Shadow work: mind the gap!

One of my first Buddhist teachers, Jack Kornfield, writes very movingly in his book ‘A Path with Heart’ about his early experiences in long-term meditation at a monastery in Thailand. His mind was just filled with lust. He was freaking out about it, but his teacher just told him to note it. Despairing that it would never change, he tried his best to follow his teacher’s instructions. And what he found was that, after a long period of time, his lust turned to loneliness. And it was a familiar loneliness, one that he recognized from childhood and that spoke of his feeling of not being good enough, not deserving enough of his parents’ love. I think he said something like, “There’s something wrong with me, and I will never be loved.” Something like that. But his teacher told him to stay with those feelings, too; just to note them. The point wasn’t to recover the childhood pain, it was to go through it. And eventually the loneliness turned into empty space. While it didn’t go away permanently, Jack’s insight into something beyond the unmet needs of childhood was crucial. This is one way to unhook ourselves from repetitive, destructive, addictive desire. It lets us go in a new direction—it frees desire up.

(Mark Epstein)

Everyone who embarks on a spiritual quest has a dark corner of the soul where the demons are howling: addiction, abuse, lost love, sex, work, laziness, craving for name and fame; the list of possibilities is endless. Shadow work is the ability to zoom into the trouble spot and dissolve the Gordian Knot of entangled cravings and painful memories of the past. There are really two dimensions to getting the job done. First, be mindful of the jumps in thoughts and feelings when the problem area gets activated. Mind the gap, so to speak. The experience of Jack Kornfield is a great example in this direction, when one day allowing the sex demons to roam freely, he realized that his never-ending lust was in fact related to a childhood memory of not experiencing his parent’s love. Observe when these jumps take place. Say for example you are thinking of work one moment and of sex the next, what is the missing theme in that mental jump? The second dimension of the problem statement is how we can in fact dissolve these entangled cravings and memories so that desire energy can move freely again just as it does in all other areas of our life. Therapy can help with that, but we are also in the process of publishing a book with specific Qigong exercises on this how these ‘stuck energy knots’ can be released.