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Healing the 3 Faces of Our Shadow through Deep Dreaming, by Linda Yael Schiller

(Article originally published in The Llewellyn Journal.)

Our Light and Dark Sides
Our Shadow side, in our dreams and in our lives, is the counterpart or counterbalance to the Light. We need both to be whole. Shadow, a Jungian term, refers to those parts of ourselves that we wish to bury or disallow or not acknowledge. We unconsciously make invisible or dissociate from the parts that we are embarrassed of, of our hidden or forbidden desires, or even the strengths we have that we have not yet owned or lived up to. Jung tells us that, "People will do anything, no matter how absurd, in order to avoid facing their own souls. One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious." We need to honor and recognize both sides to be fully whole and learn to make our darkness both conscious and healed or befriended.

When parts of ourselves or our history are not allowed expression or are unresolved, they can show up in our dreams as a monster: as a dark or evil force, as something that is chasing us or endangering us. Those lurking dark figures, those creepy slithering beasts, those masked men or women—all can be a sign of our shadow. Literature and myth are full of these figures, from Medusa the snaky-haired Gorgon to Darth Vader (later challenged by his son, Luke Skywalker, using the Lightsaber as his weapon in a historic battle between good and evil.) There was an old radio show called "The Shadow," whose creepy weekly tagline was, "Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men? The Shadow knows!"

The Three Faces of Shadow in our Lives
What has not been widely talked about are the three faces of our shadow in our dreams and in our lives. It is mostly thought of at the personal layer with our personal challenges, traumas, and demons. What are less widely known are the ancestral and world shadows that can also show up in our dreams. From the science of epigenetics, we are learning that more than eye color and height can be inherited: the vicissitudes of life that our parents, our grandparents and even our more distant ancestors lived through can show up and effect our lives and our dreams. What is occurring in the world around us, what Jung called our collective unconscious, can also seep into our dreamscapes and we can dream of worldwide events that are not part of our personal history.

At the first layer, the personal layer, our shadow consists of the unhealed or unacknowledged parts of ourselves. The old hurts or traumas, or our own greedy or envious or foot-dragging parts can be here. For example, my client Samantha had a woman in her dreams blocking her path who moved ever so slowly and kept stopping and keeping her from getting out of the hole she was stuck in. Her Shadow side was the "Slow Woman" who kept her stuck in indecision and prevented her from action in her life.

To understand the second layer, the ancestral layer, we need only look at the nature/nurture paradigm. Some parts of our selves are governed by our genetic overlay, and some by the environment in which we have grown up. I think this is a false dichotomy, however, as we are parented by caretakers who have their own histories, for better and for worse, as did their parents, and so on and so on. One client of mine, Helene, was told by her mother that it was dangerous to be beautiful or visible since that could attract violence against her. Helene had lived her life suppressing her feminine strengths because of this fear. In investigating her family history, she discovered that her grandmother had been sexually assaulted as a child and passed this fear on to her daughter, who in turn passed it on to Helene. Neither Helene nor her mother had personally been assaulted, yet they behaved in life as if they had and feared most men as dangerous. Once Helene realized that she was carrying a family story that was not her own, she was able to do the work of divesting herself of it and come more fully into her own power. (Mark Wolyn's book, It Didn't Start With You: How Inherited Family Trauma Shapes Who We Are and How to End the Cycle, explains this concept in great detail.)

Finally, to understand how the world shadow may show up in our dreams, the most recent and common world dream shadow can be exemplified by the plethora of pandemic dreams we have been experiencing worldwide. As the Covid pandemic progresses and morphs, our dreams have shifted with it—themes of bugs, infections, being sequestered, and vaccine hopes. (Deidre Barret chronicaled this in her book Pandemic Dreams.) War, famine, refugee status, and climate change, to name a few, can also show up as world shadows in our personal dreams. We can dream for ourselves, we can dream for our family, and we can dream for our community and our land. Dreaming for the land can show up in our dreams in any form of a ravaged or endangered landscape, and many native and indigenous peoples have been urging us for centuries to dream these dreams forward with healing intentions, ceremonies, and actions to restore our lands. This can be part of our healing and redemption as well, for what we do at one level of action or consciousness affects all others.

Confronting the Vampire
For twenty years, my friend Jason had been followed around by a dark Shadow figure in his dreams that seemed to embody all three parts of this shadow. In the most recent of these dreams, a vampire figure showed up for him in a glass coffin, calling to him to join him on the dark side. Below we will look specifically at what this recurring dream had come to tell him and how it became resolved.

In working with his dream using the GAIA method of Guided Active Imagination Approach, along with hypnotherapy and journeying practices, he was able to identify and resolve all three faces of the shadow in his vampire-in-a-coffin dream mentioned above. Jason has been on a journey in his personal life to conquer addiction and his pull to the dark side of spirit, and to come into his own as a good and powerful man. At one level, the en-coffined vampire calling out to him was the face of his own personal history: needing to be watchful of and aware of his own dark side. Jason also related to me that his father had a history of alcoholism, so there was a family legacy piece as well. On the larger world spiritual and multiverse level, Jason was once told by a shamanic practitioner that there was a curse on his family, and that the men would be "Tragic Men" because of grave misdeeds in the past.

As we worked with his dream, his first inclination was to enter the room not only with the protection of the mentors and the bubble of light he had gathered up during Part 1 of the GAIA method (before entering the dreamscape to enhance safety and protection), but with guns blazing to do away with the vampire once and for all. I encouraged him to slow down and not demolish the vampire before finding out if there was a message or a gift for him hidden in the coffin or the dead-yet-alive man. This is important when we work with dark figures on our dreams: Don't just react to our gut instinct to kill them off; first find out, from a vantage point of safety, who they are and why they are there, and what their message is for you When Jason was able to do this, he could find within his safety net his own heart of compassion and get closer to the figure to really see who he was and what he wanted.

Then, when he peered into the glass coffin, low and behold he found an aspect of himself that needed further healing: both his current "me" and the long ancestral line of men who had come before him. He then climbed into the coffin with the vampire, held him close, and the terrifying vampire turned to ash in his arms. The final action step from this dream was to take some of the ash into his own heart, and then take the remainder and give it a proper burial. Later that day he created a ceremony whereby he wrote out the words Vampire and Dark Man on a piece of paper, burned it, and buried the ashes out in his yard in his pet cemetery. What a nice way to put an end to the old year and bring in the new, as we did this work the first day of the new year. The curse was broken.

To learn more about healing your Shadow and the GAIA method, you can read PTSDreams: Transforming your Nightmares from Trauma through Healing Dreamwork and Modern Dreamwork: New Tools for Decoding Your Soul's Wisdom.

Bibliography:
Barrett, Deidre, ed. Trauma and Dreams, Harvard University Press, 2001, 1986
_______________Pandemic Dreams, Oneiroi Press, 2020
Bosnak, Robert, Tracks in the Wilderness of Dreaming, Delacourte Press, 1996
Dannu, Ayala, Ancestral Dreaming and Why it Needs to be a Part of the Dream Studies Conversation, Dreamtime, Fall 2019
Dunlea, Marion, BodyDreaming in the Treatment of Developmental Trauma, Routledge, Press, 2019
Herman, Judith, Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence-From Domestic Abuse to Political Terror, New York, Basic Books, 1992
Jesamine, "The Shadow: What You Do Behind Your Own Back," blogpost www.counselinginzurich.com
Perry, Christopher, "Shadow," www.webarchiveofthesocietyofanalyticalpsychology, 2020
Schiller, Linda, Modern Dreamwork: New Tools for Decoding Your Soul's Wisdom, Llewellyn Worldwide Publishing, 2019
__________, PTSDreams: Transforming your Nightmares form Trauma through Healing Dreamwork, Llewellyn Worldwide Publishing, Sept. 2022
Wolynn, Mark, It Didn't Start With You: How Inherited Family Trauma Shapes Who We Are and How to End the Cycle, Viking Random House Press, 2016

Article originally published in The Llewellyn Journal. Copyright Llewellyn Worldwide, 2022. All rights reserved.

How can my spirit guides help me handle my grief and depression over the loss of my son? My son's first birthday would have been a few days ago. I thought I was handling his death fairly well, but now I seem to be slipping into a very dark period and I'm not sure how to help myself. I know my spirit guides can help me, but I don't know how.

Angel

Susyn:

Few things are more challenging than living with the loss of a child. You have my heartfelt condolences. To cope with your grief, I believe it would be most helpful for to you to gain understanding of why his time on earth was so brief.

A few years ago, I attended a seminar held by an author who had penned a version of The Tibetan Book of the Dead. He relayed a fascinating story about a couple who took a trip to India accompanied by their two-year-old son. While visiting a temple there, the toddler suddenly collapsed and died on the steps. In their grief, the parents sought out the priest of this temple. To explain to them what had happened, the priest told them that in a past life, their son had fulfilled all his wishes save one: to visit this particular temple. Once he was in the temple, his mission was complete, so his spirit left his body at that exact time and place.

It is helpful to remember that there is a higher plan at work and that we enter each incarnation for specific purposes. Even though his life was a short one, I am certain there were many joys and lessons your son brought to you while he was here, and that you continue to learn valuable things about him, yourself and Spirit as a result of his passing.

You can take comfort in the fact that he chose you to be his mother, for he knew that you would be the perfect person to nurture and protect him and then allow him to pass when the time was right. When these moments of sadness overtake you, try to view them as further gifts from him, for these strong emotions are designed to expand your awareness and understanding of the plan Spirit has for each of us.

If you'd like to know more about what his specific purpose was and why he had to leave so soon, I recommend you contact a psychic who specializes in channeling. I believe that our loved ones send us signs from the spirit world, and that the more open we are to receiving these signs, the more will appear. When your grief feels like too much to bear, remember that your son is trying to comfort you from beyond, and ask for signs from him. Unlike your spirit guides, he is your own special angel. He is at peace now and wants the same for you, so he will try to bring you comfort and lead you to understanding.

Though this may not make sense to those of us here in the physical, it's possible that he felt he could better serve you in spirit form. The good news is that your son lives on in your heart and memories. Since your spiritual bond is eternal, you are sure to be reunited one day.

*****

Oceania:

I'm so very sorry for your loss, and I'm glad you reached out to us for support. That means you're already on the path of healing. Please know that it's normal that your son's birthday stirred up your grief again, for holidays and milestones tend to do that.

You're right: your spirit guides can and will help you. As for how, those three letters - H-O-W - suggest the answer: by being Humble, Open and Willing. Your guides may have inspired you to reach out and write to us, and I'm sure they will lead you to other forms of support. For starters, it would be extremely helpful for you to participate in a support group for bereaved parents, for we often receive messages from Spirit and our guides through the words of other people.

There are also things that you can do to feel better and move through your grief with greater ease. Be extra gentle with yourself. Nurture and pamper yourself during this vulnerable time. Welcome your feelings; don't judge, minimize or try to get rid of them. Embrace and sit with them for as long as you need to. Take your time.

When we try to escape painful feelings, we interrupt our natural healing process. We become depressed and shut down because it takes a tremendous amount of energy to hold back feelings. Our thoughts darken, we feel fatigued, and nothing seems enjoyable. This is because we have shut down our feeling system. Instead, give yourself permission to sob, wail, scream, pound the bed with your fists, tear up a phone book, grunt, shake and tremble, curl up in a ball and hide in the corner. These are ways of experiencing and expressing your feelings. Anything goes as long as you do not harm yourself, others, or property you might later regret destroying.

I'm certain your baby is one of your angels. You had a precious visit with him for a while. Now, talk directly to him and say how you feel. Trust that he and your other guides hear your pleas, and are already responding. Open your heart to receiving their signs, nudges and cosmic hugs.

Shakespeare's most beloved plays include silly comedies and gut-wrenching tragedies. Audiences do not favor one above the other, for both are needed to reflect the full spectrum of human experience. Be in your dark period because that's what is authentic and real today, and rest assured that you won't get stuck there. Grief comes in waves that over time become less frequent, less intense, and shorter in duration. Life will carry you as you spiral through her many cycles: winter and summer, night and day, grief and joy, goodbye and hello.

Astrea:

Many times in life we hear, "You will always have what you NEED, but not necessarily what you WANT." Your spirit must have needed to experience the feeling of leaving your human body, and the suggestion in the next chapter of Sylvia Brown's book was all it took to get you there.

Even though you hadn't read it yet, your SOUL recognized the title of that chapter as something it had been seeking, and your soul, knowing that you had that reference to read after your experience, got with it and out you went!

While I don't usually recommend her books, Sylvia Brown has a wide reaching and powerful effect on lots of people. A Gemini like you would be able to relate easily to her writing and put it to good use. Synchronicity - you gotta love it!

I like your description of "getting caught." That's exactly what it feels like, isn't it? One minute you're free and hovering above the room, and the next minute, ZAP! back down into your corporeal form you go!

As a little kid, I loved that "feeling of return." With practice, most of the time we can control that event, but sometimes, when our physical ears hear a distracting noise or something else occurs to knock us back into reality, back we go. With practice you will be able to control your return better.

I find it interesting that you were visiting your mother-in-law and not someone in your own genetic family. Evidently, you and your husband got married for reasons that are even deeper than love. His family's interest in "psychic stuff" will nurture your children in such matters and help them to grow into their own abilities.

You'll never have to be concerned that when your daughter visits them, she'll be discouraged from exploring her own psychic life and power. My parents encouraged me to develop my psychic senses in a time when it wasn't nice to even discuss such things in public. Heck, it's STILL not considered a great topic at the dinner table in some families!

Your kids will get to talk about it ALL and ask questions and read and study. This is going to give them such an edge in life! Talk with your husband about how you want to present this to your kiddos, so that you are united in your approach and ready to tell them their experiences are all natural and okay.

A word or two of warning: Geminis often have difficulty staying grounded in REAL LIFE. Don't get so strung out on your ASTRAL life that you neglect what you're doing here on Earth.

You are at the beginning of a long journey to learn where your power really lies. Try to be patient with this process and take your time.