Shadowboxing

"Make friends with your opponent quickly while he is taking you to court; or he will hand you over to the judge, and the judge to the officer, and the officer will throw you into prison. You will not get out until you have paid the last penny" (Matthew 5:25-26).

Shadow work is very important if one wants to grow spiritually and also psychologically. Shadows are those parts of my personality that I don't want to see, or show others. They are the alienated parts of myself. In the above passage, Jesus asks his disciples to "make friends" with those who have a challenging message for them. If they do, they will be able to see some of their own shadows. Only the soul knows we grow best in the shadowlands. We are blinded inside of either total light or total darkness, but “the light shines on inside the darkness, and it is a light that darkness cannot overcome” (John 1:5). In darkness we find and ever long for more light.

Your shadow self is not your evil self. It is just that part of yourself that you do not want to see, your unacceptable self by reason of nature, nurture, and choice. That bit of chosen blindness is what allows us to do evil and cruel things—without recognizing them as evil or cruel. Think of our many politicians, god-men, and clergy who have fallen into public disgrace following sexual and financial scandals. So ongoing shadowboxing is absolutely necessary because we all have a well-denied shadow self.

In other words, we absolutely need conflicts, relationship difficulties, moral failures, defeats to our grandiosity, even seeming enemies, or we will have no way to ever spot or track our shadow self. They are necessary mirrors. You can recognize the shadow in two ways. Shadow material either (1) makes you hypersensitive, easily triggered, reactive, irritated, angry, hurt, or upset, or it may keep coming up as an emotional tone or mood that pervades your life; or (2) it makes you positively hypersensitive, easily infatuated, possessive, obsessed, overly attracted, or perhaps it becomes an ongoing idealization that structures your motivations or mood. Jesus' wish for us is to befriend our shadows if we want to truly grow.