Me and My Shadow

Take my friend Jon, for instance. He gets teased by all his friends for exaggerating his accomplishments, and criticized for blaming other people for his own mistakes. For a long time, he simply refused to accept the feedback. Then, his best friend of many years told him that he no longer wanted to be close to someone he couldn't trust to tell the truth. And Jon had to recognize that stretching the truth had become a habit. As he admitted it to himself—and dealt with the accompanying feelings of shame and embarrassment—he began to vigilantly, and moment to moment, choose truthfulness.

When Do You Feel Charged?
Another technique is to notice when an encounter leaves you feeling emotionally charged. Why do you get so upset when the line at the ticket counter moves slowly? Could your fury come from a feeling of thwarted entitlement, a belief that life should arrange itself to fit your convenience? Why do you feel so sour when your girlfriend easily passes her bar exam? Is it because you have been procrastinating about finishing your doctoral thesis and her success feels threatening? As you look closely at your hidden shadow feelings, they begin to lose their charge—and, hence, their power over you.

Who Is It You Can't Stand?
A third way to bring your shadow to light is to look at the people you feel vehemently negative about. When Hillary Clinton was running in the 2008 primary elections, I kept running into women who would practically froth at the mouth when her name was mentioned. All of them were successful women who had had to make a lot of compromises to rise in male-dominated professions. Hillary, they would say, is ruthless. She's compromised. And sometimes, "I just hate her." The vehemence alone indicated that there was projection going on. The "dark" qualities they saw in her were unacknowledged aspects of themselves.

This also holds true for your positive shadow—for the unowned "golden" qualities in you. The people you idealize for their courage, creativity, wisdom, or charm inevitably mirror our own hidden potentials. Think about it: Who did you idolize in college, and why? Which qualities and traits make you fall in love with someone? What do you admire about your closest friends? These are clues to your own unexpressed or uncultivated strengths. My guru intuitively understood the phenomenon of projection. When you paid him a compliment, he used to say, "It's your own greatness you see in me."

As you stick with these "shadow work" strategies over time, make an effort to notice and explore the ways that your shadow might be manifesting, without judgment or self-blame. For instance, you might become aware that you're in the grip of your shadow when you find yourself obsessing over your ex's critical remarks. Or when you brood over a close friend's silence rather than calling her. Or when you idolize your boss because he's so creative, while continuing to hold back from offering your own creative ideas. Once you can recognize when you are in the grip of your shadow, you can refrain from acting on a negative shadow impulse (such as lashing out at a loved one), or choose a different way of behaving than you might otherwise (by being patient when someone is annoying you, or reflecting on how the man you suddenly adore exhibits beautiful qualities that are latent in yourself.

And then you can take the next step, the step that allows integration and, ultimately, release. You learn how to hold the shadow feelings in your awareness, and sense your way into the energy tied up in them. You recognize and accept the fact that, like everyone else, you contain light, and you contain darkness. And if you can become the witness of both, your very awareness will allow these two sides of yourself to integrate, releasing the energy that has been tied up in privileging one side over the other. Paradoxically, it's then, and only then, that you gain real power to change the tendencies and behaviors in yourself that can and should be changed. Change doesn't come from blindly trying to suppress or get rid of a negative tendency, or refusing to acknowledge a positive one. It comes through the power we gain by becoming aware of it. It's only when we know our own depths—our unique wisdom and our unique blindness, the way we are at our most loving and the way we are when we're most angry, that we become truly trustworthy to ourselves and others. That's when we can authentically choose to live as our best self. That's when our yoga begins to shine through all our moments and all our days.

Exercise: Letter Writing Game
Another way to identify your unacknowledged and projected shadow is through an exercise that I call the Letter Writing Game. Set aside half an hour, during which you will write two letters. One is addressed to someone you have an intense emotional charge with, someone you dislike, judge, disapprove of. It can be a friend, a colleague, a family member, or even a public figure. Describe the things you dislike about them, including the reasons why you dislike these things. ("I can't stand the way you talk to people because it makes everyone feel bad." "You're such a drama queen.")