Mastodon

mackenzian

Keisha E. McKenzie | communication | systems | social good

Shadow

By

Your shadow precedes you

Photo by Tertia van Rensburg: A fuzzy humanoid shadow holds its open palm up to a frosted glass pane. A light source backlights them.
Photo: Tertia van Rensburg

According to Carl Jung, a person’s “shadow” represents those parts of their selves that they’re unaware of, especially facets that they might recognize in others and find repulsive.

Our shadows accompany us. They’re also often like the second quadrant in Joseph Luft’s and Harrington Ingham’s Johari Window: perceptible to others, but not obvious to us.

“We carry ourselves wherever we go,” Amma Matrona writes, “and we cannot escape temptation by mere flight.”1

Moving to new locations means migrating our unconsciousness as well as our awareness, our unclaimed parts as well as the traits we’re most proud of. We don’t get to escape who we are, no matter how deliberate we are and no matter where we go.

Leadership doesn’t depend on where in an organizational chart we stand. If, during conflict and uncertainty, we can practice claiming our whole selves, we can be oases of wholeness in communities where it’s much more common for people to live fractured.

Shadow work includes receiving feedback from others on what they’ve noticed about us. It also involves learning from life events and treating them as data that can increase our understanding of ourselves and our part in our experiences. Most of all it requires that we as we become more aware of who we are, we also grow willing to share more with the wider world.

We don’t have to stumble from conflict to conflict, repeating the same lessons in different costumes. We can choose awareness.

  1. Read more about Amma Matrona in Mary Earle’s The Desert Mothers. [Back to text: ◄]

By

Shadow-boxing

When we see others as evil, unable to care, or in some fundamental way immune to transformation, then, if they can’t be ignored, the only available strategy is to overpower and vanquish them.” —Miki Kashtan

During the spring and early summer when the birds in this region are nesting, a few things happen.

First, we invest extra money in seed. There are more than eighteen bird species that live around our house, and they eat everything by the pound.

Second, the male birds become extra territorial.

Most of the birdfeeders are near windows so that anyone in the house can watch the birds from indoors. But this also means that birds sometimes see their reflections in the glass as they fly up to eat.

For some reason, smaller birds seem especially prone to the illusion that another bird is just a glance away, looking at them, staring them down, and menacing.

Every so often at this time of year, we hear the thunk-thunk-thunk of a bird ramming itself into a window with wings extended, trying to play chicken with its mirror image.

Thunk. That’ll teach him!

Thunk. Who does he think he is, flying up on me like that?

Thunk. Thunk. Thunk. 

And a bird can easily thunk himself unconscious doing this.

I empathize.

Two small red-and grey-feathered birds eat sesame and sunflower seeds from a blue plastic birdfeeder. Behind them is a large lawn with criss-crossing mower lines. Toward the back of the photo is a road.
Two finches at breakfast. Photo © Keisha E. McKenzie

If I’d like to eat from life’s buffet in peace rather than bash myself unconscious, I need to come to terms with my own reflection. I can’t make progress if I can’t recognize and accept myself, if I catch glimpses of myself as I navigate the world yet render myself a threat to be overpowered and vanquished.

The biggest danger to the nesting bird is not the external predator or competitor. It is his own reflection.