The shadow is part of us that we don’t really know it’s it’s part of us that we’re not really in control of.

We may be very frightened of these sides of ourselves or we may feel very ashamed of them. These sides of us can sometimes be totally out of our conscious knowledge, yet we can be very aware of the impact that they have on us, as they rule our lives from behind the scenes.

I like the description that Robert Bly gives in his article, our shadows being the long bag we drag behind us. He says we’re all born into a 360 self, that we express our our entire human nature in any direction without thinking without censoring without editing. As a baby, if we’re tired, we sleep, if we’re angry we scream, if we’re sad we cry.

You don’t judge any sides of these selves or express one in preference to another, but as we enter the world and start our journey journey we get influenced by our parents, by our teachers, by society at large. We can get the message that certain slices of this 360 ball of energy that we were born with, are not acceptable we might not be loved and cared for if we expressed those sides of ourselves.