In the Desert

By Stephen Crane

In the desert
I saw a creature, naked, bestial,
Who, squatting upon the ground,
Held his heart in his hands,
And ate of it.
I said, “Is it good, friend?”
“It is bitter—bitter,” he answered;

“But I like it
“Because it is bitter,
“And because it is my heart.”

Loving Shadows

This stygian masterpiece by Swiss master Henry Fuseli shows us the drama lurking behind the curtain of our own consciousness. Lady Macbeth is our own veiled, Mercurial spirit who moves between the presentable, well-lit places of the stage and the murky lands of the unconscious.

If we go into the tragedy the painting is based on, we see this in rich detail.

In Shakespeare’s Macbeth, the title character has been convinced to do something he “doesn’t want to do”—that is, kill the king in his sleep to take the throne for himself. Yet, we know that Macbeth does want to do exactly that, it’s just that he needs Lady Macbeth to “force” him to do it. This takes him off the hook psychologically: he is allowed to see himself as the loyal, noble knight while reaping the rewards of treachery and ambition.

In this painting, we see how the relationship works in our own minds. Our actions often end up getting us what we don’t want, but always under cover of darkness.

Our shadows, the parts of ourselves we reject, get us the goods. They are Lady Macbeth, sweetly pressing and surreptitiously plotting to get us those things we want but can’t admit we want.

Like Macbeth, we are all slavering for one throne or another (a stand in for many things: from wealth and sex to humiliation and pain).

It is worth remembering that shadow work is, in large part, a loving tribute to these Lady Macbeths in us, those parts of ourselves that are willing to get us what we want. What we truly want. It isn’t a process of “eliminating” the rejected parts. It’s a process of falling back in love with them.

In the Stephen Crane poem that we began with, we are reminded that our hearts are not all sweetness. Personal development and spiritual spaces often focus their attention on the positive. It’s “love and light” from the first sun salutation to the last namaste. But what shadow work calls us to do is love our hearts, our whole hearts—not in spite of the bitterness but because of the bitterness.

Let’s stay with the flavor for a moment. The nondual teachings of Mahāmudrā take us even further in this direction, reminding us of the “one taste” of all things. The bitter taste of our shadows and the sweet taste of our lights are, at a high enough level of consciousness, the same flavor.

We can take a moment, whenever in that scary place of encountering a shadow, to appreciate the delicious combination of sweet and bitter. And we can then shift our perspective, seeing how there is a nondual height where these merge into the same thing, and we can no longer see what is shadow and what is light, what is profane and what is sacred. It is all one.

But to live a little closer to that oneness, we must do the scary work in the dual world of the depths, where the shadows stalk. While they can be quite terrifying, it is in the confrontation we must reject our need for weapons and armor here (just as Macbeth seems to reject his bloody knives in the painting above). While everything in us wants to run or retch, shadow work asks us to glimpse, romance, and unite.

It is a process of making one.

Shadow work is the sexual union of Lady Macbeth with her bridegroom. Put in a more sanitized way, it is the reconciliation of our rejected parts with those we feel worthy of the limelight. It is Christian Rosenkreutz’s Chymical Wedding—where we allow the bestial power of our dark sides to feed our full selves. (Of course, the influence goes the other way too, with the predator’s teeth being guided away from innocent necks.)

Passing through the Autumn Equinox, we have entered a country of darkness. For the next six months, we have a chance to seduce the Lady Macbeth inside us, to listen to her yearnings and to share with her our own. And through the power of this inner love, we can seed and eventually give birth to a more radically authentic, powerful, and integrated self.

Touching the Dark Places

We were sitting in circle on a September evening. After sharing poetry and blessed bread, we drifted out into the deep waters, drinking in the energies we found there.

It was one of those nights when real, heavy magic was afoot.

First one, then two, then three, and eventually four people launched into various processes that brought to life the tears and screams and roars and finally even words that were long lingered in the belly of the whales that were our day-to-day lives.

In the days after, I was raw. Tired. I needed recovery and integration. It was like I’d crossed a desert or taken a heroic dose of medicine cactus. And what I found—while tooling the car through town or sitting zazen in the sauna—were the shades of old wounds groaning their way up from the gloom to commiserate with me on matters of the past, present, and future.

But I met them somehow larger than before, somehow more ready for peace. I was wounded, yes, but every wound is an opening, a portal. And I was ready to pass through.

If this isn’t shadow work…

The practice spaces we create through surrendered leadership open us to such transmissions. If we are willing to hear them.

The circle is a place where our shadows are allowed to fully inhabit these incarnate vehicles and speak words that for too long are only murmurs hidden in your darkest thoughts.

Of course, it is scary. Of course, your shadows want to say exactly what is hardest to emit into the room. The discipline of circling, however, builds your strength. You’ll be able to do it.

In the dark months, we can augment the space of the circle with other shadow practices. This intensifies the romance between Lady Macbeth and her husband. But the question becomes, what is the very best way to do this?

We have an episode on shadow work with, for my money, the leading expert on these matters, Carolyn Lovewell, the writer of Existential Kink. Her work gives us a direct practice we can begin right now.

Check out our conversation with her on Spotify or YouTube below:

From the Gospel of Thomas

Whenever we travel into the depths, we need our lights to guide us. And scripture of all kinds can provide those stars that hang in the firmament that we may right our ship, heading to our true home all through the long, long night.

Scripture is like the Phial of Galadriel. As the Elven Queen told Frodo when she handed him this magical gift, “May it be a light to you in dark places, when all other lights go out.” And like that gift, we do not know when we will need it, but we have faith that it will save our life.

It is in that spirit we give and receive words of glowing wisdom for this journey into the Autumn and Winter. And it is in that spirit that I share these verses from the Gospel of Thomas.

The Gospel of Thomas was discovered in 1945 near Nag Hammadi, Egypt—along with a treasure trove of other gnostic writing. Likely written around the first or second generation after the crucifixion of Jesus, it shows us a side of the Christ that is only hinted at in the books that an emperor and his men would later call the canon.

Thomas is a simple gospel. Almost every verse begins with, Jesus said—and so it reads much like Confucius. The simplicity and repetition make the offering humble and unassuming, yet the nondual truths Jesus lays out in these verses shimmer with that inner light we recognize as true initiation into the mysteries.

Below are three verses offered to you for this season of shadow work. May it be a light to you in dark places, when all other lights go out.

• Verse 70: If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.

• Verse 108: He who will drink from my mouth will become like Me. I myself shall become he, and the things that are hidden will become revealed to him.

• Verse 109: The Kingdom is like a man who had a [hidden] treasure in his field without knowing it. And [after] he died, he left it to his son. The son did not know (about the treasure). He inherited the field and sold [it]. And the one who bought it went plowing and found the treasure. He began to lend money at interest to whomever he wished.

A Final Warning

Perhaps the most famous literary guide to shadow work is Book VI of The Aeneid. In it, the hero Aeneas must find a single golden bough hiding somewhere in a large forest. If it breaks off easily for him, he will be allowed to pass into the underworld. Through prayer, two doves are brought to him and guide his way to the golden bough. That is his ticket into the dark land of shadows. There, he sees monsters and his many dead countrymen. He confronts the certain and uncompromising way of the gods.

And finally, he passes into the Elysium fields. There, he finds his dead father who shares with him a stunning, mystical vision of Rome—the civilization Aeneas will begin.

A beautiful metaphor for this work, yes, but also a warning.

Because so much of our preparation to encounter shadows focuses on facing the vile and the embarassing. But we seldom prepare for what happens when we marry Lady Macbeth to her bridegroom.

We are seldom ready to take the throne—or, in the case of Aeneas, to establish our own empire. Yet it is this eruption of power and potential that is the orgasm that consummates the marriage.

The heat that radiates from this forms the solar surge that beckons back the light, that takes us from the bitterness of Winter to the sweetness of Spring and the haughty height of Summer. It is a swelling, tumescent yes to existence that will race us up to the heavens until, finally, we are ready to grab that golden bough and return once more to the underworld. This cycle reminds us that, for those of us in the incarnate world, the marriage is never final. We are caught in the erotic flux of separation and consummation until that day when our tongue scrapes across all things and can say that it is one taste.

But this is grand, isn’t it? Let us return to the field Jesus speaks of and the day-to-day plowing that uncovers the treasure underneath.

Perhaps for this Autumn, it is enough to look inside for the parts we have so long buried and find a way to say in all honesty, “I love you because you are bitter, and because you are my heart.”

Additional Resources

• The Upgrade (mystical life coaching)

• The Container (relational arts podcast)