Dancing With the Shadow

Tuesday, 07 November 2023 Written by Alberto Villoldo PhD

The masculine theology dominating western culture has devastated our earth and severed our relationship with the sacred.

We can see the effects of this theology throughout history – how ‘the earth is cursed because of women,’ like the Book of Genesis tells us, or the persecution of wise women during the Inquisition, and how the distorted masculine continues to shape our reality today.

The Swiss scholar Carl G. Jung coined the term the ‘shadow’ to describe the parts of ourselves (or of God) that we disown and then project onto others. Jung shed light onto the concept of evil allowing us to understand the mechanism of the shadow on a personal and collective level. So the devil becomes the shadow side of God…Is there anything that is not God? Still, Judeo-Christian mythology suggests the existence of an independent evil principle, equal in power to the Creator.

I know this conversation is not going to help you pay the rent, but it’s important to understand the shamanic perspective on evil, and how it is described so elegantly by the Jungian notion of the Shadow. According to shamanic cosmology, nothing that needs to hide in the dark has any authentic power of its own. Evil exists, but only in the hearts of men and women, and what gives evil its power is fear.

Wow. Sit with that for a little while. Thus, when we practice fearlessness, we stop turning our demons into enemies and start turning them into allies. We begin to love our devils – the judgement, the impatience, the fear even…instead of fighting them.

We can begin the process of transforming or demons into allies by keeping a dream journal.

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Alberto Villoldo PhD is a medical anthropologist who has spent the last 30 years investigating the healing practices of the shamans of the Amazon and the Andes. He is the founder and director of the Four Winds Society, and author of Shaman, Healer, Sage, Mending the Past and Healing the Future with Soul Retrieval, The Four Insights and Yoga, Power and Spirit. Alberto is founder of the world-renowned Four Winds Society and of the Light Body School. In his teachings and writings, he shares the experience of infinity and its ability to heal and transform us, to free us from the temporal chains that keep us fettered to illness, old age and disease.