Robert Augustus Masters - Bringing Your Shadow Out of the Dark: Breaking Free from the Hidden Forces That Drive You

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

WRITING THIS BOOK was one hell of a labor of love.

When my energy for it waned and my psychospiritual work demanded my time, my wife, Diane, infused me with her deep care and vision, giving me both healing rest and the boost to freshly reenter my writers cave. She also read, carefully, everything that went into the book, doing plenty of needed pruning, which was initially (not surprisingly) met with my resistance. I made case after case for my articulate blooms and my poetic excesses, but soon yielded to her insight gratefully. Having cofacilitated with me for ten years, she knows my work well! She did a lot of editing, helping me greatly to make this book more accessible to many.

My Sounds True editor, Amy Rost, did an exceptional job of shaping the book into something much clearer and more readable than I could have done on my own. Amys skill in organizing my often-unkempt writing into user-friendly material was masterful. I could not have asked for a better editor.

And my gratitude to all those who have trusted me with the exploration of their shadow and deepest wounding. My time with you made this book possible.

Also by Robert Augustus Masters, PhD

To Be a Man: A Guide to True Masculine Power

Emotional Intimacy: A Comprehensive Guide for Connecting with the Power of Your Emotions

Knowing Your Shadow: Becoming Intimate with All That You Are (Audio)

Until Our Song Is Fully Sung: Selected Poetry, Lyrics, and Prose Poetry

Transformation Through Intimacy:

The Journey toward Awakened Monogamy

Spiritual Bypassing: When Spirituality

Disconnects Us from What Really Matters

Meeting the Dragon: Ending Our Suffering by Entering Our Pain

The Anatomy & Evolution of Anger: An Integral Exploration

Divine Dynamite: Entering Awakenings Heartland

Freedom Doesnt Mind Its Chains:

Revisioning Sex, Body, Emotion, & Spirituality

Darkness Shining Wild: An Odyssey to the Heart of Hell & Beyond:

Meditations on Sanity, Suffering, Spirituality, and Liberation

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

ROBERT AUGUSTUS MASTERS, PHD, is a pioneering integral psychotherapist and group leader, relationship expert, and psychospiritual guide and trainer, with a doctorate in psychology. Hes also the author of many booksincluding Transformation Through Intimacy, Spiritual Bypassing, Emotional Intimacy, and To Be a Manand the audio program Knowing Your Shadow.

His intuitive, uniquely integrative work, developed over the past four decades, blends the psychological and physical with the emotional and spiritual, emphasizing full-blooded embodiment and awakening, emotional authenticity and literacy, deep shadow work, and the development of relational maturity.

At essence, his work is about becoming more intimate with all that we are, in the service of the deepest possible healing, awakening, and integration. He lives with his wife, Diane, in Ashland, Oregon. His website is robertmasters.com.

CODA

DARKNESS UNVEILED

Turn, turn toward

What youre housing

In the dark

Meet it, uncover it

Until you realize

That what youre seeing

Is none other than you

In endarkened disguise

No longer blinded by light

You start unwrapping the night

Touching a knowing

Too deep to be spoken

A recognition

Too central to be broken

Until even the darkest day

Lights your way

ABOUT SOUNDS TRUE

SOUNDS TRUE is a multimedia publisher whose mission is to inspire and support personal transformation and spiritual awakening. Founded in 1985 and located in Boulder, Colorado, we work with many of the leading spiritual teachers, thinkers, healers, and visionary artists of our time. We strive with every title to preserve the essential living wisdom of the author or artist. It is our goal to create products that not only provide information to a reader or listener, but that also embody the quality of a wisdom transmission.

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AN INSIDE LOOK AT OUR SHADOW

OUR SHADOW is the place within each of us that contains what we dont know, dont like, or deny about ourselves. Calling it our shadow is fitting because of its lack of illumination; what its storing is being kept in the dark, to whatever degree. Wherever we go, our shadow goes with us, whether were aware of it or not.

Our shadow holds our unattended and not-yet-illuminated conditioningall the programmed ways we act, think, feel, and choose without knowing why. It also contains all that weve disowned, pushed aside, or otherwise rejected in ourselves; whatever in us about which we insist, Thats not me; whatever in us were out of touch with or keeping out of sight, such as the roots of our unresolved wounding. Things we may find in our shadow include:

Fear, especially in the form of core-level anxiety

Anger, including anger thats been converted into aggression

Shame, particularly when we associate it with humiliation and rejection

Empathy, especially when we equate it with being too soft

Less-than-flattering intentions, such as being good in order to stay in control

Resistance, especially when our no to something is muted or muzzled

The child in us, particularly when were avoiding or minimizing our childhood wounding

Our inner saboteur, featuring us playing victim to self-defeating behaviors

The nonsexual factors driving our sexuality, such as wanting to be wanted

Grief, especially in its raw depths and unsullied intensity

Our bigness and beautythe ennobling qualities weve learned to suppress

A quick way to get a sense of what our shadow contains is to identify something we dont like about ourselves, perhaps a quality we wish we didnt have and therefore tend to push away or ignore as best we can. Initially well probably only see the presenting surface of this qualitysuch as an out-of-proportion insecurity or irritabilitynot realizing that this is but the tip of the proverbial iceberg. However, once we realize theres more to this disliked quality of ourselves than were seeing, were likely going to feel more open to exploring it and its origins. And the more we explore, the more likely we are to realize that the quality weve disowned is, in fact, a quality that can be helpful to us.

For example, Terrys wife complained that whenever she was upset with him, he shut down. Terry understood that this behavior of his was a problem and wished he could stay open to her, connected to her. The trouble was, he felt vulnerable whenever his wife was unhappy with him, and feeling like this made him very uncomfortable. So he pushed away both his vulnerability and discomfort by shutting down.

Once Terry began to explore his shadow, he found there not only his vulnerability but also what he originally associatedand still associateswith being vulnerable: being humiliated. As a boy, when he was mocked and degraded by his brothers and he started to cry, he was belittled even more by them. Remembering this and emotionally connecting it to his current circumstances, through some counseling, helped him start experiencing his vulnerability not as a weakness but as a source of strength. As a result, he became able to remain emotionally connected to his wife, even when she was upset with him.