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S2E3 9 TRANSCRIPT:

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Yucca: Welcome back to The Wonder Science-based Paganism. I'm one of your hosts Yucca. 

Mark: And I'm the other one Mark. And this week we are going to talk about working with the shadow aspect.

Yucca: That's Right, So we'll start by talking about what does that actually mean? And then get into how to recognize it. and what to do with it once you do.

Mark: Right, right. This is a frequent topic of conversation in my experience within the pagan within pagan circles, certainly. And.

Yucca: We also got a few requests. We've had actually multiple requests to talk about this topic. 

Mark: We have and it's, and some of those requests were quite awhile ago. So it's taken us a while to get around to this. We deliberately put it off until the Hallows ey time of the year. When we deal with stuff like mortality and decomposition and other, other things that are a little bit harder for people to live.

So, that's, that's why it's been a while, but now we're doing it.

Yucca: Yeah. Yeah. So let's talk about. What it actually means, right? Or what, what do people mean when they say shadow work?

Mark: Yeah. And that. Complicated because it really is a moving target. I have heard that term used to mean a lot of different things. But when I go and look for technical definitions within the frame of psychology, there are basically two, the first is everything in your unconscious, everything that you're unaware of about yourself.

Yucca: And that's young, right? That's 

Mark: that's that's young. That was Young's approach to it. He, his perspective was that our personalities have these different components and that some of those components are not visible to us. It's not that they cannot become visible to us it's that they are not visible to us either because we simply have blind spots to them or because of.

Chosen at some level, not to look at them 

Yucca: So, this is sort of the, the whole of the unconscious. 

Mark: that's right. The whole thing, everything going on. And so, he would approach the shadow with interpretation of dreams and other other sorts of imaginative. Responses like responses to Rorschach, blots, things like that. Do people, maybe people don't know what those are, that they're those eight blots where they put ink and then unfold the ink.

And it makes pictures that look like butterflies or whatever you see in them. Right.

Yucca: But it's supposed to be what you see tells some, something about you. Right.

Do you see that it's the, you know, old mother beating a dog with a stick or does it look like a little, child's smelling a flower, Right.

And that's supposed to say something about your internal state or personality. 

Mark: Exactly. And we'll talk more about what some of those techniques might be later on in the podcast. The other definition that is frequently used for shadow work is. Psychological processing and growth specifically about an aspect of the unconscious, not the whole thing, but just an identified. Part of us that is less visible to us that we feel a need to heal or transform or bring more into a conscious visibility.

And those processes are what is called shadow work.

Yucca: Right. So those would be the things that are in the shadow or that. a light, right? Let's say you've got a flashlight or a torch, And you're looking at yourself with it. What is behind what you're seeing? What's still there, but it's, it's part of the shadow that you can't see.

Mark: Right. And this is the time when we should make the point, which we did in our episode, entitled the darkness that when we're talking about shadow and darkness and stuff like that, we are not saying bad. 

Yucca: Yeah. 

Mark: We're not going to play that game around, equating blackness with badness, which is a racist trope.

And there's no reason for it. Shadow aspects can be positive things. It's just that you're not aware of t