On Shadow work (Robert Bly)

[wegge]

Hi all!

I want to introduce you to some aspects of Robert Bly´s work.
Some may know him as a proposer of men´s movement.

I stumbled upon two books of him:

http://www.amazon.com/A-Little-Book-...e+human+shadow

In "a little book on the human shadow" he´s talking about how we´re born with a 360° personality. Over time we´re stuffing aspects of us "in the bag", especially when we´re exhibiting behaviour which people dear to us don´t approve of (Parents, teacher, friends, media etc.)

It´s happening over time that these stuffed away things become perverted. We spend a lot of time holding these aspects back and not let them shine through ("It wasn´t really me in this moment").

Also he´s talking about projection. THings we don´t like in other people are probably aspects of ourselves in our bag which we don´t like.

He´s talking about the importance of safely reintegrating these aspects of ourselves making us whole again and not just love and light.

http://www.amazon.com/Iron-John-Book...ords=iron+john

In "Iron John" he is talking about the importance of initiation for males/females. He´s concentrating on males in this book.
He uses the fairy tale "Iron John" as a golden thread to show the different stages of initiation and draws parallels to Tribal people where initiation is still happening.

What experiences do you have with shadow work or initiation?

kind regards

[Eram]

Hi wegge,

Those books look very interesting by your introduction.
I'll put them on the "to read" list.

I've done work with the Byron Katie method for some time now and especially the sitting down and writing on paper what these shadow peaces have to vent seems to have a healing quality. It shines light in places that have been deprived of it for years on end.

[Milneman]

Iron John is a book everyone MUST have on their shelves. It's a fascinating study. Wegge did you see the series Bly did with Marion Woodman on PBS back in the late 80's early 90's where they went through the Iron John story? I'd love to find it again.

He's got some interesting points in regards to initiation.

[wegge]

no I don´t know about it but it seems interesting, I just started reading a book about/by Joseph Campbell that´s based on such a PBS series and he´s talking about the importance of myth there extensively

[donk]

I believe all of this sorta ties in with this thread I just started (but gotta read more to know for sure) a little bit, where the "shadow" elements are that thing was rejected by humanity for a couple million years--the desire to control, which manifested as civilization.

I think it's important to understand the "shadow" and also the "hero" archetype which has as a Campbell puts it "many faces". It's so convulsed these days, we must look back to understand it properly in today's context

[DNA]

This is the best little six minute primer on Shadow work I have ever come across.
This is very much worth the watch.

Source: https://youtube.com/watch?v=Tja6_h4lT6A

[wegge]

Here is an excerpt from part 3 of the little book on the human shadow:

Ill suggest, then, five stages, beginning with the stage in which the psyche has sent the unwelcome power out and it is successfully projected. When the uncomfortable talent is well exiled, all that is left inside is a thin, gray, wispy substance, hardly noticeable in daylight.
The male child begins projecting his interior witch early perhaps at two or three months, the mother being a good hook.

Some observers believe that the baby, when he or she experiences for the first time the mother´s refusal of the breast, or some other setback, sees, his perceptions powered by enormous rage, fangs actually come out of her mouth, and skulls appear around her neck.
Children feel grateful when a grownup reads witch stories to them because it proves to them that they are not insane. The child, male or female, lives with this secret, that the mother whom everyone declares to be supportive and caring has a witch face at times, and the child knows he is too small to do anything about it.

Some men let their mother carry their witch for the rest of their lives, but most men, when they marry, transfer their witch, or most of it, over to their new bride. While the bride and groom stand in front of the minister exchanging rings, another important exchange takes place in the basement. Durig a separate meeting, the mother passes over the son´s witch, which she has been carrying, to the bride. An hour after the ceremony the witch is firmly in place inside the bride, though it will take a while for it to show up, because neither the bride, nor the mother, nor the groom knows about this second ceremony. But after a few arguments, a few obstinacies, and a few money fights, it occurs to the groom one day that there is something witch-like in his bride that he hadn´t noticed before. It sometimes occurs to her too that something bizarre has happened. During an argument she feels herself more greedy, or more witchy. One woman said to me, „Robert, before I was married I was quite a nice person. But now I´ve been married for three years, and you know, I´m getting bitchier and bitchier, How can this be?“ I said, „Well, you´ve been eating for two.“ The husband meanwhile gets sweeter and sweeter, and this enrages his wife still more, and tends to bring out more her witch side. She is now carrying witchiness-- that is, impulsive, irritability, abrupt greediness, unfairness, unexplainable hostility, and underground current of rage-- for both of them.
He feels quite calm, and looks with wonder and pity at her behavior.

During the marriage service a similar exchange takes place between the groom and the bride´s father. Perhaps their spirits meet in the garage – their actual bodies being in church – and the bride´s father passes over to the groom as much as he can find of the giant or the tyrant that he has been carrying for his daughter. The bride´s father leaves the church door lighter, the groom heavier.

The groom receives from the father many other transferred projections as well: he may have to carry her spiritual guide, and perhaps her interior bluebeard, some brutal side of the feminine.
Besides his childhood witch, the bride receives from the mother of the groom his helplessness, his deviousness, perhaps his Kali-like rage. The bride goes home from the wedding considerably heavier.
We´ll call the first stage of projection then the state of mind in which shadow material, well handled by trained conspirators, comes to rest outside the owner´s psyche, and seems likely to remain out there somewhere, The bride and groom may remain in this first stage for years. Some things, like the wedding silver, last a long time.
But sooner or later one of the projections starts to rattle, in the lovely word Marie Louise von Franz uses. Something doesn´t quite fit anymore, and we hear it rattle. We´ll call this rattling the second stage. The man´s wife acts witchy at times and not at other times, and no matter how much the husband squints at her through half closed eyes, she definitely is acting generously and not witchily.
That is confusing for the man. He may begin, unconsciously of course, coming home late for dinner without telling her, or forgetting birthdays and anniversaries. Hopefully she´ll take those rudeness personally, and the mask will fit again
.
It is threatening when the projection starts to rattle. Let´s suppose a woman has put a giant´s mask firmly on her husband´s face, and feels it as a painful relief-- at least she get it out of her psyche. But what if her husband fails one day to be a negative patriarch? What to do then? Trouble.
She might, unconsciously of course, overdraw jer checking account, lose bills, dent the fender, feel victimized, act like a little girl. That may turn him into a tyrant again. Or she may go to a feminist meeting to be revved up. Hopefully someone there will explain that even man´s kindesses are a subtle part of their oppression. When she gets home he hast the patriarch mask on again.

(…)

Many young American men and women in the last twenty years have projected their spiritual guide onto an Asian guru; that projection lasts a while, and then starts to rattle. Perhaps a student hears that his or her guru is sleeping with young girls, or buying Rolls-Royces by the dozen. An ashram of disciples may live for years in the anguish of the second stage.
What is the second stage like in our projections onto our children?
A sort of history of child-rearing in Germany in the nineteenth century came out recently called For Your Own Good, written by Alice Miller. She notes that around 1850 the bad word in such circles was „exuberance“. Some child-rearing books spoke of exuberance as if it were negative and potentially evil. The books would say, „Now when your child gets to be two or two and a half years old, you´ll notice a lot of exuberance appearing. This is your test as a parent. If you fail this test the child will end in prison or drug-addiction.“ Not all child psychologists of the time thought in this way, but many did, and their thought affected the lives of millions of children. One way of curing exuberance, they said, was to keep the severity of punishments unrelated to the offense. If the child spills milk, don´t speak to the child for three days.

So nineteenth-century Germans considered exuberance to be a form of wickedness, and that was a wickedness that they had already put into their bag, along with weakness, the desire to cry, the longing to get excited. It seems, then, that what women and men project onto children is wicked-weakness. We believe secretly that our weakness as children was wicked. We should have been stronger; our pliability was evil. Our weakness was wicked. Children were considered evil in Salem, Massachusetts. It´s important to have these two concepts, weakness and wickedness, together. We believe that it was wicked weakness that we had.
What then? We get angry at our children, especially those of our own sex.
My oldest children were daughters, and I didn´t feel that too much anger went toward them. Every parent knows the situation – more anger flies out of us than is justified by anything the child has done. Do you know the situation? Perhaps the child fails to finish his chores, or breaks a glass, and the parent goes wild. And what can the child do? – feel fear. I´ve seen it in my children´s eyes, and I felt horror at that.

So when we can consider our children weak, wickedly weak, we have gotten rid of something else that´s in our bag. What a relief it is to be strong! But when it occurs to me that my children are not actually wicked, then I´ve got a problem, because I´ve passed into the second stage, and the substance is threatening to come back. This is a dangerous moment. We can become violent when there is a threat that we may have to take it back.
I´ve described the second stage as the state of mind in which there is some rattling, some troublesome inconsistency. A man´s wife is carrying his witch, but she doesn´t look or act like a witch all the time; the woman´s husband is carrying her negative patriarch, but he doesn´t look or act like a patriach all the time; an we know dozens of other examples.
China may act honorably; a right-winger may be compassionate, a leftist disciplined.
This is distressing. In this stage one begins to get nervous, and anything can happen. All traces of exuberance, life-force, inconsistency, spontaneity become threatening.

I´ll call the third stage that state of mind in which the distressed person calls on the moral intelligence to repair the rattle. The idea is scary because we need the moral intelligence, yet here it becomes a tool for continued unconsciousness. People with moral intelligence are often very dangerous types, because the moment the mask is about to fall off, they step forward on request to put it back. Walt Whitman Rostow was, during the Vietnam War, an example of such a person, as were the Alsop brothers. Lyndon Johnson felt that the Asians were ignoble, and we were noble.

When our saturation bombing from high altitudes, use of napalm on civilians, and policy of village massacre began to cast doubt on that, Johnson began to compare himself to Lincoln, and Rostow spoke of moral fiver, duties of the peave-giving nation, etc. In child abuse the rule is:
every act of cruelty, conscious or unconscious, that our parents take, we interpret as an act of love.
So the moral intelligence redefines gross human abuse as an act of love.
And the anti war protesters fell into the third stage also. When it appeared that not all policemen were pigs, Ho Chi Minh wasn´t precisely Albert Schweitzer, that Hubert Humphrey had some honor
even if he remained Vice president, then the moral intelligence rose to replace all masks, reject Humphrey, and effectively elect Nixon.
It is easy to fall into the third stage. Many times I heard policemen called pigs and didn´t say a thing at the time.
Let´s turn now to what we project onto children. When a child exhibits some wicked-weakness, and yet we notice that our anger is far in excess of any appropriate response, then what?
I found that a voice inside me would say: „Never mind, You´re here to give discipline to this child!
If you don´t he´ll be lazy and irresponsible.“
Similarly students in the ashram who have become upset over the guru´s behavior will soon begin justifying it. They have recourse to the wonderful resources of the moral intelligence.
They´ll tell you that he is exhibiting „crazy wisdom,“ or that he is doing what he´s doing to challnge the „Western ego“.


Let´s recapitulate the stages I´ve suggested briefly. To start with, the man´s witch and the woman´s giant are out there, and that feels fine. Many qualities are projected. Nora gave her hero to Torvald, and he gave is childishness to her. Then the machine started to wobble a little, and Nora found out that sometimes Torvald was a hero and sometimes he wasn´t. Nora the planned with her moral intelligence a crisis for Torvald in which he would prove triumphantly to be a magnificent hero.
It didn´t work. So the desparate effort in the third stage to refit the hero mask, search the memory for witch dangers, fight with all women against negative patriarchs, achieves its aim only for a short time.

What is the fouth stage? Suppose that one day, exhausted, one gives up for a moment the struggle to make the mask hang onto the other person. At that moment the eyes break contact;
we suddenly look into ourselves and see our own diminishment. We recognize how diminished we have been for years. I would call the forth stage the state of mind in which we feel the sensation of diminishment. If a boy has given his witch to his mother, and then, when older, has given it to his wife or lover, one day, perhaps at thirty-five or forty, he will feel soft and diminished, precisely because his witch is out there. We can say that the witch corresponds to a force in us that wants to block our growth, yet we must say that the witch present a very positive force also. Her value lies in the fact that she knows what she wants. „I want you to separate these seeds by sunset, and I´m going to eat you up if you don´t.“ The witch doesn´t say, „Well, let´s just check the I-Ching to see if you should separate these seeds.“ I´ve noticed recently that more and more agreeable men or „soft males“ are turning up in the United States. I respect these men, because they have often developed their feminie selves in brave and original ways. Many american men have moved to do that, in ways hardly guesses by French or German men.

And yet the fault of the soft male lies in what we could call the absence of the witch. If you ask such a man what he wants to do, he may say, „Well, I don´t know what would you like to do?“ „I´ll do what the others do.“ „I´ll ask my girl friend.“ When the soft male loses a relationship, it is usually broken by the woman. At Lama Commune a man told me that every serious relationship there broken off in the last three years was broken by the woman. The soft male doesn´t have enough witch so say, „Enough!“ When the witch reenters we could say a certain crispness enters into the man. A man then who has projected his witch out eventually feels diminished; and it´s very important that he feel that pain deeply, hold to it, keep the pain of it. He may notice that what he is best at is empathy, listening to other´s pain, going with the flow; and he may be capable only of that, but the power the witch has to want what she wants, he doesn´t possess.

We all understand how a woman who has given her hero to a man will later feel diminished, but giving the negative patriarch to a man or men is no better. When one gives the negative, one gives the positive also. Women who have projected the patriach usually practice consensus in daily life:
the talking solution, no one in authority, the circle in which everyone speaks, imagining that the matriarchy functioned this way. Consensus politics doesn´t work well inside men either, for the same reason. So by insisting that patriarchal authority is the primary evil in the world,
and priding herself on having no part of such authority, a woman may condemn herself to brutalization by strong forces inside her, just as the soft male, because of his absent witch, lacks the strength to end a relationship that has turned into slavery, let alone end a relationship with interior being that involve slavery.

If we have given away thirty parts of our self, we will then eventually feel ourselves diminished in thirty different ways. Men and women usually take back their spiritual guide from a guru when they feel sufficiently diminished. That doesn´t mean they were wrong to give it to him in the first place, but the idea suggests that each student should be as alert to his or her diminishment as to the initial elevation or empowerment.

Our friends play crucial roles in what we call the fourth stage. The sense of diminishment sets up strange situations. If we tell a friend of diminishment, it´s important that the friend not try to cheer us up at that point. „I don´t think you´ve really lost anything, you´re just a drip by nature.“ If a woman retrieves her patriach, or a man retrieves his witch, their respective friends may not like it.
Our friends are used to us as we are.
And what about children? They may get used to being wickedly-weak, or at least ambigously weak, and so freeze us into a position of being ethically strong. When we feel diminished in relation to our children, it´s usually because we have given our child to them, and they, with the cunning of the child, dominate us. J.B. Yeats, W.B. Yeats father, wrote to his son after living two years in the United States, „ You know discipline is essential in every family. In Europe children discipline themselves so that the parents can have a good time; in America the parents discipline themselves so the children can have a good time.“
Many American parents don´t feel their diminishment, but feel it as a new way of parenting.

It´s clear how diminshed Reagan feels by projecting madness, cunning, spy-genius, military superiority, and superhuman cleverness onto the Russians; and so we allow Russia, as we allow our children, to set the tone in the house, and determine our expenditures.
We don´t live wholly at any moment in the fourth stage or the fifth stage or any stage; we are in all five stages simultaneously, as we send out or receive back various rejected qualitis, projected substances, abandoned powers, each absent in different degrees, or retrievable with different schedules.

It´s clear that the fifth stage in this long process amounts to the state of mind in which we retrieve the giant, retrieve the hero, retrieve the witch, retrieve the wicked child, retrieve our brutal national character; and the whole process of retrieval could be called eating shadow.

Eating our shadow is a very slow process. It doesn´t happen once, but hundred of times.
Churchill said:“ I have had to eat many of my own words, and I found the diet very nourishing.“
Puritanism by its insistence that the child is truly wicked prevented many seventeenth-century Americans from eating that part of their shadow, and some malnourishment is evident in their literature. The witch-burning craze, pushed along by ignorant monks who had forgotten how to think mythologically, caused immense suffering and injustice, and prevented the men administering it from eating their own witch, and the church is still undernourished there.
As a person grows older he or she becomes more wise about this stage. The mother feeds, but the witch eats. So the witch has the be brought back, I think, for the person to eat a significant portion of his or her shadow. When the person begins to bring in rejected or projected authoriy, for example, and eat that, Saturn enters, and our passion deepens, and melancholy, always a mark of Saturn, and of retrieved shadow, bring its sorrow in, and its opening to the spirit.
We sense limits, and limits, begin to seem a part of us, a natural agency of life.[COLOR="red"]

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The Iron John book read by the author:

Source: https://youtube.com/watch?v=4YAL20UVvjY