Richo - Shadow dance: liberating the power and creativity of your dark side

Deep and spiritually challenging.

Spirituality & Health

David Richo has written a big book, much more than a book on the shadow and its context. Shadow Dance is a poem, a paean to the psychological life, written with a great sense of culture and depth. My world has been enlarged by reading it.

Jeremiah Abrams, author of TheShadow in America and coeditor of Meeting the Shadow

As useful a self-help book as one is likely to find.

Huston Smith

ABOUT THE BOOK

Our shadow is the collection of negative or undesirable traits we keep hiddenthe things we dont like about ourselves or are afraid to admit: egotist, non-PC proclivities, forbidden sexual desires. But it also includes our positive, untapped potentialqualities we may admire in others but disavow in ourselves. Befriending the shadow makes fear an ally and enables us to live more authentically. It also automatically improves our interpersonal relationships, because we are freed from the need to project our own negativity onto others, and we become more acutely aware when theirs is projected onto us. David Richo looks for where the shadow manifests in personal life, family interaction, religion, relationship, and the world around is. He shows how to use the gentle practice of mindfulness to work with our shadow side, and he provides numerous exercises for going deeper. He is remarkably skillful at making the shadow concept not only easy to understand, but supremely practical for enhancing the quality of our lives.

DAVID RICHO, PhD, is a psychotherapist, teacher, writer, and workshop leader whose work emphasizes the benefits of mindfulness and loving-kindness in personal growth and emotional well-being. He is the author of numerous books, including How to Be an Adult in Relationships and The Five Things We Cannot Change. He lives in Santa Barbara and San Francisco, California.

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1999 by David Richo

The selections from Emily Dickinsons poems are reprinted by permission of the publishers and trustees of Amherst College from The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson, Thomas H. Johnson, ed., Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, copyright 1951, 1955, 1979, 1983 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College. Efforts were made to obtain rights from copyright holders where applicable. In some cases the efforts were unsuccessful. The author and publisher are grateful for the use of this excerpted material.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Richo, David, 1940

The shadow dance: liberating the power and creativity of your dark side/David Richo.1st ed.

p. cm.

eISBN 978-0-8348-2291-7

ISBN 978-1-57062-444-5

1. Good and evilPsychological aspects. 2. Good and evilPsychological aspectsCase studies. 3. Shadow (Psychoanalysis)

I. Title.

For my Fathers

Stepdad Joe Slubowski, Grandpa Philip Garibaldi, Uncle Mike Perillo, Dad Dominic Richo, Harry Gaunt, Roger Racette, Reverend Al Giaquinto, Ed Murray, S.J., Rabbi Robert Goldberg, Bert Bigelow, Don Miesen, Armando Quiros, and Uncle Sal Garibaldi

What would life have been without your love?

Under an empty autumn sky

Stretch endless wastes

Where no one goes.

Who is that horseman riding in from the west?

WANG CHANGLING, EIGHTH-CENTURY BUDDHIST POET

Contents

Introduction

We meet ourselves time and again in a thousand disguises on the path of life.

C. G. JUNG

D O YOU DARE to love what you have hated all your life? If you can entertain that paradox, this book is for you, since it attempts to show how everything about us contains creativity and goodness no matter how bad or useless we may think it to be. Our dark side has been called our personal shadow by C. G. Jung. The shadow is everything about ourselves that we do not know or refuse to know, both dark and light. It is the sum total of the positive and negative traits, feelings, beliefs, and potentials we refuse to identify as our own.

The shadow is that part of us that is incompatible with who we think we are or are supposed to be. It is the realm beyond our limits, the place where we are more than we seem. The shadow is ironically humorous because the opposite of our self-image proves to be true in spite of all our tricky attempts not to believe or display it. Fear of that wider self keeps it in the dungeon, but there are ways to release the prisoner. It takes practice. This book presents it in bite-size pieces and accompanies you through the process. It shows you how to transform your inner demons and awaken your dormant divinities. It invites you to grant hospitality to all the pilgrim parts of yourself and make room for them one by one.

The challenge is in accepting ourselves all the way to the bottom: admitting and holding rather than denying and eschewing our arrogance, our self-centeredness, our will to coerce others, and any other dark truths we cannot face about ourselves. All these constitute our negative shadow side, which can turn out to be not so much a threat as a promise: we can find the best in us in what is bad in us. We shall see how the counterpart of every negative in the human equation is something positive. Everything is meant for good, says Saint Augustine, even what is bad.

This handbook is also about accepting ourselves all the way to the top: acknowledging and accessing the creative powers we have never believed we possessed and have never put to use. This is our darkened positive shadow side. We may admire these glowing attributes strongly in others and deny them in ourselves, just as we strongly dislike in others what may be true but ugly about ourselves. Hope grows from welcoming our positive shadow, since hope is about believing in the potential in us for a life that is greater than the one our frightened and limited ego has designed, a wisdom larger than our thinking mind can muster, and a love that is wider than that with which we embrace our immediate circle of friends.

The gnawing sense of emptiness that sometimes arises in life might be just this: our refusal to grant full suffrage to our shadow regions, our failure to see that we are more than we seem. We lose contact with our dark side when we deny our pettiness, our selfishness, our vindictiveness. We may also lose faith in our own bright merit and spiritual limitlessness: I am larger, better than I thought, / I did not know I held so much goodness, wrote Walt Whitman.

To think that what we are conscious of about ourselves is all there is to us puts us in danger of being run by the unconscious forces in our shadow. This is scary, since we are mostly