Speaker 1: Now here's a highlight from Coast to Coast AM on iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2: Welcome back to Coast to Coast AM. My next guest
Speaker 2: is connie's Wig. She is a beautiful spiritual author. She
Speaker 2: wrote award winning book called The Inner Work of Age
Speaker 2: Shifting the Role, Shifting from role to soul, and she
Speaker 2: talked a lot about in that particular book about her
Speaker 2: work on the shadow in midlife and beyond, going from
Speaker 2: the roles in your life to the soul, and I
Speaker 2: remember interviewing her about that book. She has a new
Speaker 2: book again on the same topic of the shadow, but
Speaker 2: it's how our search for our shadow or our diving
Speaker 2: into that shadow wherek can really help us on our
Speaker 2: path to awakening, to our spiritual path and to really
Speaker 2: separate from the abuse that we've had or trauma that
Speaker 2: we've had in our lives. Back to the show, Connie,
Speaker 2: thanks for joining me.
Speaker 3: Lisa, so good to be with you again.
Speaker 2: Absolutely, it's just for your body of work is diving
Speaker 2: into the tough subjects and I really appreciate that you're
Speaker 2: not afraid to go there because you see such a
Speaker 2: better way on the other end of the path through darkness.
Speaker 2: But it's not an easy one, is it.
Speaker 3: It's not easy. But the truth is all of us
Speaker 3: meet our shadows all the time. It's just that our
Speaker 3: habit is to deny it or defend against it because
Speaker 3: we don't have the tools.
Speaker 2: What's an example maybe of a shadow that one would have.
Speaker 3: Yes, okay, so let's kind of start at the beginning
Speaker 3: and be sure that we're on the same page. So
Speaker 3: when we say shadow, this is a term that was
Speaker 3: named by Carl Jung, who was famous psychiatrist in the
Speaker 3: beginning of the field of psychology, and he used a
Speaker 3: term shadow because it's that part of us that's not
Speaker 3: in the light, the light of awareness. It's like a
Speaker 3: blind spot in our field of vision. And it can
Speaker 3: be absolutely anything that goes into the shadow. It can
Speaker 3: be a forbidden feeling like anger or sorrow. It can
Speaker 3: be a trait that we don't develop, that goes unlived,
Speaker 3: like an artistic or athletic trait. It can be a
Speaker 3: belief that begins early but then gets repressed and doesn't
Speaker 3: ever get expressed. So anything at all becomes shadow content
Speaker 3: and the shadow. You know, we know now that the
Speaker 3: mind and the body are intimately interwoven, interconnected.
Speaker 2: Right yes.
Speaker 3: So shadow material is not just in a corner of
Speaker 3: the mind somewhere, which is how people seem to picture it.
Speaker 3: It's actually in the whole brain, mind, body, in our muscles,
Speaker 3: in our in our tightness, in our memory, in our feelings.
Speaker 3: And when we begin to discover or uncover this material,
Speaker 3: we actually gain energy, we gain awareness. We can reclaim
Speaker 3: lost feelings that have been buried, we can reclaim talents
Speaker 3: that were unexpressed because maybe they weren't supported by our families.
Speaker 3: So there's a all kinds of gifts. Young called it
Speaker 3: the gold in the dark side. So the shadow is
Speaker 3: a is a large topic, and that's why I've written
Speaker 3: so many looks about it. It's really it's paild my
Speaker 3: interest for many decades.
Speaker 2: Now I can understand why.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and there's not a lot of material for people
Speaker 3: about how to work with it.
Speaker 1: Well.
Speaker 2: Also, when it's not recognized, it can run your life
Speaker 2: without unconsciously and cause you to have behaviors that I mean,
Speaker 2: look at generational trauma. The shadow that is buried repeats
Speaker 2: itself over and over again.
Speaker 3: Yes, that's exactly right. So if any of our listeners
Speaker 3: have the same fight with a friend or a partner
Speaker 3: over and over again. That's the shadow erupting. Or you
Speaker 3: struggle with a self sabotaging behavior, maybe it's overeating or gambling,
Speaker 3: or making critical statements of the person you love, that's
Speaker 3: the shadow erupting. There's a part of you that is
Speaker 3: it is not in the control of your ego, but
Speaker 3: it's erupting in order to bring information about some valid needs.
Speaker 3: So when we learn how to discover the valid need
Speaker 3: inside of that shadow, I call it a shadow figure.
Speaker 3: It's a part of ourselves. It's not who we are,
Speaker 3: it's not all of who we are, but it's a
Speaker 3: part and inside that part there's a valid need that's
Speaker 3: actually asking for something. In that self destructive behavior, like
Speaker 3: say addiction, what is it asking for? And as we
Speaker 3: learn to uncover that, we gain self knowledge and we
Speaker 3: gain the consciousness to be able to change those behaviors.
Speaker 2: Can you give me an example, because like for the
Speaker 2: example that you just gave of addiction, it's really about
Speaker 2: control in some way, right.
Speaker 3: Wellet I give you a brief story about a client.
Speaker 3: So a woman came to me because she had gained
Speaker 3: a lot of weight and she was unhappy in her
Speaker 3: relationship and this is what she described to me. Every night,
Speaker 3: she would wait for her boyfriend to call her, and
Speaker 3: when he wouldn't call, she would sit by the phone
Speaker 3: and eat ice cream. And it became habitual night after night,
Speaker 3: and she was devastated that he didn't call. And as
Speaker 3: she gained the weight, that symptom told her that something
Speaker 3: was really wrong. She couldn't face that something was wrong
Speaker 3: with the relationship, but she could look at the fact
Speaker 3: that she was gaining all this weight, and that's what
Speaker 3: motivated her to enter therapy. She thought that was the problem.
Speaker 3: But when we began to do shadow work and we
Speaker 3: discovered this shadow part that she called the foodie, what
Speaker 3: we found out was that her mother had also had
Speaker 3: an unhappy marriage and was always waiting for her husband
Speaker 3: to come home, and she was overeating while she was waiting.
Speaker 3: And so Susan had been watching her mother do that
Speaker 3: all her life. She was keeping the feelings down with
Speaker 3: food and so the source of that addiction was her
Speaker 3: inability to communicate her needs and her fear of finding
Speaker 3: out what the truth was from her partner. So eventually
Speaker 3: Susan was able to took months, you know, but she
Speaker 3: was able to call this man and say, what's going on?
Speaker 3: You know, you don't seem to want to be with me,
Speaker 3: and he said, I don't. I haven't been able to
Speaker 3: break up with you, but I don't want to be
Speaker 3: in a relationship. So, you know, she she spent a
Speaker 3: few weeks with a lot of grief and anger and
Speaker 3: very upset. And as she worked that through, she realized
Speaker 3: that she had been choosing someone who didn't want her
Speaker 3: and using food in the self destructive way, and now
Speaker 3: she was free of both of those patterns. She wouldn't
Speaker 3: do that again because she saw the connection between the
Speaker 3: poor choice of a partner and the emotional eating. And
Speaker 3: so the foody shadow character began to recede and she
Speaker 3: was able to communicate. You know, as she started dating,
Speaker 3: she was able to tell people her needs more clearly.
Speaker 2: Just by recognizing that. Did she have to do specific
Speaker 2: work or dialogue around it, or forgiveness or was there
Speaker 2: any more that goes into shadow work.
Speaker 3: So this is kind of the method that I developed
Speaker 3: in the book Romancing the Shadow. So you begin to
Speaker 3: watch with self observation when this self destructive behavior comes up,
Speaker 3: what are you saying to yourself? And she was saying
Speaker 3: I'm lonely and I feel abandoned. And then you watch
Speaker 3: the feelings that go with those thoughts. So she felt
Speaker 3: really sad and alone, and you watch the bodily sensations
Speaker 3: that go with those thoughts and feelings. And I don't
Speaker 3: remember what it was for her, but it could be,
Speaker 3: you know, tightness in the shoulders or the abdomen, or
Speaker 3: nausea or some kind of physical sensation. So then you
Speaker 3: have three cues that that particular shadow came character is
Speaker 3: coming forward, is moving into consciousness, and you give it
Speaker 3: a name. She called it the Foody, and you give
Speaker 3: it an image. And the image that she came up
Speaker 3: with was this giant open mouth. So now she had
Speaker 3: all these ways to catch that. What had previously been
Speaker 3: this sort of amorphous, unconscious feeling that she couldn't get
Speaker 3: a handle on it was too abstract. Now she had
Speaker 3: a concrete image, and she gave it a name, and
Speaker 3: she had something that she could work with and witness
Speaker 3: every time it moved into her awareness. And in that moment,
Speaker 3: she had a choice, should I listen to the foody
Speaker 3: and eat ice cream? Or should I make a different choice,
Speaker 3: Because while it's still unconscious, you don't have choice. It's
Speaker 3: like you're in a trance and you lose your agency.
Speaker 3: That's what addiction is about. It's a very trance like state.
Speaker 2: Right, right.
Speaker 3: And so as she moved more and more awareness into
Speaker 3: the process, she gained more and more choice, and sometimes
Speaker 3: she might choose to eat ice cream if she felt
Speaker 3: like it, but this was about learning how to communicate
Speaker 3: in a relationship, so she wasn't using the ice cream
Speaker 3: to stuff down her feelings. So it's a process and
Speaker 3: it takes time. It's not a quick fix.
Speaker 2: But you personify the behavior with some type of an image,
Speaker 2: so you call it to the forefront of the conscious mind,
Speaker 2: and then you are able to make a little bit
Speaker 2: more of a clear choice around it.
Speaker 3: Now, that's right. I really love you have the opportunity
Speaker 3: to choose because it's not an unconscious process anymore.
Speaker 2: And this is from your book Romancing the Shadow, that process.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that book really focuses on method and then as
Speaker 3: we age. I wrote The Inner Work of Age to
Speaker 3: use that method for other issues that come up later
Speaker 3: in life. So, for example, we have I'm in my
Speaker 3: seventies now. Most of the people I interviewed for the
Speaker 3: book have a shadow figure called that I called the
Speaker 3: inner ages, and it's that part of us that either
Speaker 3: denies or dislikes aging, looking older, feeling older, behaving differently,
Speaker 3: and so people lose self acceptance. In my practice that
Speaker 3: there were people who were just hating themselves for how
Speaker 3: they look, and so that in internalized agism becomes a
Speaker 3: shadow character that's unconscious, and when we begin to work
Speaker 3: with it consciously, we then have a choice of how
Speaker 3: to respond to our aging and how to do it differently.
Speaker 3: So that's just one of the shadow characters in that book.
Speaker 2: Well, these are I mean, this is fantastic, especially when
Speaker 2: it comes to giving a personification of the shadow behavior,
Speaker 2: so it calls it to the forefront. Probably the more
Speaker 2: obscure the personification of the behavior is, the easier it
Speaker 2: is to have be the observer of it, right to
Speaker 2: maybe even make make it fun or obvious or outrageous,
Speaker 2: so that there.
Speaker 3: Can be yes. Some people like to do it that way.
Speaker 3: I mean, it's you know, the general principle of psychology
Speaker 3: is making the unconscious conscious mm hmm. And people can
Speaker 3: do that with dream work. Using dreams, you can find
Speaker 3: the shadow. You can do it with a creative process.
Speaker 3: You can do it with free association. So this is
Speaker 3: a particular method for making the unconscious conscious and forming
Speaker 3: or as you said, personifying these characters and making them
Speaker 3: memorable because their nature is to hide. And so if
Speaker 3: they slip behind the curtain again and you remember, you
Speaker 3: remember it because it's eccentric, you know, or wacky, that's great.
Speaker 3: You have a way to recognize when it comes up again.
Speaker 2: Yes, absolutely so. In the book, you talk a lot
Speaker 2: about various contemporary teachers of Buddhism and Hinduism and Catholicism,
Speaker 2: and you talk about the shadow in let's particularly talk
Speaker 2: about Catholicism. Where there's a shadow in a religious or
Speaker 2: a spiritual teacher, it could be anything. It could be also,
Speaker 2: you know what we saw recently with the Dalai Lama.
Speaker 2: Depending on whether or not that was true, there's so
Speaker 2: many different shadows that are associated with religious and spiritual leaders,
Speaker 2: especially when it comes to cults. How does that shadow manifest?
Speaker 2: Why does someone who has a shadow passed? Why are
Speaker 2: they attracted to being a religious leader in the first place.
Speaker 3: So this is the new book, Meeting the Shadow on
Speaker 3: the Spiritual Path, And this just kind of extends my
Speaker 3: work into the religious and spiritual arenas. So it's a
Speaker 3: continuation of what we've been talking about. But we tend
Speaker 3: to meet a shadow in ourselves when we're in a
Speaker 3: religious or spiritual community in various ways. We could meet
Speaker 3: our own denial. We could meet a projection, we project
Speaker 3: we attribute something positive to a clergy person that we
Speaker 3: deny in ourselves or reject in ourselves. We might meet
Speaker 3: a shadow in a community, because groups have their own shadows.
Speaker 3: You know, groups are cultures, and they define what's acceptable
Speaker 3: and what's taboo, what goes into the shadow, And we
Speaker 3: might meet a shadow in a teacher, as you're saying,
Speaker 3: somebody may act out a hurtful, destructive behavior. And in
Speaker 3: the research for the book, I was really astonished to
Speaker 3: find how much that's going on now and how little
Speaker 3: people are talking about it, you know, not really. I mean,
Speaker 3: there's the news every single day. The headlines are screaming
Speaker 3: about politician shadows, and you know, we're all kind of
Speaker 3: overwhelmed with all of this and the attention and even
Speaker 3: the Me Too movement, which brought this incredible attention about
Speaker 3: sexual shadow to the workplace and to universities, it didn't
Speaker 3: extend it into the religious and spiritual world.
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