The Lexicon
Shadow and obstacles
Shadow
The shadow is the disowned self, all that a person has refused to be and pushed below the threshold of awareness. Jung named it as the part of the psyche we will not look at, the rejected and repressed contents that gather power in the dark and govern us precisely because we deny them. It is not evil as such but unlived life, the gold buried in the dirt; the very energies cast out as unacceptable are the ones the self most needs to become whole.
The traditions hold that what is unowned is not gone but projected, met again in the people and conditions we cannot abide. Shadow work is therefore the turning toward, the deliberate retrieval of what was banished so that it may be integrated rather than acted out. Far from a descent into darkness, this is read as the path to wholeness: one does not become enlightened, Jung taught, by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious. To meet the shadow is to gather the self that fear had scattered.
In their words
Where love rules, there is no will to power; and where power predominates, there love is lacking. The one is the shadow of the other.
One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious.
Everyone carries a shadow, and the less it is embodied in the individual's conscious life, the blacker and denser it is.
Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.