Dimitri Bilgere (pronounced bil-GAIR) was one of Shadow Work®’s first facilitators. “I was always one of those people who was looking for the most effective kind of healing,” he remembers, so was in his mid-twenties when he started doing men’s work and met Shadow Work founder Cliff Barry. 

 Dmitri is a Certified Group Facilitator living in Madison, Wisconsin, where he has a coaching practice and runs facilitator trainings. He also co-leads the Inner King Training. I caught up with Dmitri on his cell phone, and our conversation touched on these topics among others. 

December 8, 2005, by Alyce Barry

AB: How did you come to do men’s work?

Dmitri: I’d always had a pretty strong interest in gender issues. In junior high school, I wrote essays for fun about personal development and gender issues. Then in 1986, I heard about the New Warrior Training Adventure (NWTA), better known as the Warrior weekend. Someone mentioned that there was this workshop where guys run around in the woods and drum. And I remember thinking, That’s not for me just yet. I was probably 22 at the time. And then when I was 24, I heard about it again. Someone I knew went through it, and he said good things about it, and I said, You know, that is for me now, and I remember having that thought.And that was where I met Cliff, in 1988, well before Shadow Work existed. He had gone through the NWTA a few months earlier and was on staff when I went through. Afterward, one of the leaders, Bill Kauth or Rich Tosi, had said to Cliff, Take this integration group, it’s your job to run it. I’m certain he didn’t get paid for that. There was no protocol, so there wasn’t that much “running it” to do. We got together, there were about five other guys from Madison, and we did whatever came to mind to do. Now there’s an eight-week protocol after you do the weekend, but there was nothing like that then. We immediately became the laboratory where Cliff started testing out ideas that would later become Shadow Work. To some extent, I did as well. That group went on for three or four years. It was something I looked forward to every week.

AB: What was the laboratory like?

Dmitri: It was pretty free-for-all in a lot of ways, a lot of experimentation. Cliff had started working with Ron Hering, one of the founders of the NWTA, who had introduced the carpet work piece — what he called “guts work.”

Ron was a brilliant facilitator. Not actually that good a teacher, dare I say it, but an amazing guy in many, many ways. He was running a program called ABC, which people said stood for a variety of things, including Accelerated Behavior Change. It was all very intuitive. Ron was an incredibly intuitive person but not very good at systematizing things.

It was in one of those groups, like an ABC group or something like that, where Cliff first had the idea and did a Shadow Reversal on someone. It was the first time anyone in that community had ever seen someone take a participant and have them step into the big, mean, Dad part. No one had ever done that before. And in fact, it was heresy, it was crazy. I remember thinking, “This is nuts, this is insane!” And so was everyone else. And it worked!

AB: That’s a process that helps empower a person who feels small and weak as he confronts a big, “bad” part of himself. We have him trade places with the “bad” part, locate its power in his body, then bring that power back to the small, weak part to help it accomplish a goal.

Dmitri: Another concept that didn’t exist early on was getting support. A man named Bruce Boehlen said one day, “If the guy’s crying, why don’t we give him an ideal parent, and let that empower him to do his work?” We see support as incredibly basic and completely obvious now. Then, it was just in its formation stages.

A lot of people contributed ideas, although the big ideas tended to come from the bigger players.

AB: The Shadow Reversal seems like a precursor of what we now call predator work, where we step into the big, bad part and let it run until the wheels fall off.

Dmitri: It definitely was a precursor. It took a while before someone had the thought, What if we just leave them in the energy until they break into grief, or break into blessing? And it was about three years before someone had the idea of the Switch.

AB: That’s a process in which you visualize having a switch on an energy, so you can switch it from the feeling you’re having to the feeling you want.

Dmitri: In the early 90s, I was doing something similar by stepping somebody into the shaming voice in their head and interviewing it until we got to the love. “What do you want for them? Why do you want this for them? How long have you been giving this to them? Is there a blessing you could give them that would enable them to do what they need to do?” That was one way of transforming the energy. Cliff was doing something a little different, based on the work of David Groves, where you find the switch in your body.

AB: Did any of the big books from the men’s movement have an impact on you?

Dmitri: We read King, Warrior, Magician, Lover by Robert Moore and Doug Gillette, and Iron John by Robert Bly. Before that, the guys in my Warrior integration group, especially us young guys, would get audio cassettes of Robert Bly’s talks. We would listen to them and listen to them, obsessively, to the point where when Iron John came out, we recognized a lot of chunks of that from talks he’d given. We were just so hungry for these ideas.

AB: At what point did you decide you wanted to facilitate?

Dmitri: It was within the first hour or so [of seeing process work] at my Warrior weekend. I had the thought, This is what my life is about. I was talking to a friend of mine the other day who’s a videographer and she said the first time she picked up a video camera, she knew that was what she was going to do with her life. And the first time I saw carpet work, I knew that that was the most important thing to my life. I took a long time to accept that, but I knew it right away. And I started facilitating as quickly as humanly possible.

AB: When did you start making money at it?

Dmitri: That took a while. I got involved in an ABC group that Cliff was running, where you paid to play. Cliff would run a series of four weekends, with evening meetings in between. And all four weekends, including room and board and the evening meetings, cost $250 total. That’s it! We were chuckling about that the other day. How would you even break even on that? But that would get people into the laboratory, men and women Cliff could work with. He and Ron stopped working together, so the leadership team was Cliff and his wife at the time, Wendy, and Erva Baden and Kathy Brown and me. At that point, I think it was called the Life Force Training Network.

I went thru one cycle of those ABC weekends as a participant, and then he made me an assistant. I remember that first time, I got paid $224. I could not believe it, it just blew my mind. They say that the first money you make in some new venture is always the most satisfying, and that was really a dream come true.

AB: When did you get involved with the Inner King Training (IKT)?

Dmitri: I remember Bill Kauth having the idea for that training back in 1988, and by the early 1990s, he and Cliff and Tom Daly had started running it. In 1994, they invited me to come do it for free. Some of the facilitation they were doing was fairly sophisticated, and at that time there wasn’t that long a list of people who were trained in this style of work. So I got involved and quickly became quite committed to it. I’ve run it maybe 31 or 32 times. Even when I wasn’t doing Shadow Work, IKT has always been a part of my life, which I’m very grateful for.

AB: What do you get out of that?

Dmitri: People who know me who have gone through the IKT have told me, You were born to run this kind of work. It’s a great fit for what I most love to do. While I got tons out of the NWTA, I tend to facilitate in a slightly different way than they do there. I tend to be more methodical, tend to worry more about psychological safety. The two weekends are not redundant in any way.

AB: You worked with the Emissaries, too, didn’t you?

Dmitri: Yes, a man named Norm Smokler from the Emissaries of Divine Light came to one of our ABC weekends. The Emissaries are a network of intentional communities, and they’re really good people. They live together and do good in the world, and they started hiring us to run workshops in their communities. This was at about the time that Mary Ellen Whalen came on board, and Life Force was renamed Shadow Work. I worked mostly with Erva Baden, and Cliff worked mostly with Mary Ellen. I’m pretty sure our first week-long facilitation training was held at an Emissaries community, either Sunrise Ranch in Colorado or Hundred Mile House in British Columbia. I also worked in their communities in England and South Africa.

AB: What was it like working in South Africa?

Dmitri: I went there twice. In 1995, Erva and I spent a couple of months running Shadow Work seminars almost every weekend, which was a pretty amazing experience. Shadow Work is about owning the parts of yourself that you don’t want to look at, and South Africa had a huge shadow that was showing up as apartheid. It was fascinating to bring that technology into that culture. We had to change things a fair amount, to slow it down enough, because it was very risky for them to look at that shadow.

I went to South Africa again in 1996, at the invitation of a therapist who had experienced Shadow Work, and spent three months there. I ran a men’s weekend there, in the mountains, and it probably was the first thing of that type that happened there.

AB: And then you took a break from Shadow Work for a while.

Dmitri: Yes, although I continued running the IKT about three times a year. I got tired of the unpredictability of the income. It dawned on me one day that if I ever wanted to have a family or retire or follow the more traditional life path, I needed to not live so hand-to-mouth. Being financially successful with Shadow Work is a hard thing to do. It’s not like we’re selling something that’s very easy to explain. In fact, it’s extremely difficult to explain what the heck it is.

So I did what I think many people do in that situation — I said to myself, I followed my dream, and it’s worked to a certain extent, but it’s not good enough, so I’m going to do something really different.

I found a niche market working with men who have extreme shyness and social anxiety with women. It’s only been in the last couple of years that I was willing to step back into Shadow Work and start believing in this again. I kind of threw out the baby with the bath water.

AB: How has life changed for you as a result of doing Shadow Work? I ask that knowing it’s a very different question for you, who’s been involved almost your entire adult life, than it is for people like me who came to it later in life.

Dmitri: One of the things we do during the IKT is a 30-40 minute visualization that guides you through reliving your entire life. Your life flashes before your eyes manually, as it were.

One of the first times I did that visualization, I realized that before I got involved in carpet work, I measured my life by what woman I was dating at the time. When I got involved in process work, I took on an identity as an adult man for the first time. That was where I grew up.

Since then, my life has been measured by my mission, and how much of this I’m doing, and how much I’m impacting people’s lives with it. The trick for me has been the willingness to trust the influence of this work in my life. Anything you idealize is eventually going to betray you, and when I took a break for a few years, it was because I felt betrayed by that belief. And it took me a while to trust that my life was better doing this work on a regular basis than without it. We sort of broke up for a while and then had to get back together.

AB: You’ve been adding free mini-courses to your website, livethelifeyoulongfor.com.

Dmitri: There’s a gift culture in the Warriors and Woman Within communities, where your value is based on how much you give away. I really like that. I give things away because I like people to know this stuff. I certainly want to make money to pay my bills, but if you can’t come to my trainings, I want to give you something that you can utilize in your life right away. That makes me very happy.

If I’m going to run a workshop, I create a mini-course about it and give that away. If you want to spend time with me one-on-one, then you’re going to pay for that. But if you want to get the meat of the workshop, I don’t hold back. It’s my observation that getting this stuff out there works better than believing you have to closely guard your secrets. I wrote an essay on this on my website, drawing an analogy between the NWTA community and Linux, with its open-source software. I get a lot of good feedback about that article, people really like it.

On my website, I’ve created free mini-courses for my facilitation trainings, for my sexuality workshop, and for my self-facilitation training. I did them as a labor of love, especially for people in the NWTA and Woman Within communities. If you sign up for the facilitation mini-course, you get both facilitation tips and personal growth tips via email. I’ve received a lot of good feedback on that, people seem to really like it.

Similarly, for the IKT, you’ll find a mini-course at InnerKing.com.

AB: What are you most excited about right now?

Dmitri: The cutting edge idea that’s in my mind right now is noticing that what I call Anger Work and Grief-and-Blessing Work — what in Shadow Work we call the basic processes, which are taught at the Basic Facilitator Training — tend to take you from being a victim to being an empowered victim. You blow mean Dad out of the room, or you get loved by the Dad who wasn’t there for you. Those processes leave you more likely to forgive your parents for what they did to you.

What we call the advanced processes — the Tombstone, the God-Split, the Predator, which we teach at the Advanced Facilitator Training — are more likely to lead you to realizing how you’ve been holding onto the pain of your past. And that can lead you to see things you’ve done to punish your parents for what happened, and then to apologize for them. Try that on! I tried that in a group recently, and it created some conversation! That’s the most controversial way of putting it.

What I’m seeing more in the advanced processes now is the way in which they can give you responsibility for your own life in a way that really is not shaming. You’re past the shame by that point, and you’re into the compassion. You’re into the good reasons why you did it. And so tacking those things onto the end of advanced processes has left people in an even more empowered place. They are empowered adults who have chosen their life who may even have some regrets for what they’ve done but [are] willing to live with that. That’s way more powerful than, Well, now I’m willing to forgive my parents for what they did to me. Which is a good thing to do, but there’s a step beyond it, that’s what I’m seeing now.

See also Dmitri’s facilitator page. Dmitri’s own site is livethelifeyoulongfor.com

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 Janine Romaner, ND, is a Shadow Work® Mentor and Certified Facilitator, a founding member of the Shadow Work Guild, a co-founder of Women In Power, and a doctor of natural medicine at the Naturally Healthy Clinic in Woodstock, Georgia. She lives in nearby Roswell, Georgia, with her beloved canine children.

                                                                                               September 24, 2008, by Alyce Barry

AB: How did you first come across this kind of work?

Janine: In college, I was extremely interested in behavioral psychology, and particularly abnormal psychology, which to me was much more normal. [Laughs.]

AB: So we could say you were certifiable even back then. [Laughs.]

Janine: My whole life, I’ve never been mainstream. My mother wasn’t mainstream. I’ve always tended toward alternatives in one way or another, without really knowing they were alternative.

I did a lot of studies in therapeutic work, even music and dance psychology. I started at the University of South Florida in Tampa and transferred to Colorado State, where I didn’t get a degree because I got so bored. I started studying unconventional forms like hypnotherapy, for which I got a license that I never used. Instead, I got involved in a spiritual organization and moved to Canada. That was the beginning of my 27 years living in British Columbia.

While living in community, part of my work involved running three-week intensive trainings with two men I knew. As the years went on, I was being pushed to the edge of my experience. I remember making a decision at the end of one of those: I’m not doing another one until I get more training.

Wouldn’t you know it, the way the universe magically works, within two weeks, somebody gave me a video to watch. It was Cliff and Mary Ellen doing Shadow Work with participants.

AB: It sounds as if you saw the videos of two real processes that were for sale at one time.

Janine: Yes, real processes. As soon as I was five minutes into the video, my cells were vibrating. I knew I wanted to train with Cliff. I knew that’s what I needed and wanted.

I was primarily thinking of getting more training at that point, but as I stepped into it, I realized more and more that I myself was in real need of doing personal growth work. What I didn’t know was that within the next year, my life was going to crash, and I would be going into a long period that I came to call the dark night of my own soul.

AB: After watching the video, what did you sign up for?

Janine: This is one of the ways that the universe conspired. In a matter of two months, without my doing anything about it, Cliff and Mary Ellen, with Dmitri Bilgere and Erva Baden, came to British Columbia. It must have been in the works, but I was unaware. As I recall, they gave several Shadow Work introductory events, which I participated in. Shortly afterward, they came back and gave their first facilitator training, which I also participated in.

For the next few years I was bitten by the Shadow Work snake, as Cliff once said, and it was a combination of doing my own personal work and going to trainings whenever I could. Learning Shadow Work was a gift to me personally that gave me the tools to rebirth, to come out of a former life in a healthy and creative way over time.

AB: What memories do you have of those first Shadow Work experiences?

Janine: My first Shadow Work experience was in a grouping of maybe 30 to 35 people I knew, within a larger community of some 110 people. I remember being very scared of exposing myself in front of people I knew. I felt a cocktail of emotions. There were, in my opinion, a lot of political dynamics in the community, and it was very hard for me to be vulnerable in that setting.

On the other hand, being kind of a fiery person myself with some background in music and dance, I remember being awestruck with the theatre of Shadow Work, and the color, music, variety, and the broad spectrum of emotions. It was activating parts of me that had been numbed over time. I still recall the physical sensation of parts of my body becoming alive.

The language of Shadow Work touched me very deeply also. I still think to this day that the languaging of Shadow Work is so elegant.

AB: Did Shadow Work change the way you saw yourself?

Janine: It helped me to be more compassionate, more accepting, and gave permission for me to be who I was. That was new for me back then. It was something I needed very much in order to do my own work.

I also remember the dance between Cliff and Mary Ellen. Seeing a strong female figure back then was new for me. It helped me to awaken my own voice that had been silenced.

AB: Do you remember the point at which you decided to become trained to facilitate Shadow Work?

Janine: I think the truth is, I never considered not. At some cellular level, I simply knew that this was part of my mission.

It was also probably that a central part of my own rebirth during that journey into and out of the dark night of my soul was to reclaim my inner she-wolf. She had been lost. Shadow Work helped me to reawaken that part of me that would not be tamed; the part of me that instinctively knows, that ancient wisdom that I believe every woman has. I was able to reclaim the gold in my wounds.

Our wounds eventually become a gift if we choose to use them that way. The deepest sore places in my life have now become what I draw from to help other women and men.

AB: You went on to finish the trainings and become certified, and you ran workshops for some years in Vancouver with George Hanson.

Janine: George and I are like a brother and sister. Our lives seemed to parallel each other. We moved south to Vancouver from the community in central British Columbia at about the same time and started to create a Shadow Work community.

My day job, though, was beginning a career in natural medicine. Even before I moved to Vancouver, I had begun training in natural approaches to healthcare and biofeedback devices. They are brilliant tools for testing acupuncture meridian points, testing for toxicity, inflammation, low organ function or degeneration, and for a myriad of substances to discover underlying contributors to ill health: metals, chemicals, viruses, allergens, bacteria, yeast, fungus. There are over 45,000 specific things we can test.

In Vancouver, I built a private practice as a health consultant, primarily using a biofeedback instrument. I kept my work well within the range of my training. It was wonderful, and gave me years of experience working with people, helping them to reclaim their health with dignity. George and I were also running Shadow Work weekends quite frequently, and I saw Shadow Work clients within my practice as well.

So a lot of people came to our weekends through my practice. Vancouver is such a beautifully open spiritual community that a lot of people wanted to work on both physical and emotional health. That’s how the two things began to dovetail in my life.

AB: What drew you to working with people on a body level? Had that always been an important thing in your life? Or did you notice that people who were coming to you to do Shadow Work were physically ill and become convinced that their emotional issues were showing up in their bodies?

Janine: Some of both, but probably more the latter. When I lived in central British Columbia, in the midst of exquisite nature, there was a lot of Native American influence, and people were into herbology and natural approaches to healing.

But in Vancouver, I had a couple of close friends who were naturopathic doctors. They were watching me doing emotional work with people, and they kept elbowing me and saying, “Haven’t you been noticing that you could also be helping them at a physical level with detoxifying protocols?”

I see that when people release emotional toxins, they release physical toxins as well.

However, I also learned about me that I didn’t want to be in people’s emotional stuff full-time. I love doing that part-time, but I didn’t want that as a full-time career.

AB: Why not full-time?

Janine: I found myself much fresher at a mental and emotional level when I wasn’t doing it day after day after day. When I built a practice that incorporated both, I loved the variety.

I’m built for variety, which is another thing I learned about me. I do best when I have a balanced mix of variety in my life, variety that all fits under one umbrella in my world. If I do only one thing in my life, I get bored with it.

When I began to train in natural medicine, I was equally impassioned and so excited about learning. I love to learn. So I found that emotional transformational work and natural medicine fit beautifully together in my work.

AB: Would you describe natural medicine as a grounding influence?

Janine: The emotions and the physical body are intricately tied together. When a person is in emotional depression, that will begin to depress their immune system sooner or later. And when their immune system gets depressed, their innate physiological weaknesses are going to give way, and they will develop an associated illness.

Are you familiar with Dr. Christiane Northrup?

AB: Yes, a little.

Janine: She’s an oby/gyn, known worldwide now, primarily for empowering women in their health, and has written numerous books.

One of the things she has said that strikes me accurately is that whether we are male or female, when we’re a fetus in our mother’s womb, we are literally made up of the biochemical soup of our mother. We take in the emotional and physical nutrients and toxins from our mother through the umbilical cord, and do not receive the nutrients she does not have to give.

So if our mother, when we were in utero, had an extremely loving, supportive family surround and ate really well, we got a ton of wonderful nutrients.

But if that wasn’t the case, if instead our mother went through trauma or got ill or was a heavy smoker, her biochemical soup didn’t have the full spectrum of nutrients. Our placenta was lacking.

What I see at a physical level, when I’m working with people, is that we can see what’s going on, not just at a nutrient level, but at an emotional level. Whether we’re doing Shadow Work or we’re in other personal growth arenas, what we’re really doing is creating a new placenta for each other.

AB: What a powerful image, of a container acting like a placenta.

Janine: Using that analogy, I think it’s a gift that, whether we are men or women, we can mother one another. We can provide some of the nutrients we may not have gotten from our mother. Maybe we were missing a neurotransmitter or crucial vitamins, or an emotional frequency of support. That analogy is sometimes in the back of my mind whether I’m working with somebody emotionally or physically. We can provide things for one another that we never got.

AB: To what degree would you say that Shadow Work and natural medicine are based on similar beliefs acting on different levels?

Janine: For me there is a principle or premise that underlies both. That’s part of why I can do both.

The principle is that, whenever we develop an issue, usually unconsciously, whether at a physical or emotional level, I believe we’re doing it as a coping or survival mechanism.

For example, in the emotional realm, let’s say a child has lost a parent and doesn’t have the tools for coping with that. The child might go into denial, and you could say that later in that person’s life, the denial becomes an issue. But early on, that denial was probably a necessity that was the best possible choice.

By the same token, on a physical level, let’s say a man comes into the clinic with very elevated cholesterol. It could be in part because of dietary habits and no exercise. But it could also be that he has underlying metal toxicity. His body is coping by elevating his cholesterol, which is the body’s most natural and effective way of detoxifying metal.

AB: How interesting. I hadn’t heard that cholesterol might have that purpose.

Janine: If you look at the hormonal feedback loops, that kind of pattern is there. Whether it’s emotional or physical, what I see is that the body gives signs.

In Shadow Work, as facilitators, we’re listening to what the participant says, and for what’s not being said. We’re looking at body posture and body language. We use all this information, and more, as signposts that tell us how to help the person get what they’ve come for.

In the physical arena, we also hear languaging, watch posture, see which organs are covered with excess fat deposits, etc, but we also include saliva panels, blood chemistry, lipid profiles, biofeedback tests and more. Again, there are patterns that show up. In my opinion, most allopathic or conventional doctors don’t look at the patterns. They look at what’s missing and give a drug to try to replace it. In natural medicine, we try to look at the patterns.

So we look at the high cholesterol and ask why it’s there, why it developed in the first place. We try to track it back to the root. If you follow unwanted symptoms back to as close to the origins as possible, much of the time they can be healed or at least improved. For me that’s one of the principles that underlies both.

AB: At what point did you make the decision to become a doctor of natural medicine?

Janine: I realized, after moving from Canada to the Atlanta area, that I wanted and needed a doctor’s degree, for a few reasons. I was newly building a practice as a health consultant and a biofeedback technician in a natural medicine clinic. What I found very quickly was that a lot of conditions coming to me were severe. I wanted to fill in the holes in my training.

Also, the Atlanta area is a much more conservative part of the continent than Vancouver. In this part of the country, having the credential of being a doctor meant a great deal to people. It put them at ease, and I thought that was very important.

Becoming a doctor proved to be extremely helpful to me. More and more, I’m finding that people are turning to natural approaches to healthcare because they’re not healing with conventional drugs. I don’t say that with any disdain for conventional drugs.

AB: What’s your take on drugs?

Janine: When they’re needed, they’re a godsend. My opinion is that they’re vastly overused, just as antibiotics are.

Many conditions can be turned around through very specific natural medications, whether it’s homeopathics or botanical blends, natural hormone supplements, dietary approaches or exercise.

Another reason I wanted to get more training was that autism started to show up in my practice.

AB: I remember your showing me several years ago an article you published about autism. Has that become a specialty?

Janine: Autism is a spectrum disorder. So there are children who are mild on the spectrum, children who are severe, there are children who have ADHD, asthma, and apraxia (speech delays). All of this is rampant in our society right now — one in 150 children are diagnosed with autism in 2008.

Families with autistic children started coming to me about eight years ago. In natural medicine I was having success with children whose speech, cognition and focus were returning. The parents of autistic children have networks, so they share their stories. Parents will do whatever they have to do to get their children healed.

There’s a brilliant organization called Defeat Autism Now (DAN). DAN provides tremendous education to parents and doctors, and it directs parents to those of us who are DAN doctors listed on their website.

Autism and developmental delays is a division of my work that I didn’t go out seeking, but because it’s such an epidemic in this country, the children and their parents come. It represents probably 60% to 65% of my practice now.

AB: I’ve read that some parents are reluctant to get their children immunized because they believe that certain vaccines might be responsible for some types of autism. Have you come to a conclusion about that?

Janine: What I have seen is a pattern, a progression that can happen in a young child’s life. In that progression, if enough insults occur, the immune system begins to break down and neurological blocks occur.

So for instance, let’s say that a child was given the usual vaccines right at birth. Will that cause autism? In my opinion, probably not. But it can, with some babies, begin to compromise the immune system. Partly because of all the preservatives in the vaccines, and partly because of the number of viruses a vaccine contains. Some babies are strong enough to handle that and some are not.

Many kids then begin to develop ear infections. A common pattern I see, with probably 90% of my kids, is that they’re taken to the doctor and put on antibiotics. Excessive use of antibiotics will break down the gut and respiratory immunity more. It starts to impair the mucosal lining in the intestines, which blocks absorption, and then yeast overgrowth develops which can impact brain function due to an opiate-like toxin excreted. And they get more vaccines. Thus the progression continues.

If a child’s system can’t withstand all these insults, as I’ll call them, at some point there’s a last straw. For some children, the last straw is a vaccine. Many parents say that, after the MMR vaccine for mumps, measles and rubella, their child is not the same. Many parents tell me that their child lost their speech overnight or within days after getting the vaccine. Again, did that alone cause the autism?

AB: What was it you were saying about the number of viruses in a vaccine?

Janine: In 1985, the vaccine schedule in North America changed. The schedule was increased, and more viruses were put in the vaccines. The list of preservatives in vaccines is scary. Is one piece of candy going to knock your system out? Probably not. But if you have so much candy that your system can’t handle the sugar and dyes, it’s going to break down.

I heard a news broadcast on this tonight. It’s not so much that vaccines cause autism, but we need to be intelligent about how and when we’re administering them. Many moms have told me they took their little one to the doctor because he or she had a cold and wasn’t well. And the doctor said, While you’re here, we’ll give your child a vaccine. In my view, that’s the worst time.

AB: This will be an ignorant question. Are you saying that autism is an immune system disorder? Or are you saying that once the immune system has been violated repeatedly, a final insult happens, and that sets the stage for something to cause autism?

Janine: It’s not a stupid question at all. A couple of my mentors call autism an auto-immune condition. For sure, it’s an extremely complex condition.

These insults definitely impact the whole intestinal and respiratory mucosal linings, which means they impact immunity. The children become malabsorptive: many of these kids have to eat a gluten-free diet and have trouble digesting certain peptides. Some have had injections that contain metals, which are neuro-toxins that can affect brain function. The body’s whole detoxification process is compromised. The methylation process is compromised. I could go on and on. It’s multi-faceted.

Because of autism’s complexity, I put the kids on a very comprehensive program, which isn’t the same for everyone, but there are a lot of similarities. Where I used to apologize for this years ago, now, I don’t apologize any more. I believe the comprehensiveness is actually what allows for so much progress.

AB: Is there a success story you’d like to share?

Janine: Yesterday, I was in tears for joy. A three-year-old autistic child had only been on our program for five weeks. He had worn the same outfit for more than two years because his skin was so sensitive to other fabrics. He was hardly speaking, had minimal focus, wasn’t sleeping well, seemed to be in another world, etc. He was toeing — walking on his toes — which I think is largely because the reflexology points for the digestive system are on the flats of the feet, and they hurt until we get the digestive system cleared.

There had been a lot of signs that this child was not healthy. We used the test results from the child’s body to determine a comprehensive program.

I had my fingers crossed when the mom came in yesterday, and I asked, “How’s our little one doing?”

Her eyes filled up, and she said, “I kid you not, this has been like a miracle. We’ve got our child back.”

Usually I hear that comment after a number of months. This child was so beautifully responsive.

He was talking a little bit to me, where five weeks before he wasn’t. His eye contact was there. He was wearing different clothing. His mom said his behavioral therapist sees great improvements.

She went on and on, and I sat there with the tears rolling down my cheeks. I credit the parents, because they are the ones who must stay committed to protocols, diets and therapies to bring their children back.

AB: I’m wondering what a medical intuitive like Louise Hay or Carolyn Myss would say about the symbolism of autism. An autistic child seems to be turned more inward than other children. Is it possible that autism on a symbolic level is children responding to the toxicity of our modern lifestyle by turning inward? And that there are many degrees of autism because our lifestyle is toxic in such a variety of ways? Does that make any sense?

Janine: Sadly, yes, it does. It hurts my heart to hear that because I think there’s truth to it.

Some of these children amaze me. I’m thinking of this little one who was sitting next to his mom in my office. All of a sudden, he looked at his mom and said, “Are you okay?”

She said, “Yes, I’m fine. Why?”

He said, “Because I can’t hear your heartbeat.” His hearing was so acute that he could hear her heart beat. For some reason, he hadn’t been able to in that moment.

I think that underscores what you’re saying. Some of these children are so sensitive, on all their levels of senses: their hearing, sight, taste, touch. In this world, that sensitivity is being bombarded by so much that it can be a massive coping or survival tool to turn in.

AB: To what degree is the patient’s belief a component of the healing process? If you had three parents coming to you, and one of them was a believer in natural medicine, the second was skeptical, and the third just flat-out didn’t believe it, how do you think their belief would impact their treatment? Aside from affecting how closely they followed what you’re describing as a demanding protocol.

Janine: I think belief is crucial. In our patient questionnaire, we ask, Do you see yourself cured of your condition? We’re basically asking them, Do you believe you can get well? If they say no, I flag that in my mind.

AB: Do you also ask children that question?

Janine: Absolutely. With most young children I don’t have to ask because their parents can hardly wait to get in. The referral network has done that work for me.

However, once in a while I have a teenager or an adult whose attitude says, I don’t believe this is going to do anything.

What I usually do is talk with them about it first. Because if in their heart and mind they don’t believe it, I believe there’s a blockage in the body that isn’t going to be able to use the treatment fully.

I am daily appreciative for what I call the grace of God, the healing power of whatever that mysterious force is that created our bodies in the first place. And I’m also extremely grateful for the brilliant mentors I have, who are there for me in case I run into questions or difficulties. That’s a great comfort to know that I’m not alone.

AB: I want to ask you about Women In Power and how you became involved. You’re one of the leaders of the organization, which is growing a good bit.

Janine: As you know, the design of the Women In Power (WIP) initiation was created by ALisa Starkweather, Sara Schley and Jude Blitz.

When they put the call out for women to attend the first initiation in 2001, there was more response than they had expected. So they invited Nicola Kurk and me to assist.

Alyce, it was going to be in about three weeks, but as soon as I heard Jude’s loving voice, something in my cells just knew I had to be there. I looked in my day book, and those days were jam-packed, and I called her and said I’d be there. It was one of those times when there was just no decision to be made.

The way it registered in me was that I felt a constellation coming together, and I was part of it. So I went in service of my sisters and in service of the women who were coming.

AB: The year I came to help facilitate, it was at Bullard Farm in Salem, Massachusetts. I understand it’s now happening at additional locations in the US and England.

Janine: Yes. So many amazing women all over North America, England, Europe and now South Africa are connected through this network. Stellar women have offered and continue to offer their presence, their gifts, their vulnerability in all kinds of leadership ways, just as you did at Bullard Farm when the initiation was newly occurring. Bless Becky Schupbach, our Executive Director (Den Mother) — if I began to name women to honor and bless, the list would be endless. I think this is because there is something archetypal in women that calls us to love and support one another.

This pushing-the-edge initiation is one way in which women can come and touch something very ancient about sisterhood, about our own authentic rhythms masked by societal demands, and become familiar with the internal predator/prey circuitry.

We’ve generally held three a year, though not every year. There have been several in Massachusetts, in the UK, one in Wales. As we speak this evening, another initiation is starting at Gaia in Maryland. And we held our first Pacific Northwest initiation earlier this year. And there are other locations on the horizon.

AB: I wanted to ask what you’ve gained from being a leader in WIP. And since it’s been about eight years now, I’m guessing you’ve gained many different things.

Janine: Yes. Many gifts. One is to be a part of a growing community of women. This has changed me. When I go to these initiations and get to know in a deeper way women whom I met when they initially went through the initiation — when I listen to them, and I hear the experiences of their rich lives — that changes me. These are women from all walks of life, leaders in their unique ways. I’m in awe of their life experiences, the amazing gifts that we each bring, and I feel very honored to be a part of that.

And for me it definitely touches something ancient. It fills an ache that I think I had in knowing that women have something to give and receive from one another that we get only from other women. It’s bringing to life an ancient memory.

AB: That’s a beautiful way to say it.

Janine: I think of some of the women I’ve known for eight years or so, and I’m awestruck by their passion for the work. These are the kinds of friendships where we may not see each other for a couple of years, and when we see each other again, no time has passed.

I’ve also appreciated my personal growth challenges in working so closely with the other co-founders and leaders of this initiation.

AB: What do you say today about those challenges?

Janine: Well, in the earlier years, we had some real tough things to go through together, working out dynamics between us, decisions, or aspects of the design. That predator/prey circuitry runs through us and between us, and to walk our talk we’ve been as thorough as possible to stay “in love” while clearing anything that arose.

The gift that I live with now, every day, is that in a way it’s like a marriage: we’ve been through it all together, and we’re still there for each other. What I’ve learned is that it’s okay for my sisters to see in me the places that I once wanted to hide: the bitchy parts, the dark places. My sisters not only won’t go away, I think they love me more. They support me. It’s such a treasure in my life to have close women friends who I know are there for me no matter what.

And that took going through some raw places together.

I think being part of WIP helps me to know that I’m on the right path. Part of my life mission is to make a difference in people’s lives. My heart is settled knowing that to whatever degree, I’m doing that. That’s been another really priceless gift for me.

 

See also Janine’s facilitator page. The website for her medical practice is NaturallyHealthy.ws. Women In Power’s website is WomenInPowerProgram.com.

This interview originally appeared in our free email newsletter. To subscribe, visit our subscription page.

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Jeff Baugher of Louisville, Kentucky, describes himself as a recovered engineer. He also worked as a natural foods cook before developing a practice as an astrologer and Certified Shadow Work® Coach and Facilitator. I interviewed Jeff by phone, and our conversation touched on these topics among others. 

September 22, 2005, by Alyce Barry

AB: Before you did Shadow Work training, had you done other personal growth work?

Jeff: The engineer part of me really likes the analytical approach, “Life is a problem to be solved.” But in the early 90s, I realized there was this other part of me that likes to connect with people. I no longer wanted to be the classic engineer-head where I’m alive only from the neck up.In 1991, a friend started what was called a ritual sharing group. It was four or five men getting together every two weeks and using a talking stick. The rules were, Speak from your heart, listen from your heart, and don’t try to fix.Being male, that was gigantic. During my entire adult life, I’d been the only guy in the meditation group, the only guy in the yoga class. I’d been the token male since my twenties. This group was a very different frontier. It was my introduction to men’s work and to a more heart-centered expression.

AB: 1991 is about when the men’s movement broke open, with books like Robert Bly’s Iron John, and King Warrior Magician Loverby Robert Moore and Douglas Gillette. Was either of those an influence?

Jeff: One man in the group suggested that I read Iron John, so I did, and I got a lot out of it. Then the local men’s community brought in Douglas Gillette for a workshop on the archetypes. I was totally blown away, it was just incredible.

After several years, I stepped back from the ritual group. It was full of Lover energy, support and sharing and feelings. I reached a point where I needed challenge, something to push against. I understand this more in retrospect; at the time, I knew I needed something more but I wasn’t sure exactly what. A friend attended a New Warrior Training Adventure and said, Jeff, it’s time for you to do this. So I did. And a couple of years later, I did a Shadow Work weekend.

AB: So you were already familiar with the four archetypes in the Shadow Work Model from the Gillette workshop.

Jeff: Yes. I wanted more, it felt powerful, and I couldn’t do it on my own. It really helps to be surrounded by people who are doing it too. There’s a wisdom of experience that comes through.

AB: What are your memories of that first Shadow Work weekend?

Jeff: There were two things that stuck with me.

First, the Sovereign visualization, where you’re standing on the top of the mountain, looking back at the landscape of your life. That just went all the way to my soul. I don’t know if I can put words to the feelings, but it was very, very powerful. That idea that we’re here for a purpose, and there’s a journey. Even when I’m in one of the crappiest, darkest, worst periods of my life, there’s actually a point to it. There’s some part of me that’s going through that to get a greater goal, a greater good in my life.

Second, there was a by-product of going to that weekend with my wife, Becky. We were in the newlywed zone, and we kept the container going between the two of us at night. It was as if there was this giant bonfire in the group, and at night we’d take our two candles home with us. It felt like we never really left the container, and when the workshop ended, our inner container kept on cooking. It was like a free ticket that extended our experience of the weekend for weeks afterward. That was amazing.

Then we did another Shadow Work weekend, and the same thing happened. When we did the Basic Facilitator Training (BFT), which was seven days, it was two or three times more powerful than a weekend. Our marriage relationship has become much more solid by doing this work together. We’ve had partners attend our Shadow Work weekends who say the same thing. It’s an unexpected, unadvertised benefit, and it’s worth millions of dollars as far as I’m concerned.

AB: How did you decide to train to be a facilitator?

Jeff: We liked the work, and in my weekly Warrior I-group, I felt inadequate facilitating other men. I’d tried and I’d studied, and I could never really catch on. The Shadow Work Model worked for me, and it offered tools. So supporting the work in I-Group was a personal impetus to attend the BFT.

AB: How would you say your view of yourself has changed since then?

Jeff: I used to think of the things that stop me as flaws. And now, I think about them as pieces of information that might be useful.

If I’m driving down the road, and the person in front of me is throwing eggs at my car out of the back of their truck, I can catch the eggs and make omelets out of them. If it’s logs, I’ll stop and build a log cabin. Whatever it is, there’s something you can do with it. As opposed to, We’ve hit another show-stopper, and it all slams to a halt, and we just feel bad about ourselves. When the shit happens, that may not be a bad thing. Maybe the fear means we’re getting close to something that’s really important, a doorway into a healing or a transformation.

AB: What are you most excited about right now?

Jeff: The part that I’ve really got juice around is bringing storytelling into everything that I’m doing. If I’m telling a story, even a four-sentence vignette, not only do people enjoy it more and get the point, but I enjoy it more. It’s a way of passing on wisdom as opposed to passing on information, and I want to move more in that direction. The world is not hurting for information, in my opinion.

AB: You and Becky are among the few who are running Shadow Work weekends in the U.S. right now.

Jeff: A lot of the certified facilitators have taken the work and morphed it into something a little different. I think that’s a wonderful thing. Becky and I are talking about creating a Shadow Work weekend for artists.

I also think that there’s something about the pace of today’s life, where it’s hard to carve out a weekend to do work like this. Every time Becky and I do a weekend, we think, We need to shorten this. And then afterward, we realize that some people wouldn’t have reached their destination if they hadn’t had that amount of time. When you’re cooking beans, you’ve got to cook them a certain time before the beans are done.

AB: You and I both know that, in a Shadow Work container, there’s a lot of laughter. I think that surprises some people.

Jeff: Part of the magic that happens is that, when people feel connected, their inner children really start to show up. Suddenly everybody’s throwing balls and rolling on the floor and playing. It feels so good, and it’s not something you can artificially create. It comes from the inside-out.

I find that the playing stays with me, too. It’s a very powerful, tangible thing that people get from the weekend.

AB: I think you’re saying that play is worth the price of admission.

Jeff: We have this giant stuffed animal, a dog, it’s three-four times bigger than life-size, and we just set it out on a Shadow Work weekend. And usually by Saturday afternoon, there’s always somebody is playing with the dog or laying on the dog. Every weekend, I wonder, Who’s going to end up with the dog on this weekend? These are thirty-, forty-, fifty-, sixty-year-old people, and somebody’s going to end up playing with that dog, playing with it, laying on it, petting its head. I call it “play breaking out.” All of a sudden on the weekend, play breaks out. I can think of social settings where I’ve tried to do something playful, and here come the pointing fingers and the shamers. I think that’s a sad thing for our culture.

AB: I’ll bet there’s a correlation between the shame we hold around playing and our epidemics of depression and obesity. Since it’s the Lover in us who likes to play, and depression and obesity reflect the Lover in shadow.

Jeff: Yes, yes. We’ve got billions of dollars for medications for people who are depressed, but here’s an organized thing where people get in touch with their play. It seems like one healthy alternative to hospitals full of medicated, depressed people.

AB: One of the things that appeals to me so much about Shadow Work — and this is true of Jungian psychology as a whole — is that it’s such an affirming view of life.

Jeff: No matter how destructive a person’s issue is, if you can keep digging beneath that, what you’re going to find underneath there somewhere is love. That, to me, is one of the most amazing concepts I’ve gotten out of doing Shadow Work and the Shadow Work trainings. If you keep looking, if you know how to tease the stuff apart and get beneath the surface presentation, you can find love. I’ve never not found it in a process. Knowing that not just in my head but also in my heart lets me really embrace and accept people in a way that they feel. People feel your judgments, and if in my head and my heart I know there’s love in there, no matter how horribly they’re presenting, they’ll feel that and they’ll respond to that.

Another thing I like, particularly about one-to-one coaching, is that whatever issue the client presents, the Shadow Work Model has very simple mechanisms to work with it. There’s a way through and out of every door that’s closed, if I’m willing to be there with the person where they are.

AB: So the model is comprehensive.

Jeff: The tools allow me to work with any issue. And you don’t have to shame someone to move through it, either. That’s not what I was taught growing up. I learned that you use “the shaming stick” if people aren’t following the rules. In Shadow Work, there are many ways to handle something without using shame.

AB: Are there other ways you use Shadow Work in your life?

Jeff: Yes, I’m able to apply that archetypal way of understanding the world in group and family dynamics.

In the organizations I belong to, sometimes it becomes obvious that there’s a built-in pattern keeping the organization from reaching its goals. One energy is inflated, or another one is deflated. And the model gives me some clues about what to do to bring things back into balance. That’s another unexpected benefit of pursuing the skills in facilitating.

See also Jeff’s page and Becky’s page. Their next weekend seminar will be held in the spring. For all seminar dates, visit the calendar.

This interview originally appeared in our free email newsletter. To subscribe, visit our subscription page.

John Crier is a Certified Shadow Work® Coach in Hobbema, Alberta, Canada, as well as a mentor to adults and young people within and beyond the Cree community. For eleven years, he has been on the faculty of Maskwachees Cultural College in Hobbema and currently holds the position of Dean of Cultural Studies.

After raising six children, John is finding it strange to have no little kids running around, at least until the grandchildren and great-grandchildren come to visit. My interview with John spanned several phone calls to work around his busy academic, community and family schedule. 

June-July 2006, by Alyce Barry

AB: Most of us who do Shadow Work came to it in mid-life or later. But you grew up doing spiritual work in the Native community.

John: Growing up, I observed my parents and their peers in activities in and around spiritual ceremony and ritual, so I grew up and participated in it. As a boy, when my dad was sweating in the sweat lodge with other men, I would go in sometimes. And because we knew the people personally who were conducting the sun dance ceremony, we played in and around the ceremony and became intimately involved with ceremony as part of our growing up. I took participation in ceremony for granted as I was growing up; it had always been there. It was my unintended personal work that was part of growing up.

It wasn’t until I went away from my own community that I met people who had been deprived in cultural, spiritual, and ceremonial experience, and I began to realize how much ceremony has been a big part of my life, and a gift.

AB: How did you come across the ManKind Project (MKP)?

John: At that time in my life, I was in construction. I wasn’t happy with the way things were going, and I wanted to do something different, so I went to school to complete a university degree. When a friend showed me the brochure for the MKP weekend [the New Warrior Training Adventure], it looked interesting. It wasn’t that we were planning to do a men’s weekend. I saw the brochure and said, Let’s do it.

For both of us, it made quite a change in our lives. It was the first time we did a weekend with non-aboriginal people. Most of our work up to that time had been within our own tribal group. It was the first time we saw people other than Cree people experiencing emotional, personal development work. It opened our eyes up, that these guys were doing their work while we were doing ours. It was the first time I had seen white people using a sweat lodge, which is kind of a home event for us.

When I came into the MKP, I wasn’t thinking about working with other people, I was working on my own spiritual journey. When I saw these men doing the ceremony and ritual, I was curious about their intentions. I didn’t come there as a novice about sweating or smudging or doing the four directions. I understood them differently.

AB: What was your reaction to seeing white people doing sweat lodge?

John: It was the first time I’d seen white people smudging and honoring the four directions and also doing the sweat lodge. I went along with it, and I neither rejected it or gave approval. I participated in it knowing that I had seen it done differently within our own tribal group. It was kind of a novelty for me; I wasn’t offended in any way, I didn’t feel threatened. It was almost like a pleasant surprise. I thought it was quaint. I could see that they weren’t used to doing it.

Afterward, I brought my sons to the weekend, and my brother, and whoever would listen to me, those close to me. I put them through the weekend and began recruiting other people from Hobbema. I wanted them to experience the joy and the healing effect that I got from the weekend; I wanted to share it with others.

AB: What was it you wanted to share? What did the weekend change for you?

John: I think the greatest effect was that I was looking outside for fulfillment or for direction, a sense of purpose, and that weekend opened up my eyes about me. It became a journey of discovering me and accepting myself and my limitations, and also the gifts that I could offer. I began doing a lot of my own Guts work.

After the weekend, when I came into the sweat lodge, I had such a profound experience just sitting in the dark. For the first time, I realized that growing up I had taken for granted all those times I had participated in ceremony, as an observer and as a participant. I had done that almost as if I was on automatic without purpose. It was as if I woke up for the first time and realized what gifts they were, what gifts the old people had been in my life. It was such an effect of gratitude, of having had that experience of being able to sit with the old men that other people referred to as elders in the sense where they hadn’t had a personal experience with them, and I had had that experience growing up. It was almost a feeling of shame that I had taken them for granted, of guilt, but also a feeling of gratitude, and how lucky I was, or how privileged I had been to have been able to have that experience. So the weekend opened my eyes about myself and my sense of coming home to spiritual connection.

AB: At what point did you decide to get trained as a facilitator so you could work with other people?

John: When I staffed the weekend, I was also facilitating, doing Guts work, and I began to realize that I was able to work with people. I wanted to do a little more of that, and to have a little more understanding of what I was doing.

AB: How did you hear about Shadow Work?

John: I did my initiation weekend in 1995, and I believe in the summer of 1996, I saw somewhere a brochure advertising Shadow Work. That’s how I and two other Cree brothers ended up at your brother Tim’s place in Mount Horeb, Wisconsin, to do the Basic Facilitator Training. I already understood what facilitating Guts work was like on the carpet, so the brochure captured my attention. At the time, it wasn’t about setting up a practice; it was about working with men on the weekend, that was the first intention.

AB: What are your memories of your Basic Training?

John: I thought every Shadow Work training was like the MKP weekend, so I approached it from that perspective — let’s get this done right now! It was only after a while I began to realize that some of the people attending had never gone through the weekend. I was in the hard energy of the MKP weekend. So I tuned down the energy a bit so I wasn’t being disruptive to the group.

AB: It must have been a bit of a shock to be sitting in a room with a manual on your lap and taking notes.

John: I remember Cliff raising his eyebrows a couple times. [Laughs.]

AB: You’ve mentioned that you feel that you have to walk on eggshells if you describe yourself as a shaman because the Native community uses that word differently than Western culture does. Would you tell me what that difference is?

John: In the Native communities, people who do the work of a shaman, or sage, do not advertise themselves openly or even at all. The People have the understanding that those who are not from the aboriginal community are the ones who advertise themselves openly. There’s an underlying negative judgment that anyone who is portraying himself as a shaman is only doing it for self-benefit.

There’s a history behind that. People who did the work of the shaman a long time ago did not advertise; they did not go intentionally to be a “shaman.” However, there were some people whose own personal work, whose journey led them towards the work of “shaman.” People in the community came to understand that if you wanted to do work around your own spirit or your own emotional work, perhaps you could go see this person who did the work of a “shaman,” and he could help you.

There was also a colonial understanding of what a shaman was. When the missionaries first came into the country, anyone who was identified as a shaman was covertly and overtly defamed by the missionaries because they were a threat to their missionary work. Over time, the missionaries taught the People that the shamans were worshipping the devil, worshipping the dark side, and practicing superstitious ritual. So a lot of people who became converted accepted the missionaries’ teachings about those who did the work of a shaman. That belief became integrated into the community so that the people who did the work of the shaman were looked on suspiciously sometimes. The meaning of shaman was redefined so that today, coming from the Native community, the label of shaman is almost derogatory. But I understand the belief is different coming from the non-aboriginal community.

Another aspect to that is that with the recent new spiritual movement, where a lot of non-aboriginal people have suddenly become very interested in the spiritual aspect of Native culture — smudging, the four directions, the sweat lodge, and ceremonies such as drumming — the Native communities see non-aboriginal people doing this with the judgment that they don’t really understand what it is they’re doing. There’s a certain amount of skepticism. Anyone in the Native community who is accepted as a shaman by the non-aboriginal community, who is seen offering these services, may also be seen as selling out for recognition and for money. So quite often one who does work resembling a “shaman” has to walk on eggshells.

There’s something else as well. Those who do the work of the shaman, if they have not paid their dues within the Native community, then there’s a judgment that the work that they’re doing is not real. If they are seen to have paid their dues in the community, then if they offer their services to communities outside, their work can be seen as real. It’s a very gray area. Part of the work I’m doing is paying my dues. Beyond that, anyone can call me whatever they want, you know. I understand that this is what I want to do. It’s about becoming rooted and committed to what it is that I have set out to do, and not worrying about the fears that people may have and the projections they may have on me. Nobody’s going to satisfy everybody in the world. Those kinds of negative projections are going to come whenever a person steps out of the community.

AB: How do you define a shaman?

John: I don’t use the word shaman. I use the term “medicine person.” A medicine person is an experienced/wounded healer or facilitator. When people go to see a medicine person, they want to go see a person who can facilitate some healing for them, who can facilitate a ritual and a ceremony to help them with any emotional or spiritual or physical health work that they want to do.

A long time ago, people became in experienced in healing people, physically, emotionally, and spiritually. Physically, they knew about medicine plants, and they knew about protocol and how to mix them. Emotionally, they began to facilitate the emotional work that people have. Spiritually, they facilitated ritual and ceremony to reconnect or reclaim the spirit, to do soul retrieval, to do soul healing.

A person who helps people in these ways has a life experience of gathering this knowledge, and gaining wisdom. Sometimes they don’t do it intentionally at first. They do it as part of their own personal work, to a point where they become so proficient in the teachings that they’re able to offer their experience and knowledge to other people who want to learn about it and become apprentice to their teaching. The “medicine people” are people who have become masters in facilitating the spiritual, emotional, and physical healing work that people need to do.

AB: That’s very interesting. I think that I have held a definition for myself, and maybe my definition is from Western culture; I’d be interested to know what your reaction is. My definition has been that a shaman is different from another kind of healer in that for a shaman, the realm of spirit and symbol is more real and has more impact in this world than the physical world has. That a shaman is aware of the spiritual realm in what’s happening for a person and is able to convey that in the healing process. To give someone a sense of something larger that’s happening in their life beyond what’s happening in their daily life. I don’t know if that makes sense.

John: Yes, it does. I think we’re both saying the same thing. People who became medicine people were people who started with the physical realities. The more they got into it, the more they came to understand in depth the gifts of the plants, the gifts of the ritual. They became more advanced in understanding the spiritual realm, so a lot of their work essentially advanced into spiritual work. What they did in the spiritual world was aided with medicines. After a certain graduation of life experience, most of their work tended to concentrate in the spiritual realm, and their healing of people then came from that perspective. So it’s not much different from what you’re saying.

What I’m trying to say about the medicine people is that they didn’t set out to be “shamans.” They started out in life learning some aspect of personal healing work and gradually became more proficient in effecting healing for people and helping people. Over time they developed their own style of working with people, physically, spiritually and emotionally, and this became their trademark. As they gained more knowledge in life experience, a lot of their work graduated into spiritual work, soul work.

AB: In your essay My Personal Vision, you wrote that “our work today is to interpret what [a] commitment [to being in harmony with Mother Earth] will look like” for us today. In your life right now, what does a commitment to being in harmony with Mother Earth look like?

John: It’s becoming aware of the spiritual in everything that we have around us. I live out in the country, so I’ve become aware of the life that’s around me: the trees, the grass, the flowers, and the animals. I become part of it, I am not a visitor, I’m not a tourist.

I was talking with a lady yesterday in the city about this, about how aboriginal people in the city can be in harmony. Even in the city, if they gather and do ceremony and ritual, that’s a way of connecting. Even walking to the park, appreciating the sense of life in the trees and the grass, and being outside, that’s a way of reconnecting, of being in harmony. If they become deprived of that, a sense of loss or confusion sometimes results. To be able to reconnect regularly with the greater life force is being in touch with Mother Earth.

AB: A few weeks ago, you were conducting a sun dance ceremony. Is that part of your service to the community?

John: Conducting the sun dance is part of my own journey, but it’s also a service I see that has been done by other men. There is no obligation of reciprocity from the community. For the man who mentored me, hosting the sun dance was his act of service to the community.

AB: Do you perform other kinds of service as well, or is the sun dance such a significant contribution that it is payment enough?

John: I work with youth at risk, I run youth camps during the summer, and I also do counseling with kids who are at risk in school, and for these I’m compensated. I build a safe container so I can work with them on their own life issues.

AB: What do you do at the youth camps?

John: Mentoring kids, active participation for initiation, and I also work with them on personal issues, using skills from Shadow Work, to work with anger issues, abandonment issues, some gang-related issues, all kinds of abuse issues. When I take them out camping, part of that is the intent is to work with their individual issues and also to build teamwork, and also to build trust in each other as a group and also to build trust in themselves personally.

AB: Do you enjoy that work?

John: I think so. [Laughs.] I enjoy going out into the mountains. Every summer I go out, and that’s one of my treats, to go out into the mountains and work with people.

AB: How big a group of kids are you usually working with?

John: Normally about 25 to 35 kids and students, though I’ve had as many as 75, with a lot of staff.

AB: I believe you offer mentoring in addition to Shadow Work coaching. What kind of mentoring do you do?

John: People have asked me to mentor them in some particular activity. They want help in gaining knowledge and proficiency, either in the ceremonies or within the culture.

AB: The students you teach at Maskwachees Cultural College, are they primarily from the Native community?

John: Most are, yes. Most of them come here specifically to investigate or reclaim a part of themselves. Many aboriginal students have been culturally deprived, and they come here with the intention of taking the program but also of reclaiming some part of themselves that they can identify as being Native. Reclaiming their Native identity.

But for five years now, we’ve had a lot of non-aboriginal people, including Asian people, and people from Europe, coming to experience our social work program. They come here specifically to experience the program from an aboriginal perspective and also to gain some understanding in the way things are done in the Native community.

I teach courses within the program: traditional healing, Cree philosophy, Cree language and the cultural camp in the mountains. I bring my personal life experience with me, and also the skills I’ve learned from Shadow Work and MKP and other trainings, and I investigate my own way of applying these skills. I enjoy fairly good participation by the students.

It’s a unique program, but recently its funding has become uncertain.

AB: Is that a political thing?

John: I call it a war. A constant battle. Some time ago, the elders in the community had a mandate for the college, and the mandate for the college was to transfer cultural knowledge so that people could come home into the culture and that could be their foundation, and from which they could then study different programs.

So this was their mandate, and sometimes the intent of the college gets lost, where people want to develop the college as another post-secondary institution, the same as a public institution. Potentially the mandate can be lost, and we have another post-secondary institution, which loses its unique Native perspective. This is really, I believe, what it’s about, that people who have lost perspective or don’t understand and appreciate the Native perspective, apply a conflicting attitude towards the college. And people who understand the perspective or understand the mandate of the elders, who understand the intent of the college, then are at odds, trying to preserve the Native uniqueness, trying to preserve these teachings, in an environment where money talks. Unfortunately, money also doesn’t really care about the aboriginal perspective or the mandate. The bottom line is the bottom line.

AB: It must be hard to watch that happening.

John: Yes, it is. We’ve lost a lot of good people here. We’ve lost quite a few faculty members, and I’m probably going to be one of the last ones to go. At this point, working at the college doesn’t weigh a lot. The college has served a purpose in my life, and it’s time to do the next thing that I want to do.

AB: I first met you at an MKP conference some years ago, where we were both in a workshop about doing work in prisons. I understand you’ve been able to work with inmates outside the prison walls.

John: I have permission to take up to four men at a time and bring them outside and work with them in some fashion. When I do a ceremony or ritual there, I also have them help so they become helpers. The intent is for them to experience a cultural activity outside, and it gives me the opportunity to work with them outside the prison environment.

There’s some good work that happens inside, and in ten years I’ve never had a bad experience. I understand that some of the guys in there want to con their way out, so sometimes it’s quite an interesting challenge to meet and relate to them in a true way, to get beyond the con. After a while, we let them understand that it’s really up to them how they want to conduct themselves, and whether they want to do it for real or whether they want to do it for the benefit of appearance.

AB: Could you imagine the men in the prison gaining enough perspective to work among themselves inside the prison?

John: Yes, and I proposed this idea to the former warden, and he thought that we could do it. We began making preparations, but there was an opening in Saskatchewan for a warden in another prison. He applied and was accepted, and the idea went with him. Quite often it all depends on the wardens and how they look at the work. I’ve talked about it to the new warden but because he’s not as familiar with this work as the other guy was, he’s not as enthused about it. Perhaps he will experience this work soon also.

AB: What are you most excited about right now? Do you have a personal cutting edge right now?

John: A friend of mine came to see me about a month ago or two months ago. He has several different black belt degrees in martial arts. He began working in our social work program as an instructor. He approached me about wanting to offer martial arts training in the community, and I thought it was a good idea.

He asked me, What style of fighting do the Cree people have, related to martial arts? What kind of martial arts did the Cree people have a long time ago? I never really thought about it, so I began doing a little research. There’s a fellow in Oregon, who also is a Native guy, who had been in the military, and he asked himself the question also. He began researching some of the ways that the People had a long time ago, and he developed quite a style. What that led to was the question, Who were these people?

Where this leads to is that you begin to see a group of people, for instance, like the Toltec — you know, the teachings in the Four Agreements — and a group of people very similar to “magicians/shamans,” a group very similar to medicine people, but they had a different term, and the term that these people had was covered over by the word “warrior.” These were men who practiced the tradition of living life efficiently or proficiently, who then became masters in their unique practice, who became masters in their ways of being themselves.

What I’m beginning to see and understand now is that thoroughly researching this group of people and then beginning to develop structure in it, that becomes my cutting edge. As I develop the structure and understanding, it becomes unique to my perspective that I offer to the community, and to the world.

AB: What kind of research will you do?

John: It’s a personal research talking with the tribal elders, and then also doing my own inner work, how I come into synchronicity with that energy, and what is needed to come into synchronicity with the energy of these people. So there’s inner work involved in it, and also connecting with energy required to walk on that path. I don’t really think there’s going to be a lot of tribal records, written records, because they would not be well known to people writing history at that time.

People of many tribes would find themselves attaining the same level of mastery in their inner journey, their life journey. They didn’t belong to an organized society per se; however, they became familiar with other people who attained the same mastery of life journey that they were on also. Mastery in their shadow, mastery in their gold and dark energies.

These were people who traveled the country, to search for gifts to bring back to their communities. They also stalked what needed to be killed that did not serve them any more.

When the Europeans first came here, these masters were the ones who went to see who these Europeans were. When the colonial Army came after the People, the masters were the first people they met resistance from, and because they threatened the occupying forces, they were the first people to be killed off. Anyone that appeared strong in the Native community was a threat.

So in order to survive, they came secretive, very covert. Their ways became so secretive that a lot of their tradition was also lost to those who did not have immediate contact with them. It became a lost art. I am researching and recreating the model that expresses that way of living and offers it to the community. Life goes in stages. This has become the next leg of the journey, to investigate and research these masters. I am researching their intent, their purpose or direction and meaning, and also their transcendence.

The more I understand and think about it, developing this concept of mastery from these people who are there but don’t make themselves visible, it is something that I want to put into book form.

AB: That would be fascinating to read. When you say they are present but invisible, do you mean in the sense of ancestors?

John: The Ancestors are always present, but also the energy of these special people. They attained a status where people had fear and respect and admiration for them. People did not mention their names casually. I see now that the knowledge has been there all this time, but I never had the understanding. I’m beginning to see now that a lot of things that the old people talk about — people doing certain feats — were done by these people.

I become adept at understanding their world, and as I understand it, accept it, and practice the way, I change my life. The more I look for it, the more the way begins to reveal itself.

See also John’s essay, My Personal Vision.

This interview originally appeared in our free email newsletter. To subscribe, visit our subscription page.

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Junie Moon Schreiber is a Certified Shadow Work® Facilitator and Coach, interfaith minister and acupuncturist. She grew up in Fort Lee, New Jersey, where she could “hear the traffic on the George Washington Bridge outside my window.”

She now lives in Oak Ridge, New Jersey, and is currently studying Tony Robbins’ coaching techniques at the Robbins/Madanes Institute of Strategic Interventions.  She has led or co-led various women’s empowerment weekends including Women In Power. Junie’s passion is to create transformative healing opportunities for people desiring rich, amazing lives. 

December 21, 2012, by Alyce Barry

AB: How did you come across Shadow Work for the first time?

Junie: I didn’t realize it was Shadow Work. In September 2006, I took a two-hour workshop with ALisa Starkweather at a weekend festival. Being someone who had done a pretty substantial amount of work on myself, and was in the know of healing and psychological stuff, I was watching her work, and teach and guide and do these mini-processes.

I was thrown back — I saw people shift, I saw people’s walls go down. And I asked myself, What is she doing? There was such safety in the room, such love, such dedication from her as a facilitator. I couldn’t believe what I was experiencing, it was so different from anything I had experienced. There was a skill set she had. It was such an impactful workshop, and I’d never seen anything so beautifully done before.

As soon as the class was over, I went up to her and said, What was that? Where did you get those skills from? She said, Oh, I am a Shadow Worker, and she told me a little about it.

From that point on it was pedal to the metal. By October or November I was in my first Shadow Work weekend to experience what a real Shadow Work container was. Her workshop wasn’t straight Shadow Work, it just used some of the language we use, about What’s at Risk and so on.

So then I went to Woman Within and the Basic Facilitator Training, and kept going. One thing after another, full blast.

AB: What kinds of growth work had you done before that?

Junie: I had done one-on-one therapy with someone who isn’t a traditional counselor, but I would call it therapy. And lots of weekend workshops, at the Omega Institute, Debbie Ford’s work, Marianne Williamson’s work, lots of reading and self-reflection.

I’ve been hungry for understanding why I am the way I am since I took my first breath. As soon as I got into my 20s I really dug in to a deeper understanding of who I am and reached out on many different levels. There wasn’t any particular path I gravitated to, I bounced around to different weekend experiences. Even expressive dance, being able to move authentically, expressing who I am in breath and music and dance, allowing myself to be comfortable in my own skin. Using different modalities to open my heart to be more connected to the Divine and to Spirit.

AB: What do you think of Debbie Ford’s work?

Junie: When I read her book The Dark Side of the Light Chasersmany years ago, it was my first awareness of the concept of shadow. I think we in Shadow Work have a similar model of what shadow is. I think she approaches the healing work very differently than we do. But I’ve never experienced what it’s like to be a facilitator of her work, so I’ve never seen it from the other side. I appreciate her work, and I think a lot of doors open to us in Shadow Work because people are familiar with the concepts, because her work is all over the place.

AB: What do you remember of that first Shadow Work weekend?

Junie: The facilitators were Chrissy and Dave McFarren, and Janine Romaner was there as a mentor certifying them, though I didn’t know that at the time.

It was profound, I remember being in awe, and I still find myself in awe when I witness Shadow Work, truthfully. The safety of the group, the ability of facilitators to hold a space with such love and dedication and intelligence, to allow people to go where they need to go. It just opens my heart so much, and it’s made me hungry for more.

I also remember doing a couple really big pieces around my dad. I remember opening up deeply with a grieving piece, and it wasn’t even done one-on-one with the facilitators, it was one of the group exercises. I remember feeling so safe and allowing myself to really grieve my dad. It was a magical weekend.

AB: How did you decide to train to be a facilitator?

Junie: I had a youngish son at the time, he was 9-10 years old, so everything I scheduled depended on how it would affect my son. I did as much as I could, as fast as I could, with that in the background.

So the first opportunity I had to take the Basic Training was in August 2007. Then I did the Advanced Training the following spring, but it took me another year before I could take the Leader Training. So it was a little less than three years before I finished everything. As Vicki said, “You’re on the fast track!” I wanted to do as much as I could as fast as I could, so I could really start facilitating.

AB: How would you say your life has changed as a result of doing Shadow Work?

Junie: I love that question, and it’s not necessarily an easy question. If anything, it stirs a lot in my heart when I think about the shifts and changes. But it’s an important question for me, because it’s touched my life in such amazing ways. I believe I wouldn’t have the quality of life I have if I hadn’t done the work I’ve done.

Specifically, one of the most beautiful things about Shadow Work is that I see people differently. I consider myself a pretty loving, compassionate person. That said, I think Shadow Work has opened my heart up massively, because I see people, and then I see beyond the personality. A person will have an attitude, or a quality we’re projecting onto them. For whatever reason we don’t like them or judge them for what they’re doing. There is such a softening of what I consider judgment on my part. I see the story more — I may not know their story, but I see the heart, the human being behind the façade of craziness they might be exhibiting. Shadow Work has opened my heart in such a huge way that I see more people more clearly for who they really are: beautiful beings that have a lot of crap on them and haven’t yet had the opportunity to heal.

On a personal level, one of the sad things — and yet happy things if I look at it both ways — is that I’m not with my husband any more. It’s not Shadow Work’s fault, because the relationship wasn’t working, the problem was already there. Shadow Work opened my eyes to a lot of dysfunction. It encouraged me to have more truth in who I am, and I wanted more of a healthy relationship. The more I saw what was in need of healing, the harder it got. Definitely hard challenges. The opportunity to heal it didn’t happen, and that’s just sad. But my marriage didn’t last for a really good reason.

But the beautiful thing is that I have a new partner and the depth of our relationship is beautiful, and if it weren’t for Shadow Work I wouldn’t have the quality of relationship, or the Clean Talk we’ve been trained to do, or the ability to communicate and share in the deep ways I so want now. It’s given me such a gift of deeper understanding of relationships and how one could get healthier.

The other thing is, I love the skills I got from Shadow Work, and that also has changed my life dramatically. Whether it’s working with an individual professionally or sharing with my friends and family when they’re having challenges, and using some of the languaging we’ve been taught — I’ve had opportunities to help a lot of people. Just to ask that basic question, What’s at risk? What’s going to happen if you do that? And to be able to honor their choices. Such great skills that open people’s hearts instead of shutting them down, and I’m really grateful for that.

AB: It sounds like you and I have that marital history in common. Has Shadow Work affected your parenting?

Junie: I don’t know how it’s affected him. But I can say as a mom, I’m so grateful for the skills. I was able to not dump a lot of crap on him. The healthier I got, the better mom I became. Keeping my side of the street clean, hopefully giving those lessons to him by being an example. Shadow Work has helped me work out some of my issues around him so that when I am with him, it’s relatively peaceful on my part, relatively clean and loving from my perspective.

I think the Shadow Work processes I’ve done have helped me heal so that I could show up for my son more authentically without dumping all over him. I am able to be a better person, communicating more cleanly and keeping my stuff out of the way.

AB: Why Junie Moon?

Junie: I have always had the nickname Moon cause I did moon ceremonies and moon rhymed with June, so people would put the two together. Then I was writing my bio for a class I teach called Chakras Alive, an authentic dance workshop, and when I wrote June Schreiber it just didn’t seem right. So dull. Many of the facilitators at the festival had very cool names. The person who was teaching this class wasn’t just June Schreiber but someone who had learned and grown and shifted through the years, so I birthed that name as the one who now does the work I do. And then everyone started calling me that name.

The funny thing is my mom wanted to name me a name that couldn’t have an “ie” at the end. She can’t believe after all that people now call me Junie. [Laughs.]

AB: Tell me about acupuncture.

Junie: I’ve been doing acupuncture for 13 years, and again, I bring Shadow Work with me wherever I go. If somebody comes in with a physical problem and I see that there’s an emotional component, as there almost always is, some of the subtle questioning we have been taught can help people see things differently and make different choices for their life. Sometimes I will invite them to experience the work. I believe you can’t separate the body and the mind; you can work on both sides of it, you have a lot of magic.

AB: I wonder if we could offer the world a map linking health issues to emotional issues, like risks, or relationships between archetypes, so that people would know where to start looking beneath their symptoms. I have pain in my feet, and I think of that as a Warrior thing, that my feet are meeting the boundary of the earth. As someone who is hearing people’s symptoms all the time, I wonder if you’ve thought about that.

Junie: Yes — and! I definitely think about that, especially with the Chinese model. When you say the foot, it can mean so many different things. When someone comes to me for acupuncture, there are layers. It can seem to be one system that’s affected, and you might find out from questioning and examining that another system is imposing on the other one. It’s not always straightforward.

So your feet, standing strong — from an acupuncturist’s perspective, as soon as you said bunions, I thought, Spleen. In Chinese medicine, the emotion associated with the spleen is worry. So would worry be a Warrior thing? I’d probably put it in Magician instead. I might see it as someone who is trying to cover all the bases, make sure nothing bad happens, who’s constantly ahead of themselves. That’s what causes anxiety, when we’re not in the present moment. So for bunions I might say that.

But bunions involve the bones, and in Chinese medicine, the bones are ruled by the kidneys, and the kidneys are all about fear, and that’s also about Magician.

So to do a whole workup on you with the Chinese model — is it the liver, which is anger, and the liver channel is right near a bunion — we’d look at it and see what it is for you. It opens up more possibilities of understanding what’s going on.

For example, my lungs right now are very challenged after a really bad cold, and in Chinese medicine the lungs have to do with grief. In the past few months I have an empty nest, my son is no longer living with me, and I’ve got a lot of sadness still moving through my body. From a Shadow Work perspective that’s Lover land, and I’m very much in my sadness.

AB: Am I right in thinking that on the Enneagram, you’re a Seven?

Junie: I am so a Seven it’s crazy. When I did those tests, every single question that could be a yes to a Seven, I was 100%. [Laughs.] I’m so grateful for my Sevenness, because that Seven energy has gotten me through so many things. I’ll have a moment of feeling like shit, and the next thing I know, What’s next? Where am I going? And I jump right back into life! Yes, I’m a Seven!

AB: I grew up with two older siblings who are both Sevens — Cliff and my sister — and I usually told myself I should be a Seven like them.

Junie: You’re a Six, right?

AB: Yes, and what you say about worry and fear is totally right. I’ve leaned into my Seven wing a lot in recent years, after years of being mostly in my Five wing and living in libraries. I’m really glad I got out of the library, there are a lot of fun things that aren’t in libraries!

Junie: A lot of life! And that sounds like a Seven! [Laughs.] If you’re a Six, you’ve got a Seven wing. If you spot it, you got it, babe! [Laughs.]

AB: Has your view of life, or your view of yourself, changed as a result of doing Shadow Work? You were already focused on health, so that might not be such a pertinent question for you.

Junie: I think it magnified strongly things that I knew or things I was beginning to understand. It was like an accelerant to the deepening of understanding of humanity, how we’re wired. And it’s helped me see people with a deeper compassion. So yes, I was on a healing journey and in the healing arts and being as present as I could be to the people I worked with. But Shadow Work has afforded me a deeper, more authentic way of being in connection with people. I think people are so hungry for that, for someone who doesn’t have an agenda, who can be completely there for them. And Shadow Work has helped me moved my stuff out of the way so I can be a better vehicle for that.

AB: You mentioned becoming more compassionate. Is that true of your relationship with yourself as well? Did you used to beat yourself up a lot?

Junie: Absolutely. I have a quite the big predatory voice that has beat the heck out of me. And though that voice is still present, I understand it more and it has quieted. The more I can forgive myself, the more I can forgive others and be more present to them. I think it starts with me. The more I can love myself, the more I can love others.

AB: I sometimes talk to someone who hopes that their predator voice will never show up in their head again. And like yours, my predator voice still shows up, which used to send me into a spiral that would last for years. And today I can get a really quick turnaround and get back to self-esteem.

Junie: Yes, I think that’s healthy, that’s healing. And here’s a great example! You sent me some of the possible questions you might ask me, and I tend to glance and then let things roll out of me. But I decided to see what some of the other interviews looked like, and I started reading them. And that predator voice came out and said, They’re so well spoken, their answers are so well thought-out, how are you going to come across?

The voice started going, and I loved it, because here I am about to talk about Shadow Work, and an hour before that, I am hearing this voice that is trying to sabotage what I was hoping would be a good interview, and trying to make me feel inferior and worthless. [Laughs.] And it lasted only a moment, you know?

I know, underneath, that voice just wants me to do a really good job and make a difference and say things that have meaning. I know that’s what that was about. And I said to it, Thank you for your two cents, and now I’m going to move into what I know to be true: I will speak from my heart, and it will be what it will be. It was a moment instead of me being terrified, nervous, stomach ache, should I do this, and canceling on you. God knows what I would have done years ago, if I had heard that voice and didn’t understand what it was about and move on. And I’m just really grateful.

AB: What are you most excited about right now?

Junie: So many things! Which one to choose?! I am living more and more each day into my new reality. I have my life back. Seventeen years of devoting my life to another human being, and now I have my own choices. Other than my own furry creature I come to at night, I do what I want to do. I don’t have to think about how busy to be any more.

I am extremely excited about a business I’m co-creating with a woman I’ve known since first grade. I had a vision, and she said, Let’s do it. She’s worked with business. I want to open up a center that is a place for many different healing modalities to come together: counseling, coaching, massage, acupuncture. Where many healers can come together and have a big room where classes and workshops can happen.

The intention is to help people, and not only that, but a place where people can get a lot of different kinds of healing. I hope to hold Shadow Work workshops and inspirational talks and classes. Have all the pieces of my life in one place. I’ve experienced so many things that have enhanced my life.

Another thing I’m excited about is launching my coaching practice. I have let people find me by word of mouth. Having so much emotional unrest the last few years, now that I feel pretty strong on my feet, I’m ready to go. I have a new website designed by a friend of mine, it’s so beautiful, coachjuniemoon.com. So now I’m really going to let people know about my coaching and offer that as another thing that I do.

I’m also excited about travels coming up. I’m looking forward to the CFG [the annual Shadow Work gathering] in just a few weeks. It’s so exciting being with all the other facilitators. Any time I’ve done anything in the last 17 years, I’ve never been able to do it as fully because in the background, I wondered if my son was going to be okay. And now, wow, I can fully be there. I’ve got so many things to be excited about in the coming year, I can’t wait.

AB: You’ve been leading Shadow Work weekends with Mark Massoni. How did your working relationship start?

Junie: I did the Basic Training and came back to New Jersey and wondered how I was going to practice and improve. I was pedal-to-the-metal and wanted to know the material really well, so I reached out to everyone who had taken trainings who was located near where I lived. Mark, who’s in Cape Cod, called me, and we had this great conversation, and we clicked.

We decided to do a Shadow Work Introduction Day in New Jersey. I pulled it together, and we had an amazing day. I was blown away by his skills and felt like I knew nothing! [Laughs.] Boy, was my predator alive that day! I thought I was so lame on the carpet, but at the end of the day he said, Maybe I’ll do the Leader Training with you and we can do this together. It kind of blew me away, because I thought I was so lame compared to what he was bringing. He’s been such a dear friend and the most wonderful supportive partner that has had my back, been on my side, encouraged me every step of the way.

We’re a drive of about 5-1/2 hours apart, so it’s challenging. We found a hub in Massachusetts that’s about halfway between us. It’s been such a pleasure, he’s an amazing facilitator and an amazing person. I’m very blessed to have him as my friend and as my facilitating partner.

We usually do a workshop in the spring in Massachusetts and another one in the fall in New Jersey.

AB: When we were scheduling this interview, you mentioned that you were going to a Tony Robbins workshop.

Junie: Yes! Tony, Tony, Tony, I love Tony! [Laughs.] I’m pretty immersed in Tony land.

About a year ago, I was going to do ALisa’s Priestess Path for women, but there was no way I could do it because of stuff that was going on. I was so sad, my dear friends were doing it without me. But being the Seven, after I mourned my loss deeply, I said, What’s next?! [Laughs.] It didn’t take me long.

By accident — but there are no accidents — I don’t know how it happened, I stumbled across this coaching program Tony does that helps people learn the skills Tony has for doing interventions with people. I think he’s a master; he’s got a heart of gold, he’s hysterically funny, and he does things with people that are amazing. Sort of like Shadow Work!

Even though his approach was very different — he’s very directive, he doesn’t necessarily allow people to unfold the way we do — I signed up for his coaching program. I wanted more skills and wanted to add to my repertoire for coaching. There’s a big overlap with Shadow Work, at least what I see, in some of the things he does. I started his coaching program about a year ago, some of it just for me to heal and grow. Then I signed up for this package of experiences for deepening work and having magnificent lives. It was called Date with Destiny, in Palm Springs. I was there for six days, and it couldn’t have come at a better time. Having this new life, I had this opportunity, to be a blank slate, and I wondered, What do I really want to do? Who am I, and what is my purpose here? It was perfect timing, and I had a glorious week of shifting some old beliefs and stepping into a very new place.

AB: I don’t know that much about Tony Robbins, except that he’s very positive and upbeat.

Junie: He is, very upbeat. He’s very strong in his heart, that fierce love we talk about. Sometimes he has to pull that Warrior up to confront somebody. Sort of like the Good Guy Bad Guy process we do, but it’s definitely a very different model. I’m taking pieces of what he does and finding ways to offer people additional possibilities for transformation.

AB: Were you affected by Hurricane Sandy?

Junie: Yes and no. It was only inconvenience compared to the devastation for some people. I didn’t have power for eight or nine days, and it was hard because I didn’t have running water or heat, because I have a well. However, I do have a wood-burning stove, and I have a brother not too far away, and I could go to his place when I needed a shower.

I lost money because I couldn’t work, and I lost the food in my fridge so I had to eat out. The kitchen became a disaster: cooking and cleaning became very difficult.

My house is in the woods, and about half a mile of the forest leading to the house is gone. It looks like an asteroid blew through, and all the pine trees are gone. It’s such massive devastation to the trees in my area. But the people on the Jersey shore had it so much worse, I have a lot of gratitude.

As of two days ago, I’ve got a generator, so I will never be without power again! I got hit with a hurricane last year, too, so I’m done with that. I’m as prepared as I can be for natural disasters. The climate is changing.

AB: What do you think about the Mayan calendar ending today [December 21, 2012]?

Junie: I’ve had my moments of anxiety over the years as we’ve approached 2012. But this year as I feel more connected to things happening around me, I had a different belief about it. I did not think the world was going to end, but I do believe things are shifting, and I do believe it’s time to make a choice. If we stay on the course we’re on, we will not have a planet. There’s such devastation to our mother earth, and to each other, with people gunning other people down. There’s so much unrest in people’s souls, and more and more people need to make a choice to come from love. I think it’s more of a spiritual shifting, but I believe the earth will continue to shift, too — again, mind, body. What we’re thinking, She’s feeling!

I think we’re in for a bumpy ride. I pray that the world is changing and choosing more of the light and not the dark. I think it’s in our hands, and I hope more people come from love.

See also Junie’s facilitator page. Her website is coachjuniemoon.com.

This interview originally appeared in our free email newsletter in February 2013. To subscribe, visit our subscription page.

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John Kurk is a Shadow Work® Mentor, Trainer, Facilitator and Coach. He has led numerous Shadow Work events and ManKind Project Trainings in the UK, Ireland, France, Germany, Norway, Austria, Holland, the US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Hungary and Russia and also offers individual and relationship counseling.

He has a B.Sc. degree in Physics with Humanities from London University and spent five years at the Centre for Alternative Technology in Wales during its developmental period. He lives in Broadway in the Cotswolds, UK, with his wife, Nicola, and has two grown sons and a grandson.

April 10, 2013, by Alyce Barry

AB: How did you first encounter Shadow Work?

John: That would have been in July-August 1992, I think, in the latter days of my involvement with the Emissary community.

Nicola and I were representing our community here in England at one of the Emissary gatherings at Sunrise Ranch in Colorado, and Norm Smookler was in a fervor of bringing more experientially-based emotional work into the communities. He’d already done the New Warrior weekend and was in touch with Cliff, and Norm arranged for a two-day men’s Shadow Work session in Indian Hills in the mountains above Boulder.

We had these two days doing Shadow Work with most of the Emissary male coordinator types, and I came away from that completely bowled over. I did a piece of work, I absolutely loved it. It filled all the gaps that were missing for me at the time. I had been engrossed in a lot of personal development work, healing, spiritual aspirational work, intentional community, all of that for a long time. This went, ‘Ahh.’ It struck another chord in another place, and I thought, I’m going to do that.

I was very impressed with Cliff. He was working on his own with a bit of support from a couple of other guys. He was a full leader in the New Warrior network then, which of course has come to be called the ManKind Project. I came back from that saying to Nicola, Okay, we’re going to bring this to Europe, this is going to happen here. This was in the early days, when Cliff was developing Shadow Work with Mel [Mary Ellen Blandford] and Dmitri Bilgere and Erva Baden.

AB: Can you say more about the kind of growth work you had done before?

John: I had met both Robert Moore and Douglas Gillette; the Emissaries had arranged for Gillette to come to a meeting at Sunrise Ranch.

I went to a men’s session with Robert Moore that Norm had organized in Texas, outside Dallas I think. We did an experiential session: not individual process work, but small groupings, clusters, groups of three or four, talking about father and family and plowing the terrain. We had a pretty wild drumming evening, and Moore talked about the archetypes, I’ve still got some of it recorded.

So by the time I met Shadow Work I was already running men’s events here in England. And Nicola and I were doing seminars called The Art of Living in our Emissary community. We subtitled that, “For those who want to change the world but can’t get it together to do the washing up.” I thought that was very accurate. The world was full of personal development, semi-spiritual airheads — still is — so this was very practical. It was good teaching, good experiential stuff, but it lacked the deeper kind of emotional circuitry, because it was more on the uphill side of things.

I had been involved in astrological work and Sufi community earlier than that. I was involved in the alternative energy world, in the dawning of what is now the massive sustainability world. I was at a place called the Centre for Alternative Technology in West Wales, the first place to have a three-bladed windmill in the whole of Europe. It was a real pioneering place. We were exposed to all kinds of weird and wonderful things there, and it had an encounter-group-type atmosphere to it. That wasn’t the focus, the focus was teaching the outside world, and I began to realize the focus needed to be a balance between the two for change to occur.

So I wanted to develop other things more internally, and that took me to the Emissary community amongst other things, where we were very nutritionally conscious and did a lot of intentional community development.

As that community changed from top-down to circle in the late ’80s and ’90s, we spent a huge amount of time gaining experience with group dynamics of all different kinds, with interventions and handling things. We also used to do a lot of non-touch healing circles, and we understood that kind of circuitry very well, but it was all very uphill, pre-midlife crisis!

And then the midlife crisis appeared for the Emissaries, as shadows of behaviors that weren’t so helpful. The cracks began to show. And then along comes Shadow Work, perfect timing.

AB: Where was the Emissary community you two were involved in?

John: Only five miles up the road. We moved a long way. [Laughs.] We’re still in touch with quite a few friends from those days, that’s part of our wider network around here. And of course, further afield, Janine Romaner was one of those Emissary friends.

Cliff and Mel got a lot of mileage out of traveling around to Emissary communities, including an arduous trip to Australia, which Cliff said he would never do again.

The four of them — Mel and Cliff and Dmitri and Erva — were getting down to it and developing all the processes. The first Shadow Work session in England and Europe was with Erva and Don Hines, another Emissary man who was one of the first people to get certified. That was the beginning. Don never did any more than that, I don’t know whether we blew him out!

I think the first Shadow Work facilitator training was also in ’93, at 100 Mile House in British Columbia, if I recall, with mostly Emissary folk. Janine was part of that one. I wanted to go, was very ready to go, but I couldn’t go, practical reasons, so I had to wait for the second one. I came to the BFT [Basic Facilitator Training] at Sunrise Ranch in Colorado and the second AFT [Advanced Facilitator Training] in Wisconsin, both in ’94. It was the early days!

AB: You were doing almost entirely group-oriented work, unlike many people, myself included, who saw a therapist, read some books, and then showed up at a group event. It helps explain what often strikes me about you, that you’re able to put your finger on the pulse of what’s happening in the group in a remarkable way.

John: You’re right, I’ve been involved in groups most of my adult life. I haven’t done the standard, going-into-business-and-ending-up-seeing-a-therapist route at all. But I have had a huge amount of one-to-one support and counseling over the years.

Nicola and I met in that Emissary community. It was a place of service, and I think our understanding of building community has helped us in all the training work we do now. We joke now when we’re doing a facilitator training that we’re rebuilding the community again. [Laughs.] And we put a lot of weight into building community and enjoy going the extra mile because there’s such a wonderful payoff. That’s not what Shadow Work is fundamentally about, yet it does build the strongest community spirit I’ve ever come across, because we’re all seen hitting at rock bottom sometimes. We’re both at our best and have seen each other’s raw vulnerability. That was the bit that was always missing in other things I was involved in. It was always, Do your best, care for others and there’s nothing wrong with me. [Laughs.]

AB: So it didn’t take you long to decide you wanted to learn to facilitate?

John: I knew straight away, absolutely. It had my name written all over it.

AB: Were you already on your way out of the Emissary community at that time?

John: It was a great exploration of intentional community. It had been a fantastic experience, we’d peaked, and it was time to move on.

Having met Shadow Work and started to do things, I was already steeped in Moore and Gillette’s archetypes and was running small men’s groups. I was doing archetype days where the centerwork meant developing four role players, one to represent each archetype, spatially and on a carpet in terms of proximity, shape, color, ornament, and messages. That was a profound experience for people in itself, and then they’d step back and look at themselves and make a symbolic change by adjusting the structure of the archetypes to bring greater balance.

Once I’d met Shadow Work I immediately got into wanting to do my own thing, and I couldn’t do Shadow Work yet because I was still training.

Cliff said, I know how enthusiastic you are, that’s great. You want to learn, and I know you will, but you need to find someone to lead group sessions with you. And almost synchronistically a woman named Hilary Woolett appeared. She and I did the trainings together, including a three-day Leader Training with Cliff and just the two of us, bless him. [Laughs.] Mel was around some of the time, and it was very short track.

I think Cliff knew I had a huge amount of group experience, that wasn’t really the issue. We didn’t run a mock seminar as everybody does now. We covered the basic ground. It was Cliff teaching what he used to call the Full Court Press, do you remember that? I believe that’s a basketball term, but it meant nothing to me. I had no idea what he was talking about. [Laughs.]

AB: I didn’t either. [Laughs.]

John: Well, that makes two of us, that’s a relief.

We knew the structure, and we’d seen a weekend session done. The first Shadow Work sessions we ran were at the community. We did probably three or four preparation sessions, and a few months later Cliff came over and certified us, that was 1995. We were lucky, we had a ready-made community to provide the people, plus a few others nearby.

Nicola started training up, and she was certified in 1996 or 1997, so we’ve been doing Shadow Work here ever since. We still occasionally have contact with Hilary, we would not be where we are now without her involvement all those years ago!

AB: What are your memories of meeting Robert Moore and Doug Gillette?

John: A fondness for both men; I liked them. I met Gillette in an Emissary gathering, really just to double-click on the book they had just put out [King, Warrior, Magician, Lover: Rediscovering the Archetypes of the Mature Masculine] which was getting a lot of attention. He was more the academic; he seemed like a wise, nice fella.

I think Moore had more of an impact on me. I enjoyed him and his way of delivery. Some people could describe him as a bit arrogant, maybe, but that didn’t bother me because he knows his stuff, and why not? He’s at the head of something that’s made a massive impact. But he clearly had more to say than Doug Gillette; he seemed to be the driving force of that combo. He was a benign, intelligent, capable, appreciative man in the focus of things. He didn’t run it but he was the focus. He talked about what he knew, and he was proud of it.

That was 21-22 years ago now. I’ve met him since, once, and his name keeps cropping up other than as co-author of the book.

Every session and training I’ve done since, both Shadow Work and ManKind Project, I always refer to his work because I think it’s been so foundational. And I have no problem even if Cliff and others are taking the archetypes a lot further in many ways. There’s no question that the book he and Doug Gillette wrote really opened the door and landed; there was something priceless about it. So I always make a point of mentioning him out of respect for that.

At some point Moore did the New Warrior Training himself, and he did acknowledge the Warriors were doing the right work. I remember saying, I’m going to do that sometime, but I decided to wait for it to come to England because I’d already committed to spending all this money to train in Shadow Work in the States.

The first New Warrior Training in England was in December 1994, and I did go. That had a big impact on me as well, even though I was very arrogant and thought I knew far more about facilitating than the men doing it did! And it was still a great experience, and I have been involved ever since.

AB: How would you say Shadow Work has changed your view of yourself, or of life?

John: I have to put myself back 20 years, really. All I can say is, it impacted me a lot.

Over those formative first few years, I was able, like many, many others, to increasingly fully, wholly accept myself with my wide spectrum of wonderful behaviors, and less desirable behaviors, to downright stupid behaviors. Doing the work opened up a number of areas. I just know that I became more wholesome and more real and more acceptable to myself.

I’d been steeped in, for the sake of a better word, New Age exploration, most of my adult life, beginning right from the time I was 15-16 in London with my friends. We were doing early group explorations, even when we were squatting in London. We used to go to some weird group situation once a week with someone who was experimenting on us with New Age ideas; we were the guinea pigs. [Laughs.] It was pretty strange, and some of it was very interesting.

I was really steeped in a lot of fanciful beliefs, and that had started to simplify. Over the first few years after meeting Shadow Work, probably until about 2000, I suppose, I went through a process of letting go and shedding all of my preconceived beliefs about a lot of things. I began to accept that I’d taken all that as gospel truth, and actually I really didn’t know and it really didn’t matter. And I went back to a kind of what you could call an archetypally Warrior simplicity, that what I know is enough. I found that really freeing; my life freed up a lot, I think is the fair thing to say. That changed a lot.

Then I also hit a pretty serious depression in the mid- to late ’90s. Looking back, I had always been a depressive, but that sort of uphill phase kept it all at bay, so that was part of the unpacking for me. Shadow Work helped me immensely with that, too. Cliff’s attitude of high-level acceptance and being non-shaming and non-judgmental, that impacted me a lot, and that’s what we teach now.

AB: What do you say when someone asks you, Can Shadow Work help me with depression? I’ve come to see depression as multi-faceted, a very difficult system of wounds.

John: I agree completely. It’s seriously complicated.

I am asked questions like that, when they want one-to-one coaching work; that’s typical of many questions I get. I would never say Shadow Work cures anything. At the same time I can speak to my own experience where it’s helped me understand the roots of what’s going on. But it’s not the only tool I’ve used to get a handle on depression, and I would recommend other things to people.

For example, I had a client come to me five or six years ago: a professional man, a lawyer from London, knew his stuff. He was about five years older than me, so he would have been around 60 then. He had suffered from depression through a lot of his life and had been to endless professionals in Harley Street in London, which is where all the highly-paid professionals are, and he’d taken various medications, and none of it had really helped him very much.

We contracted, and after about the second or third session spread over a couple of months, he said, Look, I have to say, nobody has ever shown the level of interest that you show in me and my story, ever, in all the people and highly-paid people he’d been to see.

That to me was a remarkable statement. That this poor man had suffered, and no one had ever listened to him before. [Laughs.] They’d just say, The problem with you is this, and do this, and take this. [Laughs.] His story had never been told, and all the deeper issues, none of it had ever been unpacked properly.

So when someone asks me whether Shadow Work can help with depression, I say, Well, we can have a good look, we can find out what the roots are over a period of time. There’s no one-shot deal, there’s no silver bullet, and it may not help you, but it has helped a lot of people. That’s the kind of thing I would say. And you’re absolutely right, and you know from personal and family experience, as do I, that depression is hard. It’s not straightforward, and there are many facets.

Fundamentally, archetypally, I believe that at its root depression is very, very low Sovereign. When you get dealt the futility card, that flame is barely burning. You’re lying in bed, the phone goes, you cannot even consider answering it and talking to the person. The ‘What’s the point?’ stuff — that I judge is all very low Sovereign quadrant.

So listening, being understood — huge amounts of that begins to redress the balance. Plus, some biochemical work of an appropriate kind, because there’s definitely a biochemical element to it, there’s no question, the serotonin levels and so on.

AB: I’ve heard people differentiate between ‘situational’ and ‘non-situational’ depression. I have so much less experience than you have, but I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s always situational, and that for many people getting more Sovereign online is simply too risky, and if they can’t go there, they’re going to remain depressed. That’s a very simplistic way of saying it.

John: Yes. There are risks, exactly. There are deep risks to changing.

I don’t know, I think there is situational depression. And then I suppose you could say the family of origin environment, the roots growing up, are situational as well, but it’s so highly formative. It’s a highly influential situational influence that does affect one’s biochemistry, I believe, particularly if there are tendencies within the family. If you’re the son of a depressive who was the son of a manic-depressive, all of that comes through. Whether it’s situational or part of the invisible messaging, or it’s even in DNA, I don’t know. It’s very interesting.

When I look back, my grandfather committed suicide. So he was a happy man. [Laughs.] And my father was a manic-depressive as a result of the situational stuff he grew up around, and many other factors. And I’m a classic depressive, the son of a manic-depressive. It’s an interesting area, far more complicated than we’re both making it. But I do think that if people are willing to work the risks of facing some things and facing their deeper need, then I do think change can happen.

AB: When you and Nicola started working together, were you living in your house in Broadway?

John: No, we were still living in the house in the village where the community was, five miles up the road. We moved here in 1997.

AB: Did you choose your home because of the building next to it where you now lead workshops and trainings?

John: No, that was a wonderful by-product. That was just a dilapidated garage when we moved here. My mother gave us a bit of money to upgrade it in 2001-2002. We were hiring places, and I said to my mum one day, It would be great if we could just upgrade that room because we could use it so much. And bless her, she put a bit of money up. She said, You might as well have the money now before I die. It was very kind of her.

Before that we were renting places, and I was running around the country doing coaching work in people’s houses. It was hard work, it was developing what we have now.

An anecdote. We were invited to do a weekend session in Hungary, in Budapest, in 1996, I think, and that was a byproduct of the Emissary contacts. Hilary couldn’t go, and I went with this other lovely woman, named Lene Dupré, who had done the BFT and possibly the AFT. We did one of the weirdest Shadow Work sessions I’ve done.

We’d been told that the taxi driver would pick us up outside where we were staying, and we’d be driven half an hour across Budapest to the place where we were doing the session, and everything was arranged.

We get in the taxi, and the taxi driver turns around and looks at both of us and goes, “Bubble-ubble-ubble-ubble” in Hungarian, which is complete gobbledygook, and we could tell by his manner that he was asking, Where do you want to go? And we knew nothing. [Laughs.] We had nothing in writing, because we had been told everything had been set up. It was one of those awful ‘Ah-ha ‘moments, and Lene describes my face as going from delight to complete despondency in five seconds as the implications set in.

I don’t remember how we got there, I think we must have gone back to the house and knocked on the door. We knew the woman who had arranged it. Everything started late, it took a long time, and I still remember my gut-wrenching realization. All I knew was, They couldn’t start without us. [Laughs.]

So we did the whole setup for Friday night, and then we were told, That’s fine for Friday night, and we’re going to another building for Saturday morning. It was insane.

The first session we ever did in Germany, we were invited by a group, a rapid language learning group, DGSL, quite a big organization. They have an annual conference, and we were invited to do a Shadow Work session. I can’t remember how they got in touch with us. Hilary and I did the session, and that set the whole ball rolling for a lot of work in Germany. That’s where we met Marie-Françoise Rosat, she came to that. That would have been in 1996. John Morrell, who had recently done the New Warrior Training in England, met me at the airport and was a tremendous support throughout the whole event. Another German woman came also who’s still a certified coach, Helga Pfetch.

After that Nicola and I went to Germany twice a year probably for seven or eight years at least, mostly hosted by John and Alice Morrell.

AB: How did you begin going to Russia?

John: ALisa Starkweather was the seed there, our lovely ALisa. Either late 2002 or early 2003 she was invited to give a presentation at a conference in Moscow. She went, and she did a break-out session for a small group on Shadow Work. They loved it. I think ALisa did a very lightweight introduction to Shadow Work and demonstrated some processes, that sort of thing.

There was a woman named Larisa Lagutina there, who was a therapist in Moscow, and she spoke really good English. She really liked it a lot and said, We want you to come back and do more of that. And ALisa said, Not me; if you want more you need to get in touch with John and Nicola, they’re in Europe. So Larisa got in touch with Nicola, and she also started training; she may have came to the UK to do the BFT with her English partner, Dave.

Then an invitation came to Nicola to do a Shadow Work session for a group of therapists on their summer retreat in Riga, Latvia, in July 2003. And dear Nicola went, with Larisa. She was on the phone every day to me for support and ideas as to how deal with all the challenges that were coming her way every day!

Nicola had all sorts of stories: classic Eastern block, things aren’t quite what they seem. They didn’t have a room to work in, they had to create it out of black plastic in this other massive room. The translator was not good enough and ended wanting to do a piece of work. It was hard work, and she did a brilliant job amidst all that!

A couple of women there loved it a lot, one of whom was Liya Kineevskaya — now the Queen of Russian Shadow Work. They said, We want you to come do something in Moscow. And Nicola said, If you want we’ll do a mixed group and I’ll bring my husband. So we did a group there in December 2003, and that was the beginning of it. It’s been ten years this year.

Since then we’ve been going virtually every year. I think there was one year we didn’t go. And half a dozen of the people who were at that first session are all certified Shadow Work facilitators now.

AB: It must be tremendously satisfying to see that kind of result from the seeds that you sowed, and to know that there will be a certified facilitators gathering in Russia this year.

John: It’s extraordinary. The situation is quite extended and evolving rapidly. It is indeed surprising, I do feel very proud of it — and a bit shocked sometimes. We have worked hard. Honestly, you wouldn’t believe some of the stuff that happened in those first few sessions. It was really hard, some of it, and that’s not including the translation on top of it.

There was no real idea of group privacy. I remember one time, in the first session, this plumber walked right across the carpet while we were processing somebody. Electricians were changing light bulbs and ladies were sweeping the corridors, right alongside where we were processing. There was little concept of the container we were trying to build.

Some of the physical circumstances were grim. But the quality of people and the interest and the celebration of the work was huge. They absolutely loved it. And I think it’s going to keep developing if we handle it right. There’s a lot of interest and some high-caliber people trained up and delivering.

I think Nicola and I have grown from the experience, too; our own authority has matured, expanded and deepened. Germany had been the focus for a while, and then it became Russia. Many years ago there was a little foray into France, but that didn’t go very far. Now that’s picking up again, and now there’s quite a bit of interest, and we have French trainees coming. There’s Gautier Hankenne and the Belgian community. We’ve recently been invited to do a session in Istanbul, that will probably happen next year. The Russians would have us for three months solid if they could — they’re that hungry. It’s quite a blossoming.

Somewhere, I suppose, in the late noughties, if you know what I mean by that, we’d done the BFT and the AFT in Russia, and we realized we were going to have to see this all the way through. People were going to become certified, and then what was going to happen? We couldn’t just walk away. Now we’re past that stage. And I have to say, every once in a while there’s a part of me that sometimes doesn’t want to go any more, because it’s hard.

There are some other developments that I can’t speak about because they’re very early. But there’s some quite high-level interest in Shadow Work there. We seem to be hitting it at a completely different level. The doorways that open there would never open here, just not at all in the same way, and I don’t know why that is.

AB: It must be so hard to keep the energy in the same spot while you do all the translating back and forth.

John: It does require a very particular focus, but I’ve been quite used to it. Within Europe as a whole, separate from Russia, I’ve done quite a lot of training work when there is continuous translation in French or German. I suppose we’re a bit more used to that than you are in the States because it’s a necessity. However, it’s not easy, and at times in Russia it’s exhausting.

One facet, of course, is that not all translators are the same, so some are much better than others. So in the early years we thought we were being translated well. Then we got an upgrade in translators, and we realized, Oh, this is what proper translation is like, when we knew that every word we were saying was working. Up to that point we had no idea what people heard. [Laughs.] They got the gist of it.

The same thing happened with the first BFT and the first manual that was translated. We discovered that part of the pain of doing the first BFT was that the translation in the manual was not up to scratch. So what we were trying to teach wasn’t actually written on the page. [Laughs.]

AB: Oh, no!

John: Try that for size!

AB: Finding just the right words can be such a delicate thing, when someone is feeling shame, or I’m afraid they’re going to feel shame. To find a translator who can be equally delicate must be very difficult.

John: We’ve always required that translators be people who’ve done some kind of psychological process work, but that hasn’t always been the case. Most of them are lovely people, you would really enjoy them. They have great respect for the work and enjoy it.

Our wonderful Lia Kineevskaya has been the key in Russia. She’s the one who’s pulled us over year after year. She describes us as the two wild horses she’s trying to drag across the ocean and the land, she says we’re quite hard to get over. And it’s true because we’ve got a full life going here. She’s the one who’s arranged the translators, and as we’ve got to know various people, we’ve said, We’ll have that one again but not that one. So there’s a little pool of established translators who have seen the work. Some of them have even started training in Shadow Work, they’re that interested. And some of them , after a day or so, just get triggered by the work and have a meltdown. Now, that is hard !

There are also often good English speakers in the group who are participants, and they know very quickly that what we’re saying is not what they’re being told in Russian, so they start to nitpick and correct the translators, which is hard on the translators’ self-esteem and at times painful. It’s very hard for the translators, particularly the junior ones, who think they’re doing a good job. But the Russians will have no qualms about saying, No, that’s not right. So there is a Russian vampire bite, quite a sting, and that will come through at times like that. There has been a fair bit of that at different times.

AB: I’ve so enjoyed getting to know Maxim Imass and Marat Sharipov at the North American facilitators gathering.

John: They’re very fine. They’re both on the lighter end of the spectrum and much more broadly aware. Your average Russian man is a different kettle of fish. They’re very reserved. [In a Russian accent] They rarely show their emotions.

In 2004, on our second or third visit to Russia, we started as one mixed group and split into two groups, men and women. We took Marie-Françoise and Phil Cowlishaw with us. A wonderful man; sadly, he’s no longer doing Shadow Work.

For three days we did these all-men and all-women groups and then recombined at the end of it. And in that session I vividly remember the difference between what your average Western European man would say — “I’m so grateful that I’ve reconnected with that part of myself I’ve forgotten about.” Whereas the average response from a Russian man is, “I have never felt this way in my life before.” That circuitry was just not working. That’s still happening, I heard that kind of comment just two weeks ago.

With what they’ve had to suppress, and the collective survival, the men have been required to shut down emotionally. Except when they get drunk, when it all, of course, explodes out dangerously — and of course, that’s a huge generalization.

AB: I’m curious about your work in Germany. I wonder what kind of emotions Germany must be dealing with, even this many years after the World Wars.

John: In Russia the War is huge, too. We’ve had a lot of generational-type processes where parents, grandparents, great-grandparents stand in lines, that kind of work. And the story is, the War, the War, the War. The impact was colossal right across all of Europe.

In Germany there is this shame that sits there, and it’s really uncomfortable for everybody. They don’t want to be reminded of it. It comes up. I’ve heard several German men say, “Look, I’m not my father’s generation, I’m not my grandparents’ generation.” They object to the unfortunate prejudices that get projected onto the German people.

I have to say that the first time I went there, I had some of that, and it soon got swept away. A lot of things happened to my family during the War; my mother was occupied by Germans in Norway. All the stuff we all grew up with, it was awful. They’re still dealing with that but it’s less and less. “Visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children to the third and fourth generations,” comes to mind!

I find the German men very emotional, very emotionally literate, actually. More so than the British, as a generalization. And they really love the work, too. They’re very beautiful people.

AB: I read the statistic once that for every American who died in World War II, 100 to 120 Russians died. A good friend of mine lost a brother on Iwo Jima, so for every one like her, there would be 100 in Russia.

John: I don’t know if that number includes the people whom Stalin put to death. I don’t think it does, and he put to death more than the Germans did in genociding the Jews. Every process we’ve ever done in Russia, in every family, there is the pain of a family member who just disappeared in the Stalin era. Never heard of again. So all that pain sits there.

Nowadays, the modern Russian world is just like New York, just like Paris, just like London. They’ve got bigger range and better quality products in their supermarkets than we have. It’s all happening there, Moscow is becoming one of the most expensive cities in the world. And Putin is sitting on the oil gate valves for Europe and China.

So those are outer manifestations, and it’s a bit mind-boggling, to be honest. We’re going to do another AFT this year, Vicki Woodard is coming. Another wave is coming up through the system, and the same here in the UK. As you know, the Shadow Work world isn’t going away, it keeps gently blossoming more and more.

And I again have to give credit to Cliff for his kind of Steady Eddie approach, which has been my approach as well: it’s not about big numbers, it’s about the quality of the work, and I think that’s really paying off now.

AB: What are you most excited about right now? What is making your heart sing?

John: Outside of Shadow Work, it’s planting my vegetables for the season. I like gardening.

AB: Another way in which you nurture growth.

John: Yes, and playing music. I’ve met a couple of musicians I really resonate with, and we’re playing a lot right now. So that’s driving and nourishing me.

From the Shadow Work point of view, it’s a classic burden-and-blessing, it’s both — the development of Shadow Work and the opportunities that are opening up here and there right now. But I don’t know how we’re going to manage. I’m very excited that more people are getting certified, that more Shadow Work sessions are happening, that the NYCFG will become the Euro CFG, and the Russian CFG will happen for the first time in September, and our three hubs will work together. I’m really excited about it, and it almost makes me tearful at times, as long as I don’t try to work out and understand how we’re going to get there, and beyond. [Laughs.]

Because I just don’t understand it. These doors are opening up in Russia, and they’re basically saying, We want a whole lot more of this. The challenge is to stay with the vision of that and at the same time somehow enable the fostering and nurturing of that, and empowering our other newly certified colleagues on this side of the pond to get up and sing their Shadow Work song. And some of them are beginning to do that, and to enjoy it and see what happens.

Nicola and I did a group session last weekend, it was a small group, and several people were highly capable and professional. We’ve probably done 100 sessions like that, and they loved it, they went away humming. I still love processing. We’ve done more weekends than anybody, actually, and I still enjoy it. I enjoy that moment when we stand up and open the carpet and ask, What do you want to have happen? And we focus in.

Because that’s what I’m good at. I’m not the developer of the model like Cliff. That’s his thing, and he’s brilliant at that and doing the work and training. I enjoy training, and I really enjoy facilitating, and I know Nicola does as well. So that still chimes my bells and pulls my chain, so to speak. And to see their faces changing at the end of the group session. People’s faces radically shift, and you know that that will impact them for quite a long time. It’s not the answer to everything, but it will be part of a substantial change.

I suppose I’m more the wounded healer than anything else, I accept that about myself. I think that’s my strength.

AB: Where was the wounded part of the healer that I was just hearing?

John: My roots. I know I’ve been as fucked-up a person as anybody, and found my way through that to a level of management of it, and I still want to bring that healing to other people. That’s what I meant.

AB: I think you were a cabinet-maker at one time, is that right?

John: Cabinet-making is how I made money in our community days, and I still love doing all that exacting craftsmanship discipline. It’s good therapy for me now; I love it when I can find the time. After some group work or time with a client, it’s my favorite thing, to be out in the garden or do something with my hands, to refocus and rebuild myself. Mostly it’s about upgrading and maintaining our own house. It’s still a part of me, I’ve still got a workshop and my tools. Sometimes I have a hankering to go back to that, and I took three months off, November, December, January, and I thought I was going to do a lot of that then, but other things happened.

AB: There are so few couples in the Shadow Work world who make their living doing this work.

John: I suppose the only reason we can do it is because of the training. Doing small group sessions, you’d have to do a lot of that to make money at it, or you’d have to raise the bar financially quite a bit, which I think would limit the attendance.

It’s a tricky one, unless one is willing to run large groups where people all pay a reasonable amount of money, and knowing that only a few will get to do centerwork, and there are inherent problems in that because you have bystanders and people who want to work and can’t. So either that or we charge double or triple for group work, and then it would become exclusive. I don’t know the answer to that one, I do think about that quite a bit.

AB: That’s a tough one, and every pair of facilitators has to come up with their own answer.

John: It is difficult, and the reason we’re able to do it is because of the training work; the week-long programs work well financially. Other people are going to have to run trainings in time, and that’s when people will make a bit more money from it.

The coaching I can always foster and develop, I’m not looking for new clients, but I do enjoy it a lot. They turn up but I’m not doing any promotion in that area.

We’ve been lucky that we had a bit of background support, that in the early years we could give more than we got until it began to balance out. Unlike many people, we had a large extended community of people we could guinea pig on. [Laughs.] The remains of the Emissary community provided a very good ground base for us to get up and running, and the wider European contacts that came with that.

In Russia they seem to be getting on with it and making it work. It’s not their sole income, most of them are therapists or doing coaching work, both therapeutically and corporately.

For most people Shadow Work is still an additional item, and I don’t know if that will ever change, but it may over time. I think it’s still early days. What do you think?

AB: I think Jung wrote that the conscious part of us is a tiny island in a vast sea of the unconscious. I’ve come to see the community of people doing this work as a tiny island in a vast sea of people who aren’t, and maybe that is an inherent parallel that will never change. But then I remember that 130 years ago no one was even aware of an unconscious, so things certainly do change and grow. In American culture there is much more awareness of parts of the self than there used to be. I think parts have become part of the language in some important ways.

John: I agree, I see the same things happening here. I think the New Warrior Network as it used to be called — the ManKind Project — has had quite a big influence in that way, and the spin-offs from that. Who knows, it’s very interesting.

When I was 24 at the Centre for Alternative Technology I saw the first three-bladed windmill in Europe fire up. Now there are thousands all across Europe, part of a huge and expanding industry. Yet we were just a bunch of crazy idealists hidden away in the Welsh hills.

A few years later I was part of an intentional community, like a handful of such communities around the country that hosted groups for self-development and spiritual aspiration from a variety of approaches and disciplines. Now such retreat centers are everywhere and going to such a session has become part of the general consciousness. So what of Shadow Work and its relations in another decade or two! Shine on, all you wonderful Shadow Work facilitators!

 

See also John’s page. His website is GoldenOpportunities.org.uk. This interview also appears on the European Shadow Work website.

This interview originally appeared in our free email newsletter in April 2013. To subscribe, visit our subscription page.

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Martin Lassoff is a Shadow Work® Mentor and Certified Group Facilitator, and certified ManKind Project Leader. Martin lives in Houston with his wife, Kathryn Urbanek, and has two grown sons.

November 6, 2006, by Alyce Barry

AB: How did you get started in this experiential work?

Martin: It was around 1993. I had recently been divorced, and I had made a decision to move on from my twenty-five-year spiritual practice of teaching kundalini yoga and meditation and running a series of yoga ashrams in the southern part of the United States.

As a result of those things, I started to go see a therapist, who directed me to a weekend seminar in Austin, Texas, run by a woman named Mary Elizabeth Marlow. She handed me a packet of clay and a poster board, told me to go sit down by the lake, make a model of my family of origin and then come back up and talk about it to the group.

When I got back up to the group with my model and started to explain it, I started weeping and crying. The group held me, cradled me and loved me, and that was my first encounter with experiential process facilitation.

From there, I was directed to the ManKind Project’s New Warrior Training Adventure (NWTA) in May of 1993, where I did my initiatory weekend. I enjoyed my weekend so much that I applied to staff and took my older son to the initiation with me.

As I began staffing more, I ran into Cliff, who at that time was a fully certified ManKind Project (MKP) leader. I was really impressed with his non-shaming facilitation skills and his use of kind language. Back in the 90s, the facilitation on a NWTA weekend was often shame-based in motivating resistant parts of participants. Cliff just seemed so much more generous. I remember following Cliff around the carpet and watching him do a metaphorical pull-out on a resistant initiate and saying to myself, Wow, I want to learn to facilitate like that.

So I signed up for a Basic Facilitator Training (BFT) in Wisconsin, attended it, and got very enthused. I began arranging with Evan Daily for Cliff to come to Houston to teach Shadow Carpet trainings, where we got to teach with him. This turned out to be an excellent venue to practice my newly learned carpet skills from the BFT and the Advanced Facilitation Training (AFT) and to have time to watch, learn and listen from Cliff.

AB: So you became a certified MKP leader and a Certified Shadow Work Facilitator in tandem.

Martin: I initially took the BFT to learn to be the best facilitator I could be. I had studied some action-method guts and found it lacking in any kind of formula or recipe that would allow my analytical mind to make choices. The action method is pretty much based on following your intuition, and my intuition at the time was very biased with my own biases and shadows.

I found that Shadow Work’s method of study, facilitation and practice taught me all the four-quadrant circuitry in myself. Learning the inner experience in the resonance of the four archetypes advanced me to a very empathetic aware state when facilitating others. It gave me a common language to discuss and explain what I was feeling. Probably most important, working in tandem with another facilitator also helped tame my narcissist and taught me to listen and observe.

All this was in tandem to becoming a certified trainer for the MKP. I actually went to take my MKP co-leader certification the day after I completed my AFT at your brother Tim’s house in Wisconsin. I got certified in Shadow Work in 1996.

Of course, back then, the use of Shadow Work in MKP carpet work was almost bipolar. They would use Cliff’s techniques for LT3, but there were so many leaders who were shadowed and envious about it that they would make snide remarks.

“Shadow Work takes too long, we’re not going to do that here, Lassoff,” they would say. “The initiates can’t understand those splits, so don’t even try to do it. This is just an initiatory weekend. Shadow Work is only good in integration groups where you have more time.” It was a very uphill struggle in the beginning.

AB: Did you come along after Ron Hering’s time?

Martin: Ron had helped develop the NWTA as well as another training called Accelerated Behavior Change (ABC). He was murdered right before he was scheduled to come lead the ABC weekend that I took in Houston.

AB: How would you say that your view of life has changed in these years of working with the MKP and Shadow Work?

Martin: When I began staffing NWTA weekends and attending ABC, I got to see the results of group containers and process facilitation and concluded that they were a great complement to my years of meditation and yoga. My inward experience of the yoga and meditation all those years had been incredible. But I subsequently felt that many emotional events in my life were being repressed and not dealt with, and I believed the same was true of the people I’d taught yoga and meditation to.

In yoga, you’re often taught to close your eyes, and whatever you feel or think, let it pass. You’re a boat floating on the sea, and you let all these things pass through you. Unfortunately, I don’t believe any more that that’s what occurs. I don’t think that things just pass through you unless you are an extremely enlightened individual with an incredible sense of detachment. The things get stuck. [Laughs.] And often repressed.

The feelings weren’t passing, so I decided I had better experience them. That’s what I found incredible about process facilitation in Shadow Work: the ability to deal with those repressed feelings in a safe and healthy way.

Ultimately, combining the two with my yogic and meditation practice was really the missing link for me. It had to evolve into everything I do being a meditation. How I sleep, how I eat, how I talk, how I walk, how I process, how I listen. That was the real teaching of Shadow Work to me: to be attentive, to pay attention to the real things that are occurring inside of myself and others around me. Versus this external concept of yogic mind or big mind.

AB: I don’t think I’ve heard the expression ‘big mind’ before.

Martin: It’s like the universal concept of inner peace: you tap into it, kind of like morphic resonance, and when many people think the same thought, at some point it reaches critical mass or a tipping point.

AB: So your goals in doing yoga and meditation today would be quite different from the goals you had before.

Martin: Oh, it totally changed. I no longer choose to practice yoga and meditation for hours and hours. My whole life is a meditation in many ways.

AB: That’s what you were saying about it evolving into everything you do. You’re saying it’s integrated—meditating isn’t a separate activity, it’s something you’re’ doing while you’re doing other things.

Martin: Exactly.

AB: Do you ever advise people you’ve facilitated to try meditation?

Martin: I do in subtle ways, and often without using the word meditation. For example, I find that young people don’t take the time to enjoy where they are. They wind up breezing through every chapter of their life and never stop to appreciate the moment of time they’re living in. That’s a very subtle type of meditation. It’s what Baba Ram Dass used to talk about: “Be here now.” Be present. Enjoy where you are in this moment. Don’t always dream and long for the next thing.

I do the same with people who can’t be still. I recommend to them, Don’t talk so much, just go inside and be with yourself for a while. Go sit outside by a tree and find yourself.

I don’t teach meditation much any more. But I’ve been invited to Shambhala Mountain Center in northern Colorado in October to lead a course called Men at the Threshold with Jun Po Denis Kelly Roshi and Luke Entrup. It’s going to combine the many aspects of meditation that I studied for many years with process facilitation. I’m very excited about it.

AB: It’s a course just for men?

Martin: The first wave of this course is for men, yes. For men who are in transition: in transition in their lives, men who are dying or have lost someone who’s died, who have had a divorce, who are in a new job or profession. We’re going to start it off with a multi-media event, with people coming into the lodge from a Buddhist fire ceremony. They’ll circumnavigate the slide shows that will be about life or about death, and they’ll have the experience of both sets of slides while music’s being played. That will be the basis for our beginning circle.

AB: What else are you excited about right now?

Martin: What I’m most excited about right now is how Shadow Work has grown here in Houston as a result of diversifying our community. They’re so interrelated that it’s hard to separate them now. The Houston community never really seemed to blossom until we added the diversity element to it.

AB: I’ve heard you mention this. How did it get started?

Martin: I was taking a diversity training in Houston in 2002, and at the end of the training, an African-American man, Judge Mattocks, asked if I would mentor him. I met him for lunch and heard him out. He wanted to be a New Warrior leader, and I agreed to mentor him if he would agree to mentor me in diversity.

We began meeting, the two of us, every Tuesday night at his home. I told him I needed to get out of my little white neighborhood and come to his neighborhood and learn from him, meet his family. The group eventually grew to include Eric Mallory, Ernest Patterson, Russell Rashard, Rhonda Gaughan, and Sally Bartolameolli, all of whom are certified Shadow Work group leaders now. Also John Gaughan, some priests, and others. It was this beautiful group of men and women, with different ethnicities.

Now, so many people want to be in it that we have to create different groups because we can’t accommodate everyone. These groups have become a venue to get people prepared to take a Shadow Work facilitation training. We’ve already run two certification weekends in Texas in the last year and certified four different people. It’s a continual pipeline.

AB: How striking, and how cool, that diversity would blossom in a city in the South. Houston seems to be such a big, thriving community for both Shadow Work and MKP now. Why Houston?

Martin: Actually, I think it’s not about how or why Houston. It would happen anywhere where you were willing to open your door and accept different people. Diversity includes diversity in sexist behavior where people use their European-blooded male superiority to exclude women or hold women back. When I speak of diversity, I actually speak of all the ‘isms:’ not just racism but sexism, heterosexism. Any type of emotional commitment to ignorance. [Laughs.]

AB: An emotional commitment to ignorance—what a great definition for ‘isms!’

Martin: That kind of takes away the specialness of Houston because that commitment to ignorance exists everywhere. I’ve found that combining Shadow Work tools with any type of dialogue on any kind of ‘isms’ is an excellent combination because of the generosity of Shadow Work to be polite and respectful.

AB: You’re referring to the Clean Talk model, for those who aren’t aware of it.

Martin: Clean Talk is so polite and respectful, yet it gives a person an opportunity to express anything that’s been repressed in them for a long time, especially the effects of being targeted by racism or sexism or heterosexism. It gives a venue for those repressed feelings in a container that’s safe.

AB: A few months ago you became a Shadow Work Mentor. For those who don’t know about the Mentors, it means you’re one of five senior facilitators who mentor new facilitators toward certification and help hold the container for our annual Certified Facilitators Gathering (CFG). Anything to say about becoming a Mentor?

Martin: Sure. I’ve done a lot of things in my life, in many different venues and places with masters of different religions and spiritual paths. And becoming a Shadow Work Mentor is what I am most proud of. Even on the most basic level, to experience this remarkable group of people for an extended period of time is in itself just a unique, fun, profound experience for me. The CFG is unlike any place I have spent time. So much of my inner growth has occurred there over the years.

Second, being a Mentor for me now is a wonderful way to pay back all the wonderful gifts that have been bestowed on me through the embracing of Shadow Work in my life.

 

You can reach Martin by email at [email protected].

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