Just when you thought it was safe to step into the sunshine – the Shadow’s back! With its sidekicks Golden Shadow, Collective Shadow, Cultural Shadow, Anti-Shadow and your Anima alone knows what else…

Thought integrating ‘the parts of you that you’re most ashamed of and keep hidden’ was the trickiest part of Jungian shadow work?

You may be unsurprised to learn that the cycles are just beginning.

There’s the ‘golden shadow’.

This includes the silver linings that inevitably accompany the regular shadow’s negative traits.

Plus perhaps more importantly the agreeable and positive aspects that we’ve smothered. We might suppress compassionate urges to appear indifferent (hard and cool in other words).

"We take the collective shadow and make it our own”

Sounds reasonably clear-cut.

Yet be wary of discriminating between the golden shadow and the murky, original one. “The ‘positive vibes only’ culture is anti-shadow,” says says Jungian analyst Dr Ido Cohen, lecturing in Vital’s shadow work lecture series, "what might be happening that oppresses the shadow?”

That’ll be ‘the collective shadow’. It’s the one who also nailed Christ to the cross, and willingly elects dictators. "We take the collective shadow and make it our own,” Dr Cohen expands. 

“We can absorb the collective shadow, or become numb to it,” adds Dr Portal. Likewise we might celebrate our outsider status; just as psychonaut heads like to do. Should we attempt union? Or consolidate independence? 

“What does integration look like?” says Dr Ido Cohen, “Moving away from these systems and creating something new? Or is it taking pieces of the experience and carrying forth?”

British christian ecologist Paul Kingsnorth has a stark view on navigating shadow work. ‘Sacrifice and surrender are at the heart of faiths,’ he points out, ‘Nobody wants this. But maybe it’s what we have to do?’

Serving up more Integration articles here on New Psychonaut: