what is it?

 Shadow  Work is a journey and I wish to guide you through the depths of a very  difficult legacy. The following informal essay could be received as a  critique to the methods, history and legacy of Jungian psychoanalysis.  In no way it seeks to deny the necessary use of clinical support when  considering mental health difficulties. Shadow Work is an holistic practice that can be complimentary and not substitute to  therapy, as it allows the individual to have complete control on the  ways their share and experience their reality.     

Many might be familiar with the Jungian definition of Shadow as the “non  recognised desires, the repressed self. The Shadow is the other in us,  the unconscious personality, the reprehensible inferior, the ‘negative’  part of one’s personality”  (C.G. Jung 1917 “On the Psychology of the Unconscious). While he was  conceptualising the “Western struggle with stress, disillusion and  repressed behaviours as a naturalised consequence of living in a civil  society” (Jung 1917, OPU), Jung decided that, to understand shadow he  had to go to the “Birthplace of Darkness and primitive psychology, the land of primordial being” (Jung 1977:272 , Memories, Dreams Reflections). If you are feeling already  uncomfortable, you can probably sense where this story goes: Africa.  Most especially the then Swahili Coast between 1924 and 1927. Jung might  have been a “very wise man”, but nonetheless he was a white elitist  European who deeply trusted and believed in eugenics and the  intellectual superiority of white Europeans. His theories -especially  those looking at the construction and deconstruction of self, were all  based on the biological other, on racial evolutionary theory. On those  notions he formed the psychological “other” for the “western, civilised  man”, and truly his forced experiments on Black Americans forced in  mental health institutions are just the surface of the rotten seld that Jung indulged himself into. After all, conditioning the USA was his way to give back to his teacher Freud, after the two part ways. In all his memoirs, his racism transpires especially in the fear  of “going black”, the fear of becoming the repressed, oppressed,  rejected Other, as to be Black for Jung and the society that he helped  to form and shape, to be black is to be the “Shadow” of society. While  on the Swahili Coast, and generally in his work in contact with Africans  and African American people, Jung observed a spiritual and practical  approach to social discomfort, grief, fear, anger etc. that native  indigenous populations would have within their communities (Practices  that we have now inherited as ancestors to restorative justice). 

Lacking the cultural and social context to understand how the Self is constructed in a society different from his, what Jung would call pathology in the west, within native communities was seen as a formal part of life. From his memoirs, some chilling events transpire of Jung displaying unfortunate (read problematic and violent) behaviour, because incapable of communicating his discomfort of being excluded from the social and cultural practices taking place around him. Jung, a white supremacist used to construct reality, found himself for the first time in an environment that didn’t cater for his experience and his Shadow showed up.   

The  Jungian framework of identifying the shadow, as the unconscious  consequence of childhood trauma (where trauma stand for the imposition  of character by social norms), is then a paternalistic consequence of  his obsession and fetish with Africa and the African “primordial mind”.  Let’s not forget that Jung founded his social categories on the theory  called “Chain of Being” where the white man would be the enlighten  individual on the spectrum. The further away one is physically, socially  and economically from a white man, the further they are from “light”  and closer they are to beasts, to shadow and the primordial being. To  this day, the archetype he has created are still at the foundation of  not just psychoanalysis but also marketing and state propaganda.   He  observed native individuals coping with grief and not displaying the  “symptoms” he would have expected from HIS social norms, he threw that  behaviour in the Shadow. He observed interactions, decided that it  didn’t match what an “Austrian dynamic” would present and threw that in  the Shadow. He watched folks communicating with their elders and  ancestors, embody their skills and experience and called it  “pathological”. He observed (mined) customs, religious behaviours,  spirituals practices and more mundane experiences of Self and simply  reported them as shadow because he didn’t have -and didn’t want-  cultural tools (or even language to communicate) to understand the Self  outside of his cultural expectations.
 

It’s  2020 and his archetypal work sits at the foundation of the Euro  American society, a society that now more than ever needs to engage with  Shadow Work. If you a racialised person and born or reside in Western  Europe or North America, then you might understand that this society is  built on the complete exclusion of your identity. What happens to one’s  mental health when the reality around them reproduces itself by  reminding them that their existence is “everything negative that could  exist”? What happens to their relationship and understanding of the  self?  As my work is centred to Black individuals, each consultation,  conversation or study session, is a chance to co-create something that  never existed before: instigated by our historical struggle and our  marginality, we actively imagine ourselves beyond the existence of the  current reality.  Weaving histories old and new, some that belongs to us  and some that we inherited.  
 

Why I call myself a Shadow Worker? First, the absolute accommodation and validation of standardised  “anything” makes me wonder how voluble our Euro American minds are. Is  it all about finding a commodified answer to spirit? Is it about a quick  answer? Or is it about maintaining the status quo? And must this answer  be so quick that for almost years, an entire society avoided  criticising and revising the work of just one -very influential- man? I  am lucky because I was raised with a different understanding of the Self  and the Shadow, finding myself studying Jung and psychoanalysis from a  critical point of view, and not a purely formative one. In my personal  and academic studies, I’ve notices that there seems to be some healing,  transformative and restorative practices shared between many indigenous  people between Ghana, Senegal, Nigeria, Togo, Benin etc. In this, the  Self is composed of three main elements: The Mind (Sky, communicative),  the physical and spiritual body, as one and as separate (Earth/Body  Earth/Ashe). Elevated Ancestors and Spirits live in constant alignment.  Humans, as they are on a learning journey, are developing that  alignment: The Soul (Ori/Kra, etc). 

The  Soul doesn’t simply exist, the Soul is a process and a journey that as  Humans we embark on constantly trying our best to find and maintain  honesty to self and service to others. That’s why we work in community, we seek support. That’s why we work with our Ancestors, we seek guidance.  

In  West African/Bantu cosmologies humans are creatures of interaction,  with others and with the environment. Because of those interactions, at  times our Self can take some blows or be forced to focus more on crisis  responses. Long term, ongoing crisis, creates dissociation with the  environment and with others, this creates Shadows. The Shadow usually is  understood as a direct, and at times overwhelming, display of one (in  some cases more) of the main elements (Sky/Mind, Earth/Body/  Earth/Ashe).

Note that pathology is not something that necessarily exist in our traditions, traditions as old as 12000years.  

Currently  a journey of Shadows would be treated in both “western” and traditional  ways, because of our cultural understanding of the Self as a composed  element. Our approach is historically holistic. You will then have  shadow body workers, shadow workers for the mind like me and shadow  workers for the spirit like traditional Priesthood, like my Elders. Some  individuals train in all aspects, some specialise, some other also  engage with western paths. Personally, I am specialised in the Mind (psyche and research), and will soon start my training in Spirit after initiating in my religious  path (Lucumi). I therefore work in close contact with an incredible  network of body workers, shadow and non, therapists and clinically  trained experts that understands the importance of supplementing western  approaches with the nourishing knowledge of the traditions.   

Why Astrology tool for Education? In Euro-American society Astrology is a widespread language that  doesn’t need to conform to any sort of canon or strict interpretation. I  practice social (behavioural) decolonial astrology, therefore my  interpretation of what a planet means or what an aspect reveals, will  always be understood through the lens of sociology, anthropology, my  research & Black Radical Critical Theory. From a relational point of  view, to observe how specific cultural patterns translate on one’s  chart (in Euro Americal society), the language of Astrology allows for  more freedom of communication than what we think, by mapping physical  interpretations of feelings, events or possibilities where the context  is understood as foreign.