Excerpt from
Meeting the Shadow

Prologue

At midlife I met my devils. Much of what I had counted as blessing became curse. The wide road narrowed; the light grew dark. And in the darkness, the saint in me, so well nurtured and well coiffed, met the sinner.

My fascination with the Light, my eager optimism concerning outcomes, my implicit trust concerning others, my commitment to meditation and a path of enlightenment — all were no longer a saving grace, but a kind of subtle curse, a deeply etched habit of thinking and feeling that seemed to bring me face to face with its opposite, with the heartbreak of failed ideals, with the plague of my naiveté, with the dark side of God. At this time, I had the following shadow dream:

I'm at the beach with my childhood sweetheart. People are swimming in the sea. A large black shark appears. There's fear everywhere. A child disappears. People panic. My boyfriend wants to follow the fish, a mythical creature. He can't understand the human danger.

Somehow I contact the fish — and discover that it's plastic. I stick my finger through its end and puncture it — it deflates. My boyfriend is furious, like I killed God. He values the fish over human life. Walking up the beach, he leaves me. I wander off, up into the trees, where a blue blanket awaits.

In analyzing this dream, I realized that I had never taken the shadow seriously. I had believed, with a kind of spiritual hubris, that a deep and committed inner life would protect me from human suffering, that I could somehow deflate the power of the shadow with my metaphysical practices and beliefs. I had assumed, in effect, that it was managed, as I managed my moods or my diet, with the discipline of self-control.

But the dark side appears in many guises. My confrontation with it at midlife was shocking, uprooting, and terribly disillusioning. Intimate friendships of many years seemed to turn brittle and crack, bereft of lifeblood and its elasticity. My strengths began to feel like weaknesses, standing in the way of growth rather than promoting it. At the same time, dormant, unsuspected aptitudes awakened and arose rudely toward the surface, disrupting a self-image to which I had become accustomed.

My buoyant mood and balanced temperament gave way to deep drops into the valley of despair. At forty I descended into depression, living in what Hermann Hesse once called a "mud hell." At other times an unknown rage would storm out of me, leaving me feeling depleted and ashamed, as if I had been possessed momentarily by some archaic god of wrath.

My search for meaning, which had led earlier in life to intensive questioning, psychotherapy, and meditation practice, resurfaced with a vengeance. My emotional self-sufficiency and carefully cultivated ability to live without dependency on men gave way to a stinging vulnerability. Suddenly I was one of those women who is obsessed with intimate relationships.

Life seemed bankrupt. All that I had "known" as a fierce reality crumpled like a papier-mâché tiger in the wind. I felt as if I were becoming all that I was not. All that I had worked to develop, strived to create, came undone. The thread of my life pulled; the story unraveled. And the ones I had despised and disdained were born in me — like another life, yet my life, its mirror image, its invisible twin.

I could sense then why some people went mad, why some people had torrid love affairs despite a strong marriage bond, why some people with financial security began to steal or hoard money or give it all away. And I knew why Goethe said that he had never heard of a crime of which he did not believe himself capable. I was capable of anything.

I remembered a story I had read somewhere in which a judge looks into a murderer's eyes and recognizes the killing impulse in his own soul. In the next moment he shifts back to his proper self, to be a judge, and condemns the murderer to death.

My dark and murderous self had revealed itself too, if just for a moment. Rather than condemn it to death, banishing it once more to invisible realms, I have tried slowly and tentatively to redirect my journey in an effort to face it. After a period of great despair, I am beginning to feel a more inclusive sense of self, an expansion of my nature, and a deeper connection to humankind.

My mother pointed out some twenty years ago, in the height of my spiritual grandiosity, that I was good at loving humanity but not so good at loving individual human beings. With the gradual acceptance of the darker impulses within me, I feel a more genuine compassion growing in my soul. To be an ordinary human being, full of longing and contradiction, was once anathema to me. Today it is extraordinary.

I have looked for a symbolic way to give birth to my shadow self so that my outer life would not be torn apart, so that I would not have to discard this creative lifestyle that I love so well. During the preparation of this book I traveled to Bali, where the battle between good and evil is the theme of every shadow puppet play and dance performance. There is even an initiation that the Balinese perform at age seventeen in which an individual's teeth are evenly filed so that the demons of anger, jealousy, pride, and greed are exorcised. Afterward, the initiate feels cleansed, baptized.

Alas, our culture offers no such initiation ceremonies. I have discovered that for me shaping this book has been a way to map the descent and carry a light into the darkness.

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