Shadow Work

Bring your true self out of the shadows and into the light

Top 20 Things You Can Learn at Basic Facilitator Training

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The Basic Facilitator Training, or BFT, is for people who want to learn about human nature, about themselves, and about how they can help people with troubling personal issues.

Here’s just some of the learning you’ll get.

YOUR SHADOW AS A FACILITATOR AND HOW TO USE IT

  1. Love your dark side. We all have a “dark side” — parts of us that are in shadow. Only those who learn to see their dark side without shame can use it to help others. Those who can’t see their dark side will be controlled by it.
  2. Start a lifetime of feeling better about yourself. Many of us fear the part of ourselves that wants to take control. That controlling part of us, however, is the same part of us that wants to learn to facilitate. What it really wants is to create safety, for us and for those we’re trying to help. You’ll learn why you needn’t feel ashamed of your inner facilitator and how you can use it to make your participant feel safe.

HOW TO SPOT MAGICIAN WOUNDS AND USE THE MAGICIAN TOOLS

  1. Reveal what somebody’s really saying. You’ll learn how to “mirror,” a way of listening that helps someone find clarity.
  2. Be amazed as Mistakes morph before your very eyes into The Best Strategies Available At The Time. You’ll learn how to help people get the gold out of their mistakes and how to help them transform regret into compassion.
  3. Change somebody’s life during dinner. You’ll learn the seven-step What’s At Risk process, which can help a person move safely through a personal obstacle within minutes.
  4. View yourself from the other side of the room. Until you’ve tried it, you won’t believe how much clarity and perspective you get from having your inner voices spoken by role-players while you watch from a distance. You’ll learn to “split out” a participant’s inner voices and then what to do with their inner tableau.
  5. Spot a group participant who’d rather be anywhere else than in your group. If you lead groups, you know that people sometimes come to groups with fear of the group experience. You’ll learn to spot them and how to safely handle their fear and bring them back into the group.
  6. Find your inner light switch. You’ll learn to “switch” an unwanted sensation into something you want, and how to help the person you’re facilitating do the same.

HOW TO SPOT SOVEREIGN WOUNDS AND USE THE SOVEREIGN TOOLS

  1. Sense when you’re getting set up for a fall. We all have “circuitry” for idealizing someone or something and then getting betrayed. You’ll learn about the idealization-betrayal circuit and what to do when someone’s idealizing you.
  2. Why some people deflect compliments. When someone can’t accept something good, it probably means there’s a risk involved. You’ll learn to recognize when a risk is appearing, and how to facilitate the process that helps them deal with it.
  3. Pull an angel out of thin air. You’ll learn how to recognize someone in need of support from an ideal being, and how to get it to them.

HOW TO SPOT LOVER WOUNDS AND USE THE LOVER TOOLS

  1. Remove a lump from someone’s throat, without surgery! When your participant wants to be free of an unwanted sensation in their body, the Metaphor Pull-Out process helps them pull it out.
  2. Talk to an adult who has just turned into a kid. There’s a special way of talking to somebody when they’re experiencing a Lover wound, developed by David Grove. You’ll learn how to use it and experience why it works so well.

HOW TO SPOT WARRIOR WOUNDS AND USE THE WARRIOR TOOLS

  1. What your “ego” really is and why it doesn’t deserve its bad rep. You’ll learn why your ego isn’t bad at all and why it’s essential to your sense of self.
  2. Give the power to the people. You’ll learn to recognize when a participant’s power is not available to them and how to help them regain control of it.

WHAT A SHAME-FREE CONTAINER IS LIKE

  1. Start creating a family of choice. The training environment is a shame-free place where you can be who you are. There’s simply no better learning environment. Many people come to feel a close bond with their fellow trainees that’s thicker than water. We all have a family of origin; we can also have a family of choice.
  2. Laugh about your family and what a corker life really is. You’ll learn one of Shadow Work’s best-kept secrets: that we laugh a lot when we’re together. When we find compassion for our wounds, we get a new perspective on human nature that’s both endearing and hilarious. Carl Jung was known for his wonderful laugh. Maybe you’ll become known for yours.

WHAT IT’S LIKE TO FACILITATE

  1. Watch some great acting. You’ll do more than study. You’ll practice. At first, you’ll practice on the trainers, some of the world’s best unpaid actors (uh…).
  2. Get hands-on experience. You’ll facilitate real processes in a team with other trainees, with the trainers coaching you in a supportive learning environment. Shadow Work trainers are known for their affirming way of giving feedback.

HOW GOOD THIS WORK FEELS

And the number one thing you’ll learn at the BFT:

  1. Something surprisingly good about yourself. After you’ve learned and practiced the processes, you’ll do a piece of your own work. It will give you an opportunity to “feel from the inside-out” one of the processes you’ve learned to facilitate. You might do Sovereign work and feel what it’s like to get, and give, unconditional love. You might do Warrior work and break your personal record for yards rushing. You might do Magician work and learn about the risks that have been standing in your way. You might do Lover work and get rid of a physical symptom.

Whatever kind of work you do, you’ll resolve an issue that’s been troubling you, perhaps for years.

For more information on the Basic Facilitator Training.

For the dates of upcoming Trainings, see the Events Calendar.

CoDevelopment: Laying the Tracks for More Love and Trust.

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July 2019, by Cliff Barry

The word “Co-Development” is not in the dictionary.  But we like that because the word has no baggage.  We can define it for ourselves.  

CoDevelopment is a word we’re adding to our Shadow Work jargon because it describes something special about our work.  CoDevelopment is actually like the glue that holds Shadow Work together.  It helps to produce the safety people experience at a Shadow Work event because it contributes to the mom-and-pop balance of energies we present.  CoDevelopment is at the core of our practice.

CoDevelopment contains a unique way of collaborating with a partner or co-facilitator.  It requires us to dig into our own shadows and process them.  In so doing, it co-creates a solution that’s been forged in the fire of our interchange.  The magic is actually in the way we polarize, process and then co-produce a unique result.  Rather than a simple compromise, CoDevelopment creates a third alternative that’s more loving and more powerful than either of our opposing viewpoints.  It generates a safer field. 

“Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and right-doing there is a field. I’ll meet you there.”  -Rumi 

If you watch old couples talking, they often seem to be fighting about things — but if you look more closely, they might not be actually fighting, they might just be expressing strong opposing opinions.  Differentiation is an important part of evolution.  But in humans, it’s even more intentional.  We don’t just polarize in the way our bodies adapt, but in the way, we think and feel and present ourselves.  And we also present our polarizations to each other.  And, hopefully, we do this in a way that doesn’t end the entire co-development process.  If someone says, “You’re just wrong, this is the way it is”, then co-development is OVER right there. 

THE PROCESS: 

CoDevelopment is really a whole process.  It can be described by the three “P’s”: 

  1. Polarize
  2. Process
  3. Produce

Let’s suppose Cliff and Vicki are talking on the phone with a man who’s a potential coaching client, and he says,  

“In my work, I want to go really, really deep.  But I also want to keep things really positive.  I’m not into that negative, small-minded kind of thinking that some people get into when they are crying about how wounded they got. Let’s just keep everything on the  sunny side, ok?”

This is what we call an Inflated Sovereign Wound.   

But suppose Cliff and Vicki have polarized reactions to this man and to his statement.  They often do.  Speaking about it after the call, Cliff might say, “Wow, he just wants to bypass the deep stuff by calling it ‘negative.’  That won’t work.  We have to confront him on this.”  

But Vicki might say, “I think he’s just been rejected a lot.  Couldn’t we just hold him in his wound and see if it all works out during the session?” 

1. POLARIZE

Cliff and Vicki start going back and forth, even arguing about whether to confront him or just hold him patiently.  

2. PROCESS

Both Cliff and Vicki are uncomfortable with their conflicting perspectives, so they decide to sleep on it. That night, they each see a shadow in themselves that tainted their vision of this man.   

  • Cliff sees himself in this guy, and he doesn’t like this tendency in himself.  So he reacted in a more confrontational way.  So Cliff did a piece of anger work until he reached a little breakthrough.  Having processed his anger through, he could now tolerate the man’s inflation more easily and could sense the opportunity for a different approach. 
  • Vicki saw her younger brother in this man, and growing up she always just supported her brother.  So she reacted to this man in a more accepting way.  So she did some work around supporting her brother and remembered her brother didn’t always appreciate the help.  So she became more willing to challenge this man.   

3. PRODUCE

Then Cliff and Vicki come together, each with a deeper awareness about themselves and about the client.  From this place, they see a new way to work with him which incorporates their deeper perspectives. In the end, they tell him,  

“We can see a way for you to go even deeper than you are currently imagining.  We can take you deeper than deep.  But this will challenge you to take some even deeper risks than you have taken before. Are you up for that?”  

He rises to the challenge and says yes.  So they work with him until he comes up against his deeper wounds.  Then he says,  

“Boy this is getting really negative!”  

But then Cliff and Vicki can say,  

“Well that’s one of the bigger risks we challenged you to take.”   

This puts the man in a position to face some negative things while being supported to go even deeper than before.  This approach has incorporated both sides of Cliff and Vicki’s polarization, and yet it’s a new field, a fresh approach. 

And this is CoDevelopment in action. The key is to “do your own work first.”  It’s to dig into your own shadows and find a way through them.  When you do, you see better because you are coming from a deeper place.  You aren’t just compromising in a rational way.  You are CoDeveloping by working with your own emotions as well.   

Shadow Work contains many tools that can help you process your reactions more quickly and easily when you are CoDeveloping with a partner.  

WHY IT’S IMPORTANT: 

We believe that when people process something emotionally they then see it differently.  Human beings are not “thinking beings that happen to feel”, but rather they are “FEELING beings that happen to THINK.”  So to get a really deeper result, you need to process your emotions as well as your thoughts.  

You see this very clearly on Shadow Work carpets, where people go through processes.  When they get down to their emotions, and their emotions change, they start seeing themselves very differently.  They will often see the dynamics that have been plaguing them in a new, more positive light.   

CoDevelopment gives you another way to look at how you collaborate.  You probably know how to polarize.  That comes naturally.  But how do you process your own reactions when you are at odds with a partner?  How vulnerable can you let yourself be?  How far are you willing to go to process your own stuff in order to reach a better solution?   

You probably CoDevelop better on some issues than others. When you are having difficulty, you might say,  

 “I know I’m right.” “I’ve got this.” “I’ll take it from here.” 

Or,  

  “I don’t care, let’s just do it your way.” 

While these might be solutions in some cases, they are not CoDevelopment.  They lack the emotional processing to find a deeper solution.   

Shadow Work has been designed around the practice of CoDevelopment in a number of ways:   

  • We insist on having two facilitators for every process because the best facilitation is CoDeveloped between two people who have been doing their own work relative to the facilitation in which they are partnering. 
  • We insist on having two trainers at every Shadow Work Facilitator Training or Coaching Training.   
  • The Shadow Work model itself has been forged through the process of CoDevelopment between Cliff and Vicki.  Before he found Vicki, Cliff Codeveloped the Shadow Work model with his previous partners.  CoDevelopment was built into Shadow Work from the beginning.   
  • The Shadow Work model itself highlights the importance of seeing the paradoxes that exist in every process.  In this case, it’s not two people Co-Developing, but two paradoxical approaches that need to be ironed out within the brain of each facilitator.   
    • Should I offer some theory now, or plunge the participant into something more experiential?  
    • Should I follow the participant’s urge to be independent now, or bring in the need for connection?   
    • Should I support the participant’s quest in life, or highlight the need for security?   
  • The Shadow Work model talks about each facilitator viewing the situation with both eyes because that provides the best depth perception. 
  • Certified Shadow Work Facilitators are required to come together to “do their own work” every two years to stay certified.  This means we must all learn to grow by CoDeveloping with our shadows. 

If you learn to facilitate Shadow Work, you will need to learn CoDevelopment, also.  If you are leading any kind of organization, it becomes important to CoDevelop with someone else when dealing with the people in the organization.  CoDevelopment becomes like the glue that helps to hold the organization together.   

CoDevelopment is actually a generic version of good parenting.  And since parenting is a universal imprint on all people, CoDevelopment becomes a universally important strategy for helping people in the family dynamics which organizations contain.   

Until now, we didn’t have our own word for this cornerstone of Shadow Work, but now we do.   

There’s a great tool for learning to CoDevelop in the way you speak.  It’s called Clean Talk, and you can begin learning about it right on the Shadow Work webpage.  There’s a Map of Clean Talk, and audio recordings to explain.    https://shadowwork.com/clean-talk/

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When Negative Thoughts Get in the Way

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February 2019, by Karin Green

WE ALL HAVE ONE!

We all have one, a voice that expresses criticism or frustration, disapprove of our actions. It might sound like “what’s wrong with you”, “why can’t you get it together”, “that was stupid”, “they will find out you don’t know enough”.

At best these negative thoughts are just present like background noise, and at worst they might paralyze you, prevent you from a successful career, a healthy relationship and may even lead to depression.

The good news is: you have the power to change these negative thoughts. You were not born with these negative thoughts. Below are some ways to begin to disrupt them so that you can start building new, more positive messages.

STEP 1: BECOME AWARE.

No matter how strong this voice seems, the act of noticing the voice begins the shift away from their impact on you. You cannot change what you are not aware of.

One way to become aware is to just sit with your thoughts and watch them. Imagine the thoughts being like water in a river, just flowing by you. The goal here is to notice, not to catch the thought.

In this step, just focus your awareness on the facts and messages of the voice. Don’t let your mind wander into the analysis of “why” you have this voice right now, and don’t allow yourself to argue with the voice. For now, just notice that you have a voice.

STEP 2: WHOSE VOICE IS THAT? [Read more…]