“Meeting One of the World’s Leading Experts on the Shadow”

UNEDITED TRANSCRIPT: The following transcript is provided in its raw, unedited form and may contain errors. We have not proofread this transcript, so it may include typographical errors or other mistakes due to inconsistencies in audio quality, background noise, or other factors. We cannot guarantee its precision or completeness. We encourage you to use this rough transcript as a supplement to your own notes and recollection of the session. 

 

Tami Simon: In this episode of Insights at the Edge, my guest is Connie Zweig, one of the world’s leading experts on the shadow. She’s a retired Jungian therapist and coauthor of the acclaimed books Meeting the Shadow and Romancing the Shadow. With her book The Inner Work of Age: Shifting from Role to Soul, Connie extends her work on the shadow into midlife and beyond, and explores aging as a spiritual practice. And then with her book Meeting the Shadow on the Spiritual Path, Connie extends shadow work again, this time into the areas of religion and spirituality. Connie herself has been practicing contemplative disciplines for more than five decades, and I’m so grateful to have this chance, Connie, to talk to you now. It’s a real treat. Thank you.

 

Connie Zweig, PhD: Me too. Thanks for having me, Tami.

 

TS: Your soul’s mission, you could say is to help people, or at least one aspect of your soul’s mission is to help people do shadow work. And here at the beginning, I’m curious what your own reflections are on a life, your life that has this central focus. How come? How come this is your torch to carry?


 

CZ: Such a beautiful question. I think it’s important for each of us to contemplate that question, you know? I didn’t, I feel like I didn’t choose the shadow. It chose me. And at this stage in my life, when I kind of look back at, in a life review, I don’t, it’s very surprising how it happened. 


It wasn’t a conscious decision anywhere along the way. I would say that in my twenties I started meditation very young at age 19, Tami. And not for any holy reason, but because I wanted to date a guy who wouldn’t go out with me if I didn’t do TM [Transcendental Meditation].

 

TS: Sounds like a holy reason.

 

CZ: Right? So we were at Berkeley, I started meditating and I really had some beautiful experiences and I spent about 10 years in the TM movement. And then I started to realize there was lying going on, there was hypocrisy, there was dishonesty, there was competition, there was sort of phony personas presented and I left and I was heartbroken because I felt that this disillusionment was so painful given that had sort of become my community, my purpose my vow to wake people up. 


And I decided to go into Jung and analysis because. Jung, to some extent included spirituality in his depth psychological approach. I mean, most psychology doesn’t do that at all until, of course later transpersonal psychology and integral showed up. So that’s what drew me to, into Jung analysis. And my very first dream was about the shadow, and I realized that was what I was encountering in the TM movement was spiritual shadow. 


And it was in me, it was in my friends, it was in the teacher, it was in everybody. So I started to study what was this longing that I had for transcendence for the divine, this yearning that I felt, and why did it lead me to the darkness was really shocking. And it was a question. That stayed with me. It became my PhD dissertation and then it became a book called The Holy Longing, which ultimately became Meeting the Shadow on the Spiritual Path. 


So that’s kind of how it unfolded. I worked in the publishing industry and did the collection Meeting the Shadow, which has 65 essays of different thought leaders on the topic. Because that was before I had gone back to graduate school. So I called on all these other people and it was, it struck a chord. 


People really resonated with it and it surprised me. And so somehow, how can I say, I rode the wave, feels like I rode a wave, and it carried me. And I went back to grad school, got my doctorate, and then I wrote my dissertation about this. And then I wrote Romancing the Shadow because at that point I had done enough shadow work, been in enough analysis and done enough writing in my own in journalism that I was ready to write a book. 


So Romancing the Shadow is about the method of shadow work, which Jung didn’t really explicate. Jung, focused on dreams and active imagination, which is creativity and the unconscious. And that’s kind of what led me to develop this method with my friend Steve Wolf. And we published Romancing the Shadow. 


 

TS: Connie, there’s so much to talk about here and I definitely want to focus on that heartbreak that I think many of us have had in our encounters on the spiritual journey. We’re going to get there later. But first, right here, I just want to take everyone with us. 

You offer a working definition of the shadow, and you may want to comment or elaborate on it now, but the definition that I wrote down from one of your many books is the unconscious part of us that holds all the material that’s taboo or unacceptable to the ego. So here at the start, how are you feeling about that working definition? Shall we use it?

 

CZ: Sounds great. 

 

TS: OK. So just to make sure everyone’s tracking with us, when we say the unconscious part of us that holds the material, that’s taboo or unacceptable to the ego, let’s make sure we understand what the ego is in your mapping. 


 

CZ: OK. So when we’re really little, we’re in these families and we’re like little sponges, taking in people’s words and gestures, body language and eye movements, all telling us what’s good and what’s bad, what’s going to lead to love and approval, and what’s going to lead to punishment or shame or criticism, or even abandonment. 


And this is going on all the time in our childhoods and it’s inevitable. So the material, the thoughts, the feelings, the behaviors that are acceptable to the adults around us and that lead to love go into the conscious personality or the ego, and we become nice little girls or nice little boys. Right?

And we do that very naturally. It’s not that there’s something wrong with this, it’s that we’re unconsciously going for the positive response and fearing the negative response. So if you think about what qualities were devalued in your family, or criticized or punished or as opposed to rewarded, then those traits or feelings go into the shadow and you can kind of imagine that the shadow is like a dark room in which our beliefs and feelings and attitudes lie dormant. 


And when we start to do shadow work, those images start to come back to life. It’s as if we’re taking them out of the dark room one by one, and we’re able to examine them and have a more conscious relationship with them. So the ego and the shadow are developing in tandem simultaneously. And you know, that’s one of the great gifts of psychology. 


It’s only little bit more than a hundred years old now. Freud and Jung just discovered that there was this part of all of us, not in a little corner of the mind, Tami, but in the whole body, mind, right in the muscles, in the nerves, in the organs, in the brain. You know, it’s dispersed. It’s all this material and it’s holding charge. It’s building up charge. If you were told never to get angry, anger’s bad and you’re going to go to hell, or you’re going to get hit, or you’re going to go into your room if you get angry, all that anger is going to get, you know, in psychology we call it repressed. It’s going to get stuffed. It’s going to get banished into the body mind, which we’re calling the shadow. 


 

TS: And why are you emphasizing that it’s dispersed throughout the entire body?

 

CZ: Well, there’s this kind of stereotype that people think it’s a closet in the mind.

 

TS: Yeah.

 

CZ: Like a little portion of the brain holds the unconscious, but it has health consequences because the body and the mind are functionally identical. Right? They’re working together. It has psychological consequences for mental health because of that as well. So I’m emphasizing that because there’s a kind of a stereotyped image of pigeonholing the shadow.

 

TS: OK. Now this notion you came forward with your own book after the anthology and you entitled it Romancing the Shadow. And I thought, huh, that’s interesting. Do we have to coax and woo and charm our shadow in order for it to come out? It seems like, you know, you’re talking about the whole body that I could go and I could get a deep tissue massage and start kind of dreaming while it’s happening and before you know it. Or I could go to sleep and dream or I could simply observe the ways I freak out and it seems out of measure to the event that happened and I’m like, shadow’s right there. Why do I have to coax it and romance it?

 

CZ: Well, the nature of the shadow is to hide. I mean, by definition it’s outside of the light of awareness in the darkness. So it’s like a blind spot in our vision, and that’s difficult to see when you’re driving and a car comes up in your blind spot, you don’t see it. 


So we meet the shadow all day long in all kinds of small ways, but we’re not taught how to identify it. And so it recedes back behind the curtain again and hides naturally from us because our first inclination when we meet the shadow is to deny it. I didn’t really say that. I didn’t mean it. I’m not that critical, or I’m not a liar. Right? Or I’m not mean. I didn’t really mean that mean joke. Sorry, but you know, that’s not me. So our first impulse is to deny it and then it hides again and we lose all the juicy information that’s encoded in these messages when the shadow erupts and it starts out in our childhoods, protecting something. 


Like I was saying, if it’s protecting us from getting angry to avoid punishment, that’s a good thing. But if we go through the lifespan, unable to be, feel anger, even when authentic anger is called for, say we’re being abused, then we lose the connection to that energy and to that emotional range, right? 
And so it erupts. People become rageaholic. They scream at their spouses or their kids because they don’t know how to manage their anger because they’ve never had to. So that’s the shadow erupting, and that’s kind of an obvious example, but it can erupt in so many different ways. 

When I was in clinical practice, a lot of people talked about how they would criticize their partner and they didn’t know why. And this critic would come up. And as we explored it, we found that the person who was expressing the critic was making distance with the other partner, but doing it unconsciously. Oh, what a relief. She pulled away. I can go do my own thing, but the conscious process of saying I need space or I need some time alone, wasn’t known. And so it wasn’t articulated. And so they did it by criticism. So the shadow can erupt in these indirect ways, and then it harms our intimacy and safety in the relationship, or it can show up as procrastination in a creative project. So it starts as a protector, and it ends up as a saboteur, and it can sabotage our conscious intentions about anything at all. 


Creative projects or communication or intimacy, friendship, work at the workplace, all the ways people sabotage themselves. So we’re meeting the shadow all the time, but we don’t have the tools to romance it. We don’t have the tools to make a conscious relationship with it.

 

TS: I want to understand more what you mean, still, by romancing it. And I think part of the question that I am working with is, in your model, is the goal to become aware of shadow contents and that’s good. Check. I’m aware of it. Or is there something else? Once I’m aware that this lives in me and was repressed and it’s, you know, I can see it kind of peeking out and it’s going OK, I’m aware it’s there. Is that good enough or is there some other set of steps that are needed?

 

CZ: Yeah, so romancing the shadow is what, the name we gave to the method. And so there are some other steps. And I think most people, for example, addiction, you know, most people have awareness of their addiction and still can’t do anything about it. 


So awareness is a step, but it’s, and it’s a necessary, but it’s not sufficient. So let me just articulate my method as kind of quickly as I can. Yeah. So let’s use addiction, let’s use food addiction and you can, you know, for our listeners, you can relate this to sex addiction, drugs, alcohol, love, any kind of compulsive behavior that you feel like you can’t control. 


So this client came to me and she said, my boyfriend is unavailable and every night I’m waiting by the phone and I’m eating ice cream and I’ve gained 10 pounds and I don’t know what to do. I can’t stop eating ice cream late at night. So we began to explore, kind of slow down the process to bring awareness to it, as you said, what is going on in this process? 


So I said to her, there are three cues I want you to look for. What are you saying to yourself? What are you feeling and what are you sensing in your body just before you go for the ice cream? So this takes some time, you know, it takes some self-reflection. You have to kind of slow down opening that fridge. 


And then she said, I’m saying to myself, if only I eat, I can wait for him to call. And she was feeling sad and empty and her body was getting tight around her shoulders and her neck and her belly felt empty. So now she had three cues that this particular shadow character, I call it a shadow character, we can’t work with the entire personal shadow at once, right? It’s pretty unbounded. It’s kind of, it’s kind of limitless. So what we do is we begin to pick a particular behavior or feeling, and we personify it. So when you have the thoughts, feelings, and sensations of that shadow, you personify it by giving it a name. She called it the foodie, giving it an image, and her image was a big open mouth. 


And then recognizing that this is not who you are, because part of what happens with the shadow character is it grips you and you get lost in it and overpowered by it, and you think, oh my God, I’m this angry monster, or this foodie or this cry baby, or whatever it is. And so you practice beginning to observe it. 


Now, most people can do this with a centering practice. If you have a meditation or ana practice, a mindfulness or a belly breathing practice, you learn how to watch your thoughts as they move through. And of course, listeners to Sounds True will be familiar with this. So she began to watch the foodie and she traced it back in her history. That’s the next step. And she realized that her mother used to overeat at night when my client was growing up, she’d watch her mother overeat because she was waiting for her husband who was unfaithful at the time, and she couldn’t speak up and say to her husband, what’s going on? Why are you coming home so late? 


So she ate. So the behavior had been modeled and maybe it was modeled for another generation too. We don’t know. Because these shadows are really intergenerational transmissions. So I said, well, what are the consequences if you just continue this behavior? Well, I’m going to get more depressed and more overweight and unhealthy and it’s just going to go nowhere. 


So it was a couple of months and I said, “Do you think you’re ready to call him?” So she called him up and he said, “No, I don’t want the relationship, but I didn’t know how to tell you.” So she spent a few days really devastated and upset, disappointed. And then she called me and she said, “You know, this is such a relief because I know the truth. I don’t have to allow the foodie to take over anymore. I can move on now.” 

So each of these shadow characters has the same thoughts, the same feelings, the same physical sensations, and that’s how you can identify them. You give it a name, you give it an image, and then you romance it, meaning you make a conscious relationship to it when it emerges from the unconscious. Some people paint it and draw it. Some people write letters to it or from it. You dialogue with it. And it’s so interesting because it expands your self-knowledge. 

You can uncover these secret hidden parts of yourself, and each one of them has valid hidden needs. And if you can discover, let’s say the valid need of the foodie, what was that? 
It was for her to be able to speak her truth. She wasn’t able to risk rejection as her mother wasn’t by asking the question directly. And so she was indirectly stuffing her feelings with the ice cream. But that’s a valid need that’s hidden in that addictive behavior, and every single shadow character has that. 


So if you can begin as an adult to meet the valid needs of these younger parts, these shadow parts, they start to change. They start to lose their grasp and lose their control over you. And that’s kind of the bigger picture of what I mean by romancing the shadow.


 

TS: It’s very helpful. And I know that this method that you’re describing is tremendously useful because even as you’re describing it, I’m feeling myself going into this dream sort of interstitial space, working with my own material and recognizing things. It’s really helpful. 

Now, I wonder if we can give one more example, and if you could use an example from your own life. I mentioned that you extended your shadow work to look at issues that occur at midlife and in the aging process, and you write that at midlife. You met your devils, and I wonder if you could give us an example of a devil, a shadow character you met at midlife, and how you developed a conscious relationship with that part of you. 


 

CZ: I don’t recall what that was referring to, but what I can tell you is there was a New Year’s where I was sitting with friends. I think there were six of us and we were in a circle talking about our year, and I said to them I’d like to know how you experienced me. You know, mirror me for this year so that I can grow and change. 


And five out of the six of them said, you are too judgmental. So I began to work with the judge, shadow character and try to understand that part of myself that was leading to a sense of separateness from people, disconnection from people. And that was hurting some relationships because people were feeling in a subtle way, less than or put down by me. 


And I wasn’t saying things, it wasn’t overt. It was like an attitude that I had really internalized from my father, who was a big superiority guy, smarter than everybody, know-it-all, master of the universe. And I kind of, and sexist definitely, you know, master over the three women in the house. And so I was shocked to hear that, but it became a really rich exploration for me. 


And what I saw was these layers of the judge. One was my personal psychology, which was that. I had really identified more with my dad than with my mother. I didn’t want to be like my mother when I was growing up. She was depressed and she was a housewife. She was an incredible artist, but unable to bring her art into the world. And my dad was powerful and articulate and controlling. And I just thought, well, you know, I mean, this was kind of an unconscious process, but I identified with him more. So I also got his shadow stuff, right? That’s how it kind of works. So I’m absorbing this superiority trip without knowing it. And then as I told you earlier, I go into the TM movement where everybody is superior because they know TM and they’re going to save the world with meditation. 


And so there’s yet another layer. Superiority. I used to call it my spiritual super ego. The super ego is the part of us that’s the inner parent that’s always criticizing us and getting us to do more or be more. So I had this spiritual super ego telling me to be more spiritually developed. And then my career led me into some very fascinating places and powerful positions. 


And that added to the sense of accomplishment and success. And along with that, what I found, so what goes into the shadow? We talked about the ego in the shadow develop in tandem. So all this was going into my ego, my conscious personality, and what was going into the shadow as a result of it, inferiority, insecurity, not good enough. I was not living, those were not my issues. I would hear my other people talk about those issues. I was not feeling those things because I was so defended by the judge shadow character. It was defending me, protecting me. I said earlier it was protecting me against first my father’s not good enough, and then the TM world not good enough. And then the career, not whatever the, wherever those messages could have come from. I was Teflon, you know, protected against that. 

So when my friend said this, and I think I was probably in probably my forties, I took it on. And I started to mine this shadow character and see the consequences of it unconsciously controlling me. And one of the painful consequences was that I stayed single for a very long time. Because I was unknowingly judging all these potential partners. I was unknowingly. And I had men tell me all the time, “You intimidate me.” So my ego feels OK about that, right? But the consequence of it is devastating because I’m not getting close to people. 


 

TS: It’s a great example. I think it’s one—I certainly relate to it, and I imagine other people do too. Now, when you feel in your life something that looks like judgment or superiority coming up, what’s your relationship to it when you feel that emerge?

 

CZ: When I feel it internally?

 

TS: Yeah.

 

CZ: It’s as if, you know, my heart is in, it’s such a different place now. It’s 35 years later. I feel equality with humanity. And at the same time, I’m aware that human beings, individuals, are in different stages of development, and there are people in lower stages of development than me, and there are people in higher stages of development than me. 

And that framework, which could be from developmental psychology or from Ken Wilber, or from whatever framework works for you, that framework helps me to avoid judging people who have a different experience and are therefore less developed. They could be less cognitively developed, less spiritually developed, less emotionally developed. Right? And also to view people who are more developed in some of these ways without envy.

 

TS: Now, it’s very interesting to me that when I asked you about meeting a shadow character at midlife, you went to this example of asking six of your friends for a reflection for mirroring, because this is a really obvious thing, but I’d love to hear what you have to say about it. 

It seems like here we are, we’re trying to get to know the contents of this unconscious part of ourselves when everyone else sees it really clearly, or at least a lot of people see it really clearly. Like, if you want to know your shadow, ask your partner, ask your friends, ask the people who work with you day in and day out. 

So I’m curious, first of all, why is that so? That other people see it so clearly for us. It’s, you know, hidden in darkness. And then secondly, if we did want to ask people a question to help us know our shadow, what would be a good question that would elicit useful feedback? 


 

CZ: I don’t think it’s that easy for other people to see it because it’s not quite that simple. These were sort of psychologically developed friends. I think people sense it instinctively more than actually are aware of how to articulate it. But they pick it up. So they would pick up a lack of safety around someone, or they would pick up a lack of honesty or an insecurity in someone, or a superiority trip in someone. 


But you know, part of what happens in most of our relationships is a lot of projection. So the shadow expels both positive and negative traits onto other people in order to disown it in ourselves. So we just, you know, we unconsciously attribute or project superiority as an example, onto spiritual teachers and we give away our wisdom, our compassion, our own enlightenment to them, and we ask them to carry it for us. 


And so we are disowning that in ourselves. So it’s not only stuff that’s negative to the ego, anything at all can be shadow content, right? If we go back for a minute to that early childhood discussion, if we have artistic talent, but our parents. Disdain that and say it’s a waste of time. That gift goes into the shadow or musical talent or athletic talent. So anything can go into the talent, so into the shadow. So we might attribute by projection some of this content that we’ve stuffed and lose it by asking somebody else to carry it for us. 

So I would say in families, like in my family, I carried this superiority trip. My sister carried the inferiority. She never felt good enough. She had the same parents in the same house, the same situation, you know, and yet somehow she developed differently. And I think that and she and I have been that kind of mirror to each other because she’s done a lot of therapy. 

But I think that—let’s talk about intimate relationships as an example for how to do this. So most people meet and they project certain traits onto the man or woman, whatever the traits are. The shadow leads us around looking for the missing parts in us, and we find them, we think we find them in the other person. Oh, that person is so independent, she’ll never be needy. Or that guy is so strong, he’ll take care of me, or whatever the fantasy projection is onto the other person. 


And then often what happens is people get married in this romantic projection phase and then they wake up one day and they go, oh my God, this isn’t the person I married. What happened? He’s angry, she’s depressed, he’s drinking, she’s withdrawn, whatever it is, they don’t have the tools to get through these stuck places. 


And so we have this, you know, 50% divorce rate because people don’t realize that they’re getting married without knowing all these hidden parts that are in the shadow. So if you have a relationship in which both people are motivated, and we don’t have to call it shadow work, Tami, I mean, you can say to your partner, let’s get to know each other more deeply. You know, who are the parts in you that are hiding from me?

 

TS: That’s a good question.

 

CZ: Or how am I relating to parts of you that you don’t like? Am I, do you feel like I’m controlling your sexuality or your anger? Is there a way that we can talk about, you know, the less obvious stuff? Because you don’t have to, you know, you don’t have to sit down and read romance in the shadow together. 


You can just talk about parts. Now, if somebody is aware that they have a part that they’re hiding, like maybe they’re secretly drinking or maybe they’re having an emotional affair, or maybe they’re staying out late to avoid spending time together and they’re aware of these things, then they know, you know, there’s a secret in the relationship. 


And so one of the ways of getting the kind of mirroring you’re asking about is to say, let’s see if we have any secrets from each other. Is there anything you could tell me that you’re not telling me? And what do you fear would be the consequences if you told me? 

And often I’ve found this is about money. Actually, money carries more shadow in our culture than sex. Isn’t that amazing? People can live together forever, keep their money separate and never want to talk about money. So money, sex and power are the big areas in couples. 

So let’s say that conversation opens up and it takes a number of months, or it takes a number of years and people continue communicating, gee, you know, I kind of discovered this feeling that I’ve never had before. I want to talk to you about it. Or I have a fantasy, a daydream that I haven’t been sharing with you, especially in transitions like at midlife and retirement. People have these fantasies that can be shocking. So they decide to share that. So what I would say is they’re moving toward a shadow marriage and a shadow marriage is the vision of being able to honor and respect, and I wouldn’t use, obey, honor, and respect all of the parts of each other in a couple, all of the various parts in myself and in yourself. 


And let’s keep encouraging them to be expressed and find ways for them to feel safe so they can come out and honor them together. Then you don’t, you no longer have a persona marriage, right, with a narrow bandwidth. You start to open it up and have these, and then use each other as mirrors, like you’re saying, more open expression and shared exploration. 


 

TS: Shadow-aware marriage. 

 

CZ: Yeah. 

 

TS: Shadow. OK. Now one of the things that you say that I think is really interesting and question is there’s no end to the shadow work that we’ll be invited in our life to do. As we’re growing as human beings, we don’t reach some point of, I’ve completed this. I know all of the repressed content in my unconscious. 


Why can’t we ever get to the end of this? We’re like, oh, isn’t, I mean, people say, you know, oh, person’s very conscious. They’re a conscious being. I’m living consciously. Well, somewhat. I’m living somewhat consciously. So what gives you this conviction that there’s no end to the shadow work we will be invited to do? 


 

CZ: Is it a conviction? The way that I see—

 

TS: An observation, or I don’t know. What would you call it?

 

CZ: The way that I see the shadow is the way that I see consciousness. Consciousness is infinite and it has, it’s, you know, and the shadow, you know, Jung talked about the collective shadow. So there are these layers, right? 


There’s my personal shadow. There’s my family shadow. You know, we’re a progressive liberal family, or we’re an evangelical conservative family, and everything else goes into the shadow in that family, right? Or a community, a church, or a Sangha or a Zen center has a persona and has a shadow. And the whole country has a shadow. And in fact, the whole world has a, there’s a global shadow to humanity. So if you’d start to see that it’s like not just individually available for personal work, but it’s actually embedded in who we are as a species, the whole species, it kind of expands the picture of it. Now, you know, I’m very involved in the world of spiritual non-duality and all of the folks who are claiming to be in higher levels of consciousness. 


And I live with a man who lives in non-duality full-time. He also functions in duality. He’s a working psychologist, he’s a husband, he’s a grandfather, and he has, if he just moves his attention, he’s in full awareness. I mean, he can look through this wall and he can be in the galaxy and he can be, I mean, he has all these powers. 


So does he have a shadow? So is it possible that, when does he, when you attain these high levels of consciousness, where does the shadow go? And that’s, you know, one of the questions that drove me when I wrote Meeting the Shadow on the Spiritual Path, what does enlightenment really mean? If all these teachers are acting out these horrible, harmful, destructive behaviors? 


There are many people who are claiming these levels of consciousness, but acting out their shadows. 

 

TS: Yes. 

 

CZ: Right? And I have really worked to understand that. So with Neil, and he’s OK with me talking about this because we now have a podcast about it. And he’s, after many years coming out publicly about his experience. 


So what I can say is this, I have watched him become less and less reactive when we met 30 years ago. He was very reactive, emotionally triggered, and clearly had a lot of shadow material. And you know, we have both been doing this work for 35 years. For me it’s longer, but together for 30 years. And I would say that yes, he still has tender points, right, that can irritate him, that can anger him. And there are wounds. And because he can remember his past lives, he can kind of trace some of them where they come from. So he has a bigger perspective on it than most people do. He’s far from perfect. He’s not perfect, but he’s very complete. He’s very fulfilled. 


And you know, in the tradition of Vedanta, which is what we’ve practiced in, there’s this teaching about—it’s called leshavidya, the remains of ignorance. And the remains of ignorance refers to the shadow in someone who is awake. And because the shadow, you know, we talked about how it was dispersed. So, you know, we have subtle bodies, right? We have auras, astral body, mental body, buddhic body. And within the subtle bodies we have chakras. You’ve done lots of programs on that. Well, within the chakras there’s shadow material. So shadow, there’s shadow in the subtle bodies. Can we get rid of all that? Can all of that be purified in any one lifetime? 


I don’t think so. And you know, most of the spiritual teachers who come from other cultures from the east don’t have psychology, haven’t done emotional cleanup work, right? So part of it is a cultural difference. And so if they act out sexually, let’s say they come from a monastery where everybody’s celibate. 


And then they come to the west where the women are prancing around half dressed, and they act out somehow that shadow material has not been processed because they never had the tools or the opportunity to process it. And, you know, what’s troubling to me is that they don’t have the moral development. So, you know, in all these different lines of development that Ken Wilber talks about, the moral development is missing in a lot of spiritual work. 


And my husband has really worked on that. He came from Jewish mysticism to ante and he’s really worked on his own and psychology and working with clients for 40 years. So he’s worked on his own moral development, and I think that’s key to what we’re talking about.

 

TS: Early in our conversation, you talked about how in your own progression with the TM movement, you were heartbroken when you saw the various waves that there were, whether it was moral breaches or power tripping that was going on, and things were like, whoa, I see the shadow here of this organization and this meditation movement I’m going to have to leave. And how in your work you’ve been bringing understanding to that. 

And what I wanted to hear from you is when you see ways that people are still filled with illusions. They’re not seeing the shadow in their spiritual life. Not so much about the teachers and the organization because I get that, but in their own idealization of what spirituality can deliver. Like, oh, it’s going to deliver this, it’s going to deliver that. I’d love to hear your view on that. Where do you think people are living with illusions about what the spiritual journey will deliver?

 

CZ: Well, you use the term “idealization,” which I think is a really good term, and it’s a  projection. We could say it’s an archetypal projection. It’s like even bigger than the personal projection. There’s the personal projection. He’s going to be the daddy I never had because he’s awake and he’ll take really good care of me and he’ll never hurt me and I’ll be able to live in this community and nothing bad will ever happen. Right? And then there’s the archetypal projection, which is he’s God. He’s divine. He’s a realized, fully realized human being, and therefore I can just relax and trust and obey and do what he says because he knows stuff I don’t know. 

So there are these kind of layers of idealization that are going on, and you know, there are times in our lives when we need guides and we need mentors, and we’re driven by unmet childhood needs, like the need to belong, the need to feel seen, the need to feel meaning, even the need for certainty. I think that’s a big one, right, people struggle with so much. Ambiguity and uncertainty. So all of a sudden you find something that’s certain and whatever the dogma is, you know, you buy into it and you buy into the teacher. It could be a Catholic priest, it could be a Jewish rabbi, it could be as in Roshi, it could be an ayahuasca shaman, right? 


The context, it doesn’t really matter because the psychology is the same in all these situations in which you idealize someone and therefore your own power goes into your shadow. What goes into your shadow? Your doubt, your critical thinking, your capacity to leave to separate and individuate from the group because the belonging is such a strong drive. 

Your own images of the divine, if they’re being fed to you, this is God. This is what God is, and this is what God says. And this is, you know, if there’s a literal kind of religious or spiritual text or teaching, scriptural teaching, then you’re not thinking for yourself. You can’t question it. You can’t even attribute your own meanings to it. 


Maybe you can, you know, you can’t think symbolically because you’re just thinking literally. So there are all these kind of levels to it that get sacrificed when you’re in that idealization. So I could judge it and say it’s naive and all that. I mean, the judge in me can, you know, give it all kinds of names, but I also recognize it can be very valid. 


For a certain period of life when people are leaving a family or leaving a church and they feel totally alone. The key for me is to learn shadow awareness so that you can see the red flags, you know, so that you can see your friend in the group is crying at night. Why is she crying? Or somebody tells you that the teacher wanted his money or the teacher hits someone. 


And what’s, as we said before, the first reaction to meeting the shadow is denial. That can’t be he’s enlightened, couldn’t be happening, couldn’t be an alcoholic. He’s enlightened. Right? Or she is so compassionate. She’s the incarnation of compassion. She couldn’t be doing that. So first denial, and then slowly, more and more things come to the surface that leave you uncomfortable. 


What I’m suggesting is at that point, you need to start your shadow work. I call it spiritual shadow work. Really looking at your projection and what you’ve lost and what you’ve given away, and whether you need to make a different decision. And some of the people I’ve interviewed stay in their communities and work to change them. You know, they become a whistleblower and they work to change the systems. And I wrote about some of those communities that were really able to reimagine and reorganize themselves around gender, around practice, around power. And other people have to leave. I mean, I was in my twenties when I left TM. I didn’t know any of this. I just knew that it wasn’t a good fit.

 

TS: All right. There’s so much I want to talk to you about, Connie, but I have to just get a couple more questions out here, which is I have had a sense that a shadow idealization in my own spiritual life has to do with thinking that at some point I won’t suffer.

 

CZ: Yes.

 

TS: I will be immune to the sufferings that humans have to go through. And I wonder, is that simply that I’m not as evolved as someone like your husband and that’s why I’m continually suffering? Or is this an idea? I’ve made up an idealization about what the spiritual journey will deliver, and I’m wondering what your thoughts are about that.

 

CZ: I think that’s a great question. And many people have this belief. That awakening means the end of suffering. And how real is that? I think that’s a really good question. And my hunch is that because there are all these stages of awakening and because many people start teaching when they’ve just had one satori or one kensho or one, you know, clear experience, and then they think they’re ready to teach other people, those folks are still suffering. And like you said, ask their partners or ask their kids if they’re suffering. 

I think in the higher stages of spiritual development that there are people who can get free from intractable emotional pain. So my husband, we are in our seventies now, and a lot of people are dying, and he is experiencing loss and grief differently than I am. He experiences it temporarily and then it moves through him. He doesn’t stay in it. He also gets migraines and sometimes I can tell he’s really in pain and then he remembers that he can put his attention on bliss and he can actually be in bliss with the migraine. 

So I think, you know, he’s given me, I mean, this is why we’re doing this podcast in order to share what I’m discovering about this, because so many people like you and me have these questions about, you know, our practices after all these years. I don’t know how unusual he is, really. I don’t know if he’s just a rare bird or if other people are really having these experiences, but I do hear some people feel more free of negative emotions, maybe more free of anger or fear. It doesn’t mean it never comes up, but what I’m, the reason I brought that up is he’s not, it’s not a perfect life. He’s human. And so there’s physical pain, even though the emotional suffering seems to have lessened for him, it seems to have like as an example, we decided to move for retirement and it means that we’re moving away from his daughter and grandkids. And I thought it would be devastating for him. And he is saying, “It’s OK. I’m letting go.” I was shocked about that. So there’s a kind of internal freedom that’s happened that’s, you know, we can call it non-attachment. We have all these ideas about it from our, you know, from our teachings. But it’s a reality for him.

 

TS: All right. The last thing, Connie, that I want to talk to you about is you’ve been teaching on the shadow now for decades, and there’s a resurgence of interest. You’re re-releasing some of these previously published books and new editions, and there’s a receptivity and a hunger for your teaching on this topic. And I wonder if you can bring us into our contemporary setting and why you think that is the case.

 

CZ: You know, there’s a young woman who sold a million books on TikTok about the shadow. She’s now my mentee and we are working together doing programs on Substack on a regular basis. It’s called Shadow Work Awareness. And she has brought in these generations of young people who are curious. And I think part of it, Tami, is because they’re suffering and they’re looking for something that’s different from, you know, brief therapy and CBT or bodywork or some of the other options that are out there for them. And they’re starting to search for something deeper and recognize that, you know, something is something more is going on than what they thought. So I think that’s on one level what’s happening. 

And it’s really gratifying for me because, you know, when you publish a book, it disappears, right? Even the greatest books, they go into oblivion on Amazon. But to have the publishers of Meeting the Shadow and Romancing the Shadow come to me and say, let’s refresh this and add new writing to it, was very exciting. 

I think another reason is that our political situation now, all over the world, is all about shadow projection. And if you think about our most crucial problems, war, racism, ageism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, immigrant hatred—immigrant hatred is xenophobia, I think. All of these problems that—antisemitism—they’re all about shadow projection, every single one. What do I mean by that? They’re about projecting the dark qualities that we don’t want to see in ourselves onto another, who we turn into a them, an other or a them. 


And we have an us, and we have a them. And whether it’s Israel and Palestine, or Russia and Ukraine, whether it’s Republicans and Democrats or progressives and conservatives, there is this sense that these schisms are getting greater and deeper and wider around the world rather than, you know, the dreams of our generation, the baby boomers, of everybody finally coming together. Coming together around the climate crisis, around social justice, and so on. And so our dream, it’s like humanity is going in the other direction. It’s regressing into earlier stages of development in which shadow projection is weaponized and it’s being institutionalized in our government now by this president. 


 

TS: Can you explain what you mean? Shadow projection is being weaponized. Can you explain that? Yeah.

 

CZ: Yeah. Every time Trump runs for office, he’s talking about “those people.” Those people are invading. Those people are stealing. Those people are replacing. Those people are—don’t deserve this and don’t deserve that. His othering of groups, often minority groups—women and People of Color—is shadow projection, and he’s doing it from this, you know, the most powerful podium in the world. And what’s happened is that has triggered a contagion of projection in the people who secretly thought that way, but didn’t have the permission to speak it before because it was not PC. 


So now they can yell it at the top of their lungs, they can put it on their clothes and on their cars. And he’s given this permission to dehumanize individuals and groups of people with this black-and-white thinking. And once you start dehumanizing groups, you get genocide. You know, you get holocaust, you get slavery. So you get camps. So the fact that, you know, he’s organized, every department of the government now around this psychological mechanism that’s underneath his belief system is very frightening. And I think even if people don’t have the language of shadow like we were talking about before, they sense that’s what’s happening. 


 

TS: How does having this language and being shadow fluent, if you will, have someone like you interact with our political landscape in a different way?

 

CZ: Well, like you said, the first step is awareness. So in my teaching in the last few months, I’ve been sharing this framework with people and just saying, look, all of these problems are not disconnected. They’re rooted in this psychological mechanism of shadow projection. 

So the first step is examine yourself. How are you contributing to the darkness? How are you othering and making us and them in your own world? And how can you begin to reclaim some of your projections? You know, the way that I’ve done that over the years is I’ve tried to look at conservative thinking, which is very unfamiliar. 


And I grew up in a really liberal family, so I’ve tried to look at conservative beliefs and find positive traits there, find bits of it that can actually, can contribute to the well-being of society so that I’m not splitting all good, all bad. So the first thing we can do, and also watching myself react, you know, watching my reactions to the news, watching my reactions to the speeches, especially around the elections, but I mean, even now as things unfold. So that’s the inner work, but that’s not enough, right? So the inner work is the basis for the outer work. 

For me, when I was a kid in Berkeley, in the late ’60s and ’70s, all of my activism was rooted in anger. And I can see now how much shadow projection was in it. The police, what we, you know, the police were pigs and then everybody was carrying a lot of projection for me. Now my activism is more rooted in grief. I’m really sad about what’s happening and I want to contribute. So I’ve been trained by Al Gore to work on the climate crisis. I’ve been trained by Citizens Climate Lobby to lobby Congress. I work with third act on climate and democracy. There are other elder groups that are fabulous, that are doing political, all kinds of political action. 


And I do my—I’m not one for marching in the streets, but yay, if that’s your passion, I would say, you know, and while you’re doing it, watch your internal process. Be self-reflective while you’re engaging in your activism. Who is the activist in you? What is it saying and what is it feeling? How can you relate to that part of you that’s angry and outraged as I think we all should be now, and at the same time wants to create peace, wants to create a positive outcome for democracy and for climate and for social justice issues, and for trans kids and for gun control and all these then universities, education, right? Free speech. I mean, we could go on and on. So how can you connect your inner work to your contributions in the world? Because there are these bridges we can build between them. 

 

TS: The specific example you gave of trying to see the positive motivation or the good in people whose opinions are quite different from yours, that’s very helpful to me. It’s very concrete. I’m wondering how else, and we can end on this note, you would bring all of the shadow work you’ve done so that we don’t participate in othering and creating this division when that’s not our goal, but yet we feel so polar opposite in so many ways to people who hold radically different perspectives on certain issues. 


 

CZ: You don’t ask easy questions. You know, Carl Jung had this famous phrase about holding the tension of opposites. And I created this practice for myself recently about holding my grief in one hand and holding my gratitude in another hand because my life is very privileged. And I have love and I have enough money and I have creativity, and I have my voice and my books, and it’s very—I feel really blessed. 


And at the same time, I feel this terrible grief for humanity and for the planet and everything that’s happening now. So I’m working on holding these opposites in my body mind, and you can create a practice of your own to begin to heal the opposites inside of you, whatever they are for you. You could be, you know, they could be opposites around one of the wars. And how you might frame that, or they could be, because when you project your shadow, you’re not holding the opposites. You’re disowning one side of it, right? Whether it’s positive or negative, you’re disowning it. So how can you hold some set of opposites for yourself and feel and practice embodying that? 


And you can do it in line at the grocery store. Nobody will know that you’re doing it. You’re just breathing in these opposites that you maybe previously were separating. Maybe the opposites are progressive and conservative. Maybe they’re white and black. Maybe they’re Christian and non-Christian. Maybe they’re love and hate. 


You know what I’m talking about right now is dualities. Right? How can you begin to cultivate non-duality in your own psychology around the current world situation? Because if the reality truly is one, one consciousness, one body of humanity, everything interconnected, then these dualities have their place in daily life. We can’t live without them, but they’re not the one truth that we’re all seeking. And so see if you can design for yourself some practices to hold various dualities that you’re now splitting and see what happens as you do that. And maybe some Jung used to say a third thing will open. He called it the transcendent function. That this third thing will emerge out of that pair of opposites. So that’s a suggestion I could make.

 

TS: Very helpful. Connie Zweig, you are a great person to learn from. 

 

CZ: Thank you. 

 

TS: Really such a clear educator. Thank you so, so, so very much. We’re celebrating the release of Meeting the Shadow and Romancing the Shadow in their new evolved forms and your work as one of the world’s leading experts on the shadow. It’s so great to have you here on Insights at the Edge. Thank you. 


CZ: Thank you, Tami. Thank you for all that you do.