These past few years, I have been challenged to recognize, integrate, and embrace my shadow. Much of my Camino journey was about shadow work, and Richard Rohr, founder of the Center for Action and Contemplation, has been a helpful teacher on this important growth path:
“Our shadow is often subconscious, hidden even from our own awareness. It takes effort and life-long practice to look for, find, and embrace what we dismiss, deny, and disdain. After spending so much energy avoiding the very appearance of failure, it will take a major paradigm shift in consciousness to integrate our shadow in Western upwardly mobile cultures. Just know that it is the false self that is sad and humbled by shadow work, because its game is over. The True Self, “hidden with Christ in God” (Colossians 3:3), is incapable of being humiliated. It only grows from such supposedly humiliating insight.
One of the great surprises on the human journey is that we come to full consciousness precisely by shadowboxing, facing our own contradictions, and making friends with our own mistakes and failings.” Richard Rohr 9/8/19 daily meditation
For more shadow work, here are 7 meditations that help us to do some shadowboxing.
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