EP114 Shadow Work with Sasha Graham

Sasha and Andrew talk about finding balance. How working on your shadow is just as important as working on the rest of yourself. They explore tarot and other tools along with personal stories of encounters wit the shadow. 

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Transcription. 

Andrew:

Welcome to another episode of The Hermits Lamp podcast. I am here today with Sasha Graham. I met Sasha at Readers Studio a number of years ago where they were talking about shadow work. And recently, this summer, they came out with a deck called the Dark Wood Tarot, which digs right into that shadow stuff. And for people who've spent time around me, really owning both sides of that stuff is important I think to every spiritual journey.

So I wanted to kind of have Sasha on here to talk shadow stuff and talk dealing with those things, especially at a time when COVID and racial issues and justice issues or the shadow issues of our cultures are really being brought to the foreground as well. It feels like an important conversation and an important thing to keep paying attention to. But maybe everybody doesn't know who you are, Sasha. So why don't you give us a quick introduction?

Sasha:

Yeah. Well, first off, thank you. Thank you so much for having me. So my name's Sasha Graham. I'm a tarot author and a deck creator and a teacher. I've written, I think, eight tarot books for Llewellyn and Lo Scarabeo. And I contribute to the Llewellyn's Magical Almanacs, which is Datebooks. And I've created two tarot decks, both of them kind of steeped in spooky darkness because I love that vibe: The Tarot of the Haunted House for Lo Scarabeo and The Dark Wood Tarot, which has just come out a couple months ago, with Llewellyn.

Andrew:

So tell me this, because you are a very positive-seeming, very upbeat, very energetic and outgoing kind of person. What's with all the darkness? What's with the appeal of that for you? What do you get from that?

Sasha:

I am a person who... The darkest parts of anything in my life that I've ever experienced, the most challenging things in my life that I've ever experienced has always paid itself back on the light side, if that makes sense. So I grew up in a very kind of... I think my childhood, to be honest with you, felt very terrifying. I lived in wild, rural places. I was on mountains and planes. We moved around.

The world always felt very supernatural and very scary. And it was always kind of going in and embracing the things and figuring out all of the dark stuff helped me find the light that much better, if that makes any sense. And especially I think as a teenager, when there were certain things that I couldn't process that were happening in my life, it was easier for me to go to horror and Stephen King. I happened to come of age when vampires and Anne Rice became a thing and the goth movement first came out.

So, to me, grinding yourself against the darkness, grinding yourself against the stuff that terrifies you makes you stronger and ultimately it makes you more whole. And then as I transitioned into my work as a taroist and as a writer and as like, I don't know, a spiritual creature or whatever you want to call it, I realized how profound and how the further you go into the...

We're all here to evolve, right? As a taroist, as an artist, as a writer, you're here to move forward and to see further than you've seen the