The Shadow We're Up Against

Recently, I read a wonderful post by Jungian scholar and author, Paul Levi, who, as I've mentioned, has written some fascinating and wise work on the Shadow archetype.  In this article, I hear the author adulate CG for his genius and way ahead of his time ways. He thinks of Jung as a teacher, and so do I.

I'm good with crediting Jung to a point.  As ahead of his time in scientific imagination as he was, he was also a man of his very patriarchal world view.  Ask Emma if living with C.G. was a picnic, or Toni.  I'm enjoying getting to know my favorite dead dream teacher as a person in Deidre Bair's biography of the great doctor.  But I already knew he was steeped in male superiority from some of his writings on the anima/animus archetype.  I remember practically throwing my copy of Symbols across the room when I read how sometimes rough treatment is the only thing an "animus possessed" woman can understand. Synchronistically, I was working as a counselor in the field of domestic violence, counseling recipients of  male superiority at its most toxic. Jung was enlightened perhaps, compared to contemporary patriarchal standards, but he held and benefited from many prejudices of his status in a patriarchal, "it's a white man's world."  He assumed knowledge of the Feminine Archetype, without understanding the impact of 6 millennia of vilification obscuring the long ancient  history of the Great Goddess.  Fortunately, one of his students, Erich Neumann steered a better psychic course when he published "The Great Mother" in 1955.

Levi makes some good points about our contemporary psychic jeopardy,  (points I also made at the start of the recent gruesome Presidential campaign). At the moment, metaphorically and literally, the Feminine Archetype is living in a "pussy grabbing" world.  From the upright Christians who want to restrict a woman's authority over her life and her body  to the Muslims, who go the extra mile and put women in sacks, to the secular patriarchal club that runs the world and wants women in bunny suits for entertainment,  women are facing new barriers to leadership and power.  Ironically, women are more powerful now than they've been in 6,000 years, in consciousness and in numbers.  More men are actively supporting women's progress than ever in that time, as well.  It's time for the obscene imbalance at the heart of patriarchal religion, the maleness of god, to get tossed out of our collective consciousness.

The Shadow we're up against is Patriarchy; - Trump, Putin, N Korea, regimes of oppression, exclusion and complete control.  Just take a look at the leadership; what do all these sinking ships have in common? Patriarchal despots leading the old boys' brigades around the world.  The mentality of patriarchy is subjugation, domination, exploitation, near sighted, self-serving religion.  The mentality of the Feminine Divine is that we are all one on this planet; what affects one, will affect the other.  What goes around, comes around.

The Shadow we're up against is of an old, fruitless paradigm that's dying of its own stagnation; this patriarchal shit is getting really old.  But, there's also a Bright Shadow we can't miss; the Feminine is emerging.  Women are taking the lead in creating alternative paradigms, and that's a fact.  Men are taking the lead in creating alternative paradigms, and that's a fact, too.  There's a consciousness revolution; more and more people just can't buy the old toxic ways.  More and more people are straddling the two worlds they live in, dreams and waking life, with awareness and grace,  transforming this dangerous, greedy old human race, slowly but surely.  It is the worst of times; it is the best of times.

Mother's Day Homily at MUUS

I'd like to share with you the homily I gave this Mother's Day at the Mattatuck Unitarian Univer-
salist Society in Woodbury, CT, titled: "The Feminine Divine on Mother's Day." 

Today is Mother’s Day, and I’m grateful for the opportunity to share my thoughts with you about Mother. Actually, today in particular is the centennial of Mother’s Day in the US, first declared officially as the second Sunday in May by Pres. Woodrow Wilson in 1914.  This holiday, which probably has its roots in ancient Mother Goddess Spring festivals of Greece and Rome, was championed in the US by Anna Jarvis, who beginning in 1905, campaigned vigorously to establish a day where each family would honor their personal mothers in a special way at home and with church services.  Unfortunately, it took no time at all for the holiday to become so commercialized that she actually spent the rest of her life fighting to have the holiday removed from the official national roster.  Thanks, Hallmark.

What Anna Jarvis wanted was that on Mother’s Day we be reminded to celebrate the unconditional love, sacrifice, untiring care and selfless devotion of our personal mothers.    To give thanks to our mothers for having the courage to give birth to us, and thanks to every woman who after taking on that heroic biological task, in the majority of cases, did her very best to take on the moral/spiritual task of nurturing her children, as well. 

Moving from the personal to the collective, on this centennial of our national celebration of Mother’s Day, I’d like to invite you to remember with me not the personal mother of our own experience, but the archetypal mother of our collective experience as a human race, the Great Mother, the Feminine Divine. 

At the very core of our collective psyche as a human race on this beautiful, bountiful planet is the Great Mother, known throughout antiquity and across indigenous cultures as the Creator of all that is. Thanks to the work of exceptional scholars like archeologist Marija Gimbutas, we know that: “The Goddess is the most potent and persistent feature in the archeological records of the ancient world, a symbol of the unity of life in nature and the personification of all that was sacred and mysterious on earth.”

I was completely delighted to learn that Unitarian Universalists have for many years offered a very sophisticated curriculum about the ancient and indigenous Goddesses from history and diverse cultures, “Cakes for the Queen of Heaven”. I was going to spend some time with you sharing slides of many of these pre-historic and multi-cultural images of the goddess, until I realized I’d be preaching to the choir, many of you already know about HER.

Whether God as Mother is a familiar concept or a new one to you today, I’d like to invite all of us to reflect on the status of the Divine Feminine in our psyches, both personally and collectively.  Because for the last five thousand years or so, She has been persecuted, obscured, neglected and finally banished. This has had dire consequences for humanity.  The elevation of the masculine to exclusive divine status and the denigration of the feminine to subservient and inferior status has grave implications for our personal psychic health, whether we are male or female, for our cultures and for the well being of our endangered planet.

The Wisdom of the Feminine, personified in the many forms of the goddess, is essentially the understanding that Divine Light is not separate from creation, but inherent in creation, embodied and birthed over and over again by women.  For ancient peoples, woman was the matrix of creation, both literally and metaphysically. Moreover, to ancient and indigenous peoples even today, the Earth is our Mother, alive, sentient and interactive with our every thought, word and deed.  We are part of a physical and mystical web of life that is inter-dependent and inter-connected.  

History is the story as told by the conqueror and the stories we have learned are about the triumph of the masculine sky gods, giving birth without women, from Adam’s rib, the head of Zeus or even the spoken word.  Patriarchal mythologies have divorced divinity from nature, exhorting conquering, dominating and exploitive ideologies that have brought us to the very brink of our own annihilation.  It has placed divinity outside of matter and reduced matter to a mechanical science, devoid of soul. All ancient and indigenous peoples even today know this is a grave error.

But today, we are in the midst of a spiritual revolution. Enlightenedl teachers from all over the world, across cultures and disciplines are pointing to a new/old paradigm for understanding our world and our purpose in it.   From subatomic physics to new metaphysics we are hearing that we are essentially energy; we are spiritual beings participating in a physical manifestation and each of us has chosen this manifestation with a purpose in mind.  Today’s spiritual teachers point to the need to bring balance back into our psyches by once again honoring the Feminine aspects of Divinity and recognizing the sacredness of the Earth as the embodiment of the Feminine Divine.

They’re telling us that our world is in serious trouble and at the root of what ails us is the terrible psychic imbalance caused by the inflation of masculine principles and the devaluation of the feminine.  In Chinese Taoist philosophy, these principles are known as the Yin, the Feminine and the Yang, the Masculine.  Taoism teaches that these opposites are in a continual dance, an ebb and flow that results in balance; neither is superior or inferior, each has its time and its purpose.  When one becomes too pronounced, the entire system is thrown out of balance to the detriment of the whole.

Mother’s Day is a fine time to consider what the consequences of shutting the Feminine out of divinity are.  I recently wrote here about the new, celebrated Pope Francis who has firmly stated that he won’t consider finally ordaining women as priests, although he is very concerned about their level of poverty and exploitation in the world.

But it’s a Catch22; the majority of the world's poor are women because women have no status in patriarchal government, patriarchal religion nor as the Divine Archetype.  In patriarchy men rule, make all the decisions concerning women and children and God looks like one of them. In patriarchal paradigms, woman's power is stripped from her and to the degree that it’s justified by “the image of god” her situation can’t and won’t change.  You’ve only to look at the status and experience of women in the most orthodox patriarchal cultures.  As Jimmy Carter recently put it:

“The truth is that male religious leaders have had – and still have – an option to interpret holy teachings either to exalt or subjugate women.  They have, for their own selfish ends, overwhelmingly chosen the latter.  Their continuing choice provides the foundation or justification for much of the pervasive persecution and abuse of women throughout the world.”

To change the status of women, we have to change the paradigm that devalues women by excluding the Feminine from divinity. This work begins at the level of the individual psyche, as psychiatrist Carl Jung taught.  The fate of humanity, he said, hangs by a thread, and that thread is the psyche.  As the mystical poet, William Blake, wrote, “mind forged manacles” imprison us.  What we believe at our deepest unconscious level is what really drives our behavior.

Like most of you, I grew up with the psychic imprint of God as male, God as Father.  Jesus, though his teachings espoused rather feminine values, was also a male representation of the divine and all his earthly ministers, up until the mid 1980s, were male, as well. As an on again, off again Catholic, Mother Mary did factor in, but definitely as an obedient helpmate, not a divine equal to His Holiness, Father God, and always a Virgin, despite marriage and motherhood, because another artificial separation of this paradigm is sexuality from the sacred.

I first met the Great Mother in a dream when I was 21, way before I knew anything about Her in waking reality. She came to me as “Howling Mary”; I talk about this dream here.

I woke from seeing Mary howling in anger and pain, heart pounding and completely baffled.  I didn’t know then the value of recording my dreams, but I’ve never forgotten this one. It was a Big Dream with a Big Message for my life that proved prophetic. In a manner I’ve come to recognize from following my dreams, my waking life unfolded in a series of one meaningful coincidence after another, until the Great Mother embodied in my Psyche, out of the shadows and into the Divine Light.

Though my original plan was to go to graduate school to study literature, I went to seminary instead, campaigned to be ordained a priest in the catholic church and when I realized that wouldn’t happen, despite the many other denominations opening the ministry to women, I abandoned Catholicism for psychotherapy and Women’s Spirituality and came full circle to marry my love of HER to my love of dreaming, where I first met Her. From my perspective today, I see what Mary was howling about.

On this day of Honoring the Mother, I invite all of us to examine our paradigms, our deeply held, knee jerk beliefs inherited from our parents, family systems, cultures and belief systems.  Knowing about the Queen of Heaven is an intellectual exercise; healing the Wounded Archetypal Feminine, the Anima and the Feminine relegated to Shadow is the soul-searching challenge of our time that each of us has to accomplish individually. Recovering a reverence for the earth and all life based on a deep, intuitive understanding of our Oneness with Gaia is the test we face.

But we can’t create the new order we need using the old logic that got us into the mess we’re in.  We need to use the principles we’ve been told are inferior, heart, intuition and instinct.

Here’s an example of what I mean; close your eyes and imagine a prehistoric time, cave people, cave man, cave woman.  How do they relate to one another? Is it hard to dispel the caricature of the caveman with the club, dragging the cave woman by the hair, dominating her way back then?  At an intellectual level, we know it’s not politically correct, but is it a knee-jerk visual?  Can we imagine a pre-historic culture where women were revered for their personal magic?  A culture that deduced the Creator of humanity from observing the creator of the personal world, a culture that finds no problem in revering a Divine Mother as ultimate Creator?  In this culture, people exercise their talents for the good of the group; knowing that sticking together and loving one another is the way to survive?  Oh, and a people who are constantly in and out of psychic experience, one to whom dreaming and dream adventures meld seamlessly with waking and waking adventures?  A culture far more advanced in spiritual practices than we are today.

We are plagued by the tunnel vision of interpreting all of history, at least 40 thousand years back, through the lens of the last six thousand years.  We have a patriarchal, war obsessed mindset that tells us it always had to be this way; human nature is naturally contentious, greedy and selfish, anything else is wishful thinking.

Amazonian and Mayan shamans teach that “the world is as you dream it.”  We create the realities we live through our communal expectations. We created this paradigm when we banished the Sacred Feminine, and in order to break free of its unconscious hold on our psyche, we need to re-instate the Great Mother as she is embodied in the earth and in all feminine characteristics we have devalued.

Here’s another example of how knee jerk our denial of the Feminine Divine can be.  I taught theology in an all girls’ RC high school, back when there were enough progressive religious communities, especially among nuns, to allow me to teach a course I called, “Christian Feminism.”  On the first day of class, I asked the students; “Is God male or female?”  They were prepared, and gave me the bonafide answer from the catechism.  "God is neither, God is Spirit."  "Fine", I said, "In this classroom, for this semester, when we pray, we’re going to say, Our Mother, and when we refer to God, we’ll use the feminine pronoun, She."  They were horrified; "We can’t do that!"  "Why?" I asked; "Because God is Father," they replied. The masculine divine has been imprinted in our psyches, both personally and collectively; it’s hard to reshape that image.

Until we heal our personal psyche, we can’t heal the collective.  Until we heal the collective, we remain alienated from the resources we need to create balance.  Here’s the good news as taught by Llewellyn Vaughan Lee, a contemporary Sufi master who wrote “The Return of the Feminine and the World Soul.”

“The mystery of the divine feminine speaks to us from within her creation.  She is not a distant god in heaven, but a presence that is here with us, needing our response.  She is the divine returning to claim her creation, the real wonder of what it means to be alive.  We have forgotten her, just as we have forgotten so much of what is sacred, and yet she is always part of us.  But now she needs to be known again, not just as a myth, as a spiritual image, but as something that belongs to the blood and the breath.  She can awaken us to an expectancy in the air, to an ancient memory coming alive in a new way.  She can help us to give birth to the divine that is within us, to the oneness that is all around us.  She can help us to remember our real nature.”

How do we reconnect with the Feminine Divine?  Turn off the TV and step out into Nature. Listen deeply to what you hear within you.  Be still and know that She is Divine, alive in the beauty of the simplest flower.  Follow the counsel of your heart over your head.  Listen to your dreams, your own organic spirituality, your connection to revelation and trust that you are part of the One, you are not separate and you are not Alone. 

I wish you all a very blessed Divine Mother’s Day.

On the Cover of the Rolling Stone

In a "USA Today" story recently, a woman reporter relates the Pope's opinion on women priests, which is No. She concludes:

"Women priests may not top his list, but perhaps Francis is serving women through his focus on global poverty and hunger. Is that enough?" Uh, no; it's not enough.

Theology professor Alice L. Laffey makes a similar point in her op-ed, saying: "Throughout the world, women and their children make up the greatest percentage of human beings living in destitution. Their main concern is not women priests but food, health, education and physical safety. Francis' genuine concern for the real lives of the poor and suffering warmly embraces women."

In other words, Francis is serving women through his focus on global poverty and hunger, because for some obscure reason, the majority of the world's poor are women and children.  So look how much he likes women; he's going to talk more about what they need and maybe see if he can get them some management positions in the Vatican, (although most Vatican positions of authority require high ranking clerical ordination).

Here's my take on Francis' position: The majority of the world's poor are women because women have no status in patriarchal government, in patriarchal religion nor as the Divine Archetype.  Patriarchy is an old fashioned word for men rule, make all the decisions concerning women and children and God looks like one of them, an old white guy.  In patriarchal paradigms, woman's power is stripped from her; consider that it's been less than 100 years since American women got the right to vote  If you wonder what it took to get the 19th Amendment passed, watch Hillary Swank's portrayal of Suffragist leader, Alice Paul in "Iron Jawed Angels."  You may have to close your eyes during the part where jailers force feed the prisoners on a hunger strike; it's gruesome.  But that's what our grandmothers had to do to get us the vote in this great country.  Now when do you think women in some Muslim nations, or in Orthodox Hebrew communities or in the Catholic Church will get equal rights? By the way, American women are not guaranteed equal rights under our constitution, as we somehow couldn't manage to pass the ERA.  

Women are poor because women are on a sliding scale of denigration in patriarchal cults around the world, so don't tell me that the head of one of the big 3 global patriarchal cults is doing enough for women by talking about how they are poor and need help.  By the way, I think he talks in general, about poor people, not poor women, but we all know how inclusive patriarchal language can be.

So then comes an interview in the Wall Street Journal yesterday, Ash Wednesday, (the infamous time of penitence for Catholics that kicks off, wisely enough with Mardi Gras) with the Jesuit editor of the Catholic magazine, "America", James Martin.  Headline: "Women Could Have Greater Role in Church, Pope says." (Sorry, it's a little hard to watch with a straight face because he has a big black cross smudged in ashes on his bald pate.)

Gee whiz, I wonder what Pope Francis has in mind for our new roles in the church?  Ordination?  Making Pope Joan known to the world or apologizing and asking the church to do penance for the millions of victims. the majority women, of the bloody Medieval and Renaissance Roman Catholic Inquisition? Gee, what could the Pope have in mind, because he already said ordination is off the table because he doesn't want to see women "clericalized," huh?  Now that's sweet; he doesn't want to see us bothered with those long black robes and stiff white collars, but maybe we can run the Vatican equivalent of the PTA or go help the poor like Mother Teresa.  Besides, he says, we've talked about ordaining women in the Church before and decided against it; there's no need to revisit this pesky little subject.

Now, according to Father Martin, the Church has already said no because...(No, not because we don't have a penis like Jesus did, that wasn't the reason he gave), because if Jesus had wanted women to be priests, he would have started off picking one as an Apostle, which he didn't; so there, women can't be priests now.

OMG!  Did he just say that?  Despite the volumes of scholarly exegesis on John 20:11-21, in which Jesus appears first to Mary of Magdala on the third day after he's crucified? She doesn't recognize him  (most departed appear looking terrific and I'm sure that's not what she was expecting), until he says her name, and she knew him.  (Did they embrace?) "Don't cling to me" he says,  "because I have not yet ascended to the Father. But go and find the brothers and tell them: I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my god and your god."  Jerusalem Bible

You see, the word "apostle" is derived from the Greek, "apostolos"; John wrote in Greek. It means messenger  or ambassador.  Now whom did the Lord choose as his first "messenger"?  To whom did He first appear, though Peter and the Beloved Apostle were duly fetched by Mary when she found the tomb empty.  Yeah, they searched around, found the linens and went running back to establish a religion based on artifacts.  Mary stuck around and was rewarded with the real thing; she was first to see the Risen Christ and the first to "take the message to the brethren, "Jesus is Alive.  He is Risen;" Mary of Magdala was first to proclaim this message.  The first Apostle to the Apostles was a woman, selected as his ambassador by Jesus himself.  She was also made a disciple by Jesus, (Luke 10: 38-42; since I know the good Father Martin might argue that one can't be an Apostle without first having been a disciple) the day she and her sister Martha were supposed to serve the food for the hungry dozen, but Mary was sitting there at Jesus' feet listening to Jesus teach.  Martha complained, but Jesus replied, "Mary has chosen what is better and it won't be taken away from her."  Did I mention that the word disciple is derived from the Greek word that means "to sit at the feet of a teacher" and that it was a crime punishable by death to defile the Torah (the holy Hebrew laws Jesus was purportedly teaching) by teaching it to a woman?  

Jesus was a Feminist; his treatment of women with respect and compassion probably contributed greatly to his condemnation by the religious authorities of his day. If he was running the RC today, we wouldn't be having this conversation, but he probably never intended the institutions that came after his death; he taught that "the kingdom of God is within you."  What's more, according to many ancient but non-canonical (meaning the RC won't credit their authenticity) texts, women had lots of authority in the early Church. Just one century into the "Christian Era, not so much.  How did that happen; ask Paul, a great proponent of keeping women silent and veiled.  

There are lots of skewed reasons for not ordaining women, beginning with the mythical fact that women are guilty from the get go; if it wasn't for Eve, we'd all still be living in paradise.   In reality, women threaten the very bedrock of the patriarchal RC church, that God is Male.  When I was a divinity graduate student and a candidate for priesthood in the RC through the "Women's Ordination Movement" of the 70's and early 80's, our motto was "New Women, New Church."  We weren't going to lie; you have sexist repressive dogma and we're here to take ink to that parchment and make some alterations.  For one, we will call God "Mother" as well as "Father" in recognition of the great historical and ancient Goddess traditions that were all but silenced by patriarchal brutality; we will bring back the full Divinity of the Feminine Archetype and represent that archetype in our priesthood. 

Okay, so it's no surprise we didn't get ordained; we were and are an open threat to the misogyny that has reigned too long. 

I can understand the Pope-u-larity of this pontiff; he's definitely a relief after the tight ass party line toters we've had recently, but he's got to walk the walk, not talk it.  Religious theater like foot and baby kissing doesn't do it; neither does unexpected papal humility, charm or ordering your own pizza. Francis says he can't change what Pope John Paul II (J2P2) said on the subject of Women's Ordination, despite that he's been contradicting that particular predecessor on other matters, like Gay inclusivity and letting divorced Catholics take communion.

"For now, though" the news reports, "Catholics have to settle for slow, subtle shifts, which, to give Francis credit, are already occurring."  

Really?  Why do women and men who support women's ordination have to settle for anything?  It's crucial I think to speak out now; there is no reason not to ordain women and every reason, including historical precedent to ordain them.  If Pope Francis wants to earn his picture on the cover of the Rolling Stone ("the thrill that will getcha when you get your picture on the cover of the Rolling Stone." playing in the Vatican?), he needs to act to bring real balance not just to the Roman Catholic Church, but to the Modern Collective Psyche that cannot function, as Carl Jung warned, in such a state of disequilibrium without creating the collective psychosis we are clearly experiencing today.  Raise women to equal status with men, physically by ordaining them and psychically, by restoring the Divine Feminine.  If there was ever a Pope who could accomplish this, outside of John XXIII, it's Francis; I hope he wants to.  Let's all focus on sending him the message: "Ordain Women, Hail Mary, Save Humanity"

The Freudian/Jungian Shadow Slip

I don’t have much use for Sigmund Freud and, yes, I’m a big Carl Jung fan, but I do credit Freud for noticing my favorite word synchronicity, the Freudian Slip. That’s when your ego says what your id was thinking instead of what your  super-ego told it to say.  This is usually very embarrassing for the ego.

Here’s one of my favorite FS moments from way back: 

I’m a young coed at a college mixer; there are grad students prowling around, looking for undergrads, I assume.  I meet this guy, good looking and pleasant who tells me he’s studying microbiology.   In true coed light-hearted banter I say, “Oh, you mean you study little orgasms…I mean organisms…” and then I burst out laughing.  There was just nowhere to hide.  I didn’t end up dating that guy, though we had a great conversation.

In my experience, Freudian slips are waking dreams in which the Trickster/ Shadow archetype is messing with me, and since the archetype concept belongs to Jung, I’ve renamed the phenomenon, the Freudian/Jungian Shadow Slip (FJSS) to credit him, as well. 

A waking dream in Active Dreaming is when you look at an event in waking life as if it were a dream and apply the same pondering observation to a waking reality that you would to a night dream.  So, having frequently recognized my Shadow archetype in dreams; I should know Her in waking.

It’s not as easy as it sounds because: a) the ego hates looking stupid, so it usually does a lot of damage control and/or rationalization to avoid looking at any undesired truth; and b) they don’t call it the UNconscious for nothing; what’s in the dark, stays in the dark, unless you shine a light on it. 

But, like night dreams, FJSS moments are opportunities to learn about myself.

As I understand Jung, an Archetype is the energy mold from which certain universal psychic realities flow into particular mythic or symbolic patterns. Cultures project consensus archetypes into myth and religion; we often project our individual archetypes into others. Dreams reveal what archetypes are ready to be integrated in the psyche, sometimes by mirroring some troubled aspect of our lives. As Joseph Campbell famously put it, “Myths are public dreams, dreams are private myths”.

For Jung, the first step on the path to Individuation, is that a person must face the Shadow. I think this is what Pogo meant when he said, “We have met the enemy and he is us.” (Individuation: that’s when your analyst gives you an A, kidding; it’s when a person has integrated all the cast off soul energies, restoring wholeness to the person and peace of mind.  I’d say it’s very like the Eastern concept of Enlightenment).

The Shadow has many manifestations; perhaps the most extreme is the archetype of evil, the devil. The Shadow represents what we reject about ourselves as unacceptable, and since it’s unacceptable to the egoic persona, we tend to unconsciously project our shadows on to others.  The devil, the enemy, the blasphemer, the person I just can’t stand, whose faults just drive me crazy, the person who is different, race, gender, nationality, the list is fairly long.

The main element of the Shadow is that it’s hidden, the ego hasn’t got a clue that it’s there; but, says Jung, in order to grow up and take responsibility for our own actions, it’s the first threshold we need to cross. We meet our Shadow in dreams, as same-sex-as-the-dreamer characters doing stuff the dreamer would consciously never do.  The otherness of the Shadow is the first clue this archetypal energy is at work.  The challenge is to see our Shadow and incorporate it’s existence into our conscious, waking life.  Since we are by definition, unconscious of the Shadow, the only way to understand those aspects of ourselves we need to face and integrate positively, is by paying attentions to dreams, and in my opinion, to FJSS.

In FJSS, the Trickster archetype is also at play alongside the Shadow. The Trickster archetype comes by its name honestly. It’s the energy in life that seems to trip you up or put you off your intended course. Trickster energy in many cultures is closely aligned with the Shadow; it’s manifestations are usually ironically funny.  Examples are the Norse God Loki, wonderfully featured in the movie, "Mask", in which Jim Carrey portrays a human who encounters the Trickster God when he finds a mask of Loki.  In other traditions, like the Afro-Cuban Lucumi, the Trickster god is Eleggua, who is also the gatekeeper and guardian of the crossroads and of all beginnings, so he is propitiated before commencing any human undertaking. 

For Jung, the Shadow is the gatekeeper of the Psyche, which is Consciousness in each of us. With the Trickster, how you respond makes the difference between learning the wisdom offered you by the unconscious or losing the gift in ego fueled befuddlement. 

So in my coed FJSS, what’s behind this slip is a towering Feminine Shadow Archetype; the Prostitute, the “easy woman.”  Interestingly, I just met a new embodiment of her for the first time, Pompa Gyra, the Lady in Red; a Brazilian friend introduced her to me. Recognizing this archetype’s pent up energy and giving her some elbowroom in my personality can help me avoid a lot of silliness and personal repression. In patriarchal cultures, the Feminine Sexual Archetype, personified throughout millennia in many mythic goddess forms, is driven underground.  Woman is split into Virgin/Whore and to various degrees, in various cultures, controlled by that myth.  But the energy of an archetype only doubles when it’s repressed; it needs it’s proper place in the psyche, culturally or personally.

Lucky for me, I live in a country and at a time when that wounded Feminine Archetype is less hidden and beginning to heal. There’s still a lot of cultural skewing of the Feminine, but personally, more women are looking within for who and how they want to be.  I have a wonderful Pompa Gira Shadow from my dream adventures that I’ve written about earlier; her name is Jeze-bella. 

As I make friends with the Jeze-bella in me, I learn to be more critical of the social mores and standards I allow to be knee-jerk truths for how I live my life. With Jeze-bella’s help, I sift through the good girl/bad girl indoctrination and come up with ideas that fit and attitudes that feel right.

So, let’s hear it for the Shadow, the dark side of our personality moon.  Let’s find a way to befriend our own darkness so we transcend the pettiness of projection.  The Shadow is a formidable Archetype until it is integrated; then it is the wisest of teachers.  My dreams have taught me that there is so much to learn that can’t come from books and universities, scholars or authorities.  Many spiritual teachers will tell you that you are born knowing all that you need to know; however, the process of remembering what you need to know after family and culture gets through with you can be a huge challenge. 

Every time you put your ear to the pillow, listen.  If what you hear constantly scares you, get help; otherwise, listen, record, and come to know your dreaming experience and the dream self that lives it every night.  We are on the cusp of a major paradigm shift; the next generations will value their dreaming, both in sleep and waking. Each of us who takes to this path today adds weight to this tipping point we’re living.  

From Robert Moss's wonderful new collection of poetry: "Here, Everything is Dreaming."

Go out in the garden any night,

step one inch outside the tame land

and you are near what you seek.

Open the window of your soul

any night and your guide may come in.

The issue is whether you'll run away

when you see what it is.  To make sure 

you succeed, tether yourself like a goat

at the edge of the tiger wood that breathes

right beside your bed.  He'll come.

 Hunting Power, August 16, 2009