regardless of how we experience our collective shadow, we are all also dealing with a personal shadow, which is uniquely our own to relate to, and it can be negative or positive. If our image of ourselves is depressed or deflated, our shadow might be a rock star!
Afterthought: We do tend to associate darkness with shadow, but, as Dante poeticized, it's all relative. The brightest light in purgatory is shadow in heaven. Most shadow has light in it. There are all shades of shadow. And, as far as the shadow goes, it can be a very dark shadow, which means there is a lot of the unconscious in it (opaque). Most shadows are translucent and there is the shadow of twilight that falls across the land, my favorite shadow time -- liminal -- when we walk between two realities. I'm just saying, shadow doesn't have to be associated with darkness, but with the invitation to dim the harsh light of ego-consciousness.
Happy dreaming.
(Article changed on Apr 24, 2021 at 10:45 AM EDT)
