Bringing Your Shadow Out of the Dark

Book excerpt: "Our shadow," teaches Robert Augustus Masters, "is our internal storehouse for the parts of us that we’ve disowned or rejected, or are otherwise keeping in the dark." Everyone has a shadow, but all too many of us are unaware of it. It holds the feelings and beliefs that we are most ashamed of or cannot accept about ourselves. For some, it may contain unacknowledged anger or grief. For others, pain or fear. Our shadow contains our unfaced conditioning. And the more unaware we are of our shadow, the more it influences and controls us. Based upon Masters's four decades as a psychospiritual therapist and guide, Bringing Your Shadow Out of the Dark invites readers to understand and skillfully work with this rich yet neglected dimension of ourselves. With depth and clarity, he illuminates the process of meeting our shadow in beneficial ways, and how we can embody a more complete and life-giving experience of who we are. In this book you’ll discover: • The nature of our shadow and how to optimally work with it—exploring our conditioning and core shadow elements, including in the domains of shame, fear, aggression, resistance, addiction, death, and spirituality • How to work with the child within, self-sabotage, narcissism, sexuality, dreams, and other matters deeply influenced by our shadow • Why turning toward our pain is an essential part of shadow work—making wise use of our pain • Collective shadow domains we share with family, social groups, political party, or nation—bringing them and their associated traumas into the light When we uncover and work in-depth with our shadow, we free ourselves from its control and gain the opportunity to put its contents to work for us instead of allowing them to work against us. Bringing Your Shadow Out of the Dark shows us how to navigate the full terrain of our emotions, drives, needs, and depths of who we are. Foreword by Lissa Rankin, MD, New York Times bestselling author of Mind Over Medicine, The Fear Cure, and The Anatomy of a Calling.