Sally Bartolameolli is a Certified Shadow Work® Facilitator, holistic health counselor, intuitive spiritual mentor and a frequent facilitator for Women In Power.

She is co-author of Relationships from Addiction to Authenticity: Understanding Co-Sex Addiction, A Spiritual Journey to Wholeness and Serenity, published by Health Communications, Inc., in April 2008, with a Foreword by John Bradshaw. As we write, the book is on Amazon.com’s Bestseller lists in the categories of Codependency and Twelve-Step Programs. She is completing her new book on sacred feminine spirituality with intentions of it being published within the next year. Sally lives part-time in Houston, Texas, with her teenage daughter by her first marriage and part-time with her geophysicist husband in Nigeria. (The “ol” in her last name is silent: “bar-tuh-me-OH-lee”). 

June 10, 2008, by Alyce Barry

AB: How did you first get involved in healing work?

Sally: My journey in self growth and transformational work began about 20 years ago. I had been bulimic for several years, and even though I had stopped bingeing and purging, the first thing I turned to under stress was food. I was in a group with a therapist, and when I began examining some trauma and other aspects of my childhood, the therapist encouraged me to attend Overeaters Anonymous and Co-sex Addicts Anonymous as well as Adult Children of Alcoholics and Dysfunctional Families. That was in 1988, and I got involved with all three programs at the same time.

Professionally, I began my career in education. When I found twelve-step spiritual recovery, I also began doing emotional healing work with a small community. Doing emotional healing work with individuals and in groups and teaching resonated deeply within me. I taught this emotional healing process professionally for about ten years and then took a break and went into the business world. I recruited salespeople, meaning I was a sort of headhunter for salespeople, both independently and as an employee of several organizations. I had a wonderful time doing that.

I was just beginning to realize I wanted to get back into transformational work when I did Women In Power and was really attracted to the organization. I came from a big family and had always been involved with a lot of groups and circles. It was a tremendous gift to find a level of maturity I hadn’t found before in a women’s circle and to fulfill my desire for connection with women in a more powerful way than I had in the past.

AB: How did you come across Women In Power?

Sally: My husband at the time was really active in the ManKind Project (MKP) community. In May 2005, he and I had been separated for about five months. We’d always had the intention of getting back together, but there were some very challenging dynamics that required our living apart for a bit. We stayed connected in other ways. He sent me a flyer about a Carpet Work Training that was happening in Houston and suggested that we attend it together. It was a co-gender group led by two men from MKP.

He suggested I visit the Shadow Work® website to learn more about it, and I found there a link for Women In Power (WIP). I called him back and said I hadn’t made a decision yet about the training in Houston, but I liked the wolf at the WIP website. So I signed up and went.

It was a very powerful experience. At the end of the weekend, as I was running to my car to get to the airport, I asked one of the founders, Sara Schley, “How can I support WIP in growing?”

She said, “You have to be a Certified Shadow Work Facilitator.” And I said, “Okay!” So I started training to support WIP.

I did the Basic Facilitator Training in December 2005, the last one that Mary Ellen Whalen led. The following September I did the Advanced Training, and then the Leader Training the next month. Then in January 2007 I did my certification weekend in Houston.

AB: So you became fully trained and certified in about 13 months. That’s really fast — you must have been ready!

Sally: I had about ten years of emotional healing work under my belt, facilitating weekends in the late 1980s and 1990s, so it wasn’t a brand new experience for me. I knew how to be with people, how to connect with them, how to step back and look. I have a lot of Lover energy and knew how to move with that. I had to learn how to drop in the Shadow Work tools, which was a challenge for me.

AB: Tell me how you came to write a book on co-sex addiction.

Sally: I had known my co-author, Claudine Pletcher, for about five years. Our personal stories were very different, but our behaviors were very similar in some ways and so were the solutions. Dealing with this particular dis-ease seemed to resonate deeply within both of us, and we wanted to share that experience with other women to make a difference in their own challenges.

AB: I don’t think I’d heard the term “co-sex addiction” before.

Sally: Many people haven’t heard of it. Early on, Claudine and I joked about it. People hear a lot about sex addiction, and a lot of people identify themselves as sex addicts. But very few identify themselves as co-sex addicts. Claudine and I joked that we don’t even get to have our own disease. [Laughs.]

Nobody talks about our addiction; it’s like a master overlay.

We also believe that, for some women, there’s a payoff in not having their own disease. What tends to happen is that their partners get caught, and it’s often easier to blame their partners than it is to own that they have this disorder and that’s why they’re in this situation.

In reality, though, I believe everything that happens in our lives is the result of what we’re attracting and who we are. If we can take responsibility at that level, we can learn how to change. If we continue to blame, we don’t have a lot of personal power to be able to create our lives the way we want them. I know I’m preaching to the choir here.

We want our own disease. Recognizing our own dis-ease is a way to take ownership in a mature way.

AB: I could imagine there being another kind of payoff, too. My shadow is to see myself as ugly, and if a man wanted constant sexual connection with me, I would feel very attractive, and that would be a huge payoff.

Sally: Right. And Claudine and I would say that your belief that you’re not pretty enough would be an aspect of co-sex addiction. Women who struggle with this addiction engage in what we call “lack mentality,” believing that we’re not enough, we’re not fit enough, we’re not pretty enough, and we live out that lack mentality in all areas of our lives. We would say that you’re carrying shame that doesn’t belong to you.

AB: What was the writing process like for you?

Sally: It took us 12 or 13 years to write the book because of the emotional intensity that was required. We believed we had to be emotionally present during the process in order to be authentic in our sharing. We’d get so exhausted that we couldn’t meet for extended periods of time. And there were two of us, so we were managing not only our histories, our herstories, our trauma and healing, but our relationship with each other. We laughed a lot because we really had to.

AB: In what ways did your personal story surface in the book?

Sally: There are bits and pieces of my story weaved into the book. I didn’t want to focus more directly on my story because it’s somewhat atypical. We wanted to write about not only the addiction per se but, in a very broad sense, about how, both in individual families and in our culture generally, women are set up to look outside of themselves to fill the emptiness within.

My setup for co-sex addiction began when my father died suddenly when I was 15 months old, and I grew up without that connection. But it’s not just the loss that causes dysfunction and difficulty and addiction. I think it’s the loss combined with the lack of an emotional presence in a family system that would allow for that loss to be grieved and that trauma to be released.

As a result of not having a family that was emotionally available to me, I began at a very young age to look to food and to others for approval. Then, as a teenager in high school and as a young woman, I looked to men to fill that emptiness.

I also have some history of being sexually abused by a family member. Without minimizing it, I will say that it occurred just once and in a less overt and less directly abusive way than many other women experience as a core trauma in their co-sex addiction.

One of our goals was to use the stories of as varied a group of women as possible. We included women who were in recovery and stayed married, women who got divorced, women who were single, and so on. We wanted to share a variety of perspectives and situations.

AB: I certainly resonate with a book process that took a long time, since my own book took eight years. After this long process, what about the book still has the most juice for you?

Sally: The juice is in the beliefs that I feel passionate about.

One is the belief that for us to authentically pursue our divine purposes and mature in our spirituality, it’s important and even essential that we deal with the addictive dynamics within which we grew up. I think dealing with our own addictions, the addictive systems and our own codependency is a necessary foundation to thriving spiritually, finding our divine purpose, and being of service to others.

I think it was Marianne Williamson who said that we have to be sober in order to heal the planet. Another belief is that we have to look at our herstories and histories and heal from our own trauma before we can make a difference in the world.

I also believe, as Gerald May wrote in his book Addiction and Grace, that our addictions become our connection to our spiritual source. Personally, I think that our wounds, as we fully embrace and honor them in a healing context, will transform into our greatest offerings of service and healing for others.

I also have a passion for discovering the other ways in which co-sex addiction affects a woman’s life, as in her relationships with other women. I often witness women hurting each other through gossip, triangulation, blame and criticism. I want to encourage women to heal their relationships with their mothers and with themselves so that we can look at other women as allies and stand together and support each other. Without doing this work on our families of origin and the ways we carry shame and self-perpetrate, we can’t stand in unity with each other.

AB: After these dozen years, what’s it like to see the book published and out in the world?

Sally: Over the last several months, I found there was some residual fear and shame coming up about my name being on a book. “Do I really want to do this? What will my family say? Did I say it all the way I wanted to? If you want to keep any anonymity, that’s gone.”

I had this sense of being exposed. Some old messages came up: “Do you deserve this? Who do you think you are?”

The intensity of my reactions surprised me, and I brought them to prayer meditation. Like other shame and wounds that I’ve walked through in the past, they seemed to heal and dissipate, and I came back to feeling joy and happiness about the book being published.

AB: The book’s Foreword was written by John Bradshaw, the bestselling author on recovery. How did he get involved?

Sally: Claudine is great old friends with John. He read the manuscript and felt really excited about it, and he committed to doing whatever he could to bring the message to the public. He contacted someone he knew — the president of Health Communications, Inc. (HCI) — and two people there read the manuscript and called us just weeks later to say they’d like to move forward. It was very thrilling and very much a dream come true. We feel a lot of gratitude for John and for HCI and for their speed in acting.

I spent some time getting to know John in Seattle. He’s still making a difference in people’s lives. He’s got a very good heart and still a brilliant mind. He reminds me of Cliff Barry: they both have that intellectual ability to connect the dots and interweave different theories. But it really comes down to feeling work. John is currently doing a lot on neuroscience, that’s the new thing.

AB: I’m guessing that with this book to your credit you’ll be asked for your opinions on human sexuality. Have you come to any conclusions about the differences between male and female sexuality, for example?

Sally: We would say that among those with the dis-ease of co-sex and sex addiction, men get a hit from sex, and women get a hit from their sex addict.

I might take it a step deeper, to say we both come to healthy and spiritual sexuality the same way once the cultural and the family wounds are embraced and grieved fully. I believe that sexuality is first about authentic emotional-spiritual connection, and sexual contact is an expression of that.

I think that when there’s full healing in both genders, we’re more similar than we are different.

AB: I was thinking of your 15-year-old daughter as I read the story in the book about teenagers getting together at a movie theatre for oral sex. I wonder if you’ve come away with beliefs about what constitutes age-appropriate sexuality for a young person.

Sally: I believe that when parents are emotionally present to their children, and the children are thriving in a healthy emotional and spiritual environment, the children’s explorations and learnings will develop and unfold naturally and appropriately for who they are. This is different from sexual exploration for the purpose of filling an emotional emptiness within, or getting approval, or acting out the ways in which they’ve been abused and violated.

In other words, I’m less concerned with age than I am with a healthy environment in which they can have a healthy exploration with support when they need it.

As I watch my own children, and the children of men and women who are in recovery and are emotionally present, I’m struck with how different these children’s lives are. My daughter’s life energy is focused on many health-giving and joy-giving passions that are really inspiring to me. At her age, I was smoking pot, drinking a lot of beer, making out with a lot of boys, acting out sexually in many ways. As far as I know, she isn’t doing what I was doing, and that’s because she’s not empty inside. She has a sense of who she is. She has her feelings, she has good boundaries. I was lost and looking for anything I could find to feel better inside.

AB: How did you find the women whose stories are in the book?

Sally: We have a very strong commitment to protecting everybody’s anonymity, but I will tell you we didn’t publicly advertise. We both knew women in recovery from all over the world, and if we heard about people whose stories in healing and recovery were miraculous given where they had come from, we invited them to share their stories if they had a desire to do so.

AB: Have any of your beliefs changed since becoming trained in Shadow Work?

Sally: Some of my beliefs have deepened.

The first is a belief I’ve found validated in the Shadow Work community, that we all have wounds, and that we all have an innate, biological and spiritual capacity to heal them through release and discharge.

Another is that everyone has a divine purpose and a unique service to offer the world, and that we find that service through embracing our wounds and allowing them to heal and transform into the gifts that we offer. I think our deepest wounds become our greatest gifts.

There’s an encouragement I’d like to offer people who are working through addictions. As I said, I believe our greatest gifts come from our deepest wounds. If we embrace and honor those wounds and learn to love ourselves in the process, I believe that addiction can be a very powerful spiritual journey.

See also Sally’s facilitator page. You’ll find her book, Relationships from Addiction to Authenticity, listed in our Online Bibliography.

You can reach Sally by email at salbart@mac.com.

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

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Vicki Woodard is a Shadow Work® Mentor, Trainer, Coach and Group Facilitator in Boulder, Colorado. After teaching in elementary schools for 29 years, Vicki became a part-time office administrator for Shadow Work Seminars and currently leads facilitator trainings with Cliff Barry, whom she married in 2005. Vicki and I spoke over my kitchen table about Shadow Work, Boulder, and her passionate interest in women’s spirituality.

AB: How did you come across Shadow Work®?

Vicki: I probably started hearing about it in the early 1990s when I was doing body work with Tom Daly. At the time, Tom was a massage therapist and was also doing what I now know as Voice Dialogue; he was always connecting the body and psychological aspects of things.

Then, in 1995 or 1996, at a getting-dark-early time of year, Tom and Jude ran a series of six Shadow Work sessions, every other Sunday evening. I went because they happened to be the evenings when I wouldn’t have the kids — the luck of the draw. So I went and watched, and I was just totally fascinated. I had never seen psychodrama or any kind of process work like that.

AB: Had you done more traditional kinds of therapy?

Vicki: Yes, I’d seen five or six different therapists for different reasons over the years, three of which involved marriage counseling. I’d also done a lot of spiritual weekends, meditation, affirmations, that kind of thing. But I’d never done anything where you could see the patterns in your life. I don’t even think I got it all.

I really liked playing parts in people’s processes, but there was no way I was going to volunteer to do a piece of my own. I didn’t know anyone there but Tom and Jude, and I wasn’t in a place of total trust at that point.

I was so impressed, that in November of 1997, I went to the Inner Sovereign Training (IST). I was still teaching and took this plunge, took off work for four days and paid all this money. I’d never paid that much money for something. If you remember, the flyer advertising the IST is huge, and it lists all sorts of things you can expect to have happen. That list was all perfectly aligned with changes I wanted to make in my life at that time.

I was just blown away by that weekend. Even the question they ask in Shadow Work, “What do you want to have happen” — certainly that’s not how they talk in cognitive therapy at all. In therapy, I’d had incredible insights into patterns in my life, or where a pattern came from, but not necessarily the shift that says, Oh, I don’t need to do this any more, I can do it in a different way. I had never experienced that level of clarity and understanding about my behavior, and the patterns I had set up in my life, as I did that weekend. It was like this huge burden was lifted off my shoulders.

AB: Was that the first time you met Cliff and Mary Ellen?

Vicki: Yes. They had just moved to Colorado from Wisconsin a few months earlier.

Then, at some point, I got a flyer for the Basic Facilitator Training (BFT), and I thought, I could really sink my teeth into this. Shadow Work had brought me such relief physically and emotionally and spiritually that I needed to know more about it. So I took the BFT the summer of 1998.

AB: What was your BFT experience like?

Vicki: It was very expanding for me to start learning the Shadow Work Model, because I hadn’t really had that in my head at all. I just liked watching the facilitation and how people treated other people. As I came to understand the Model more, there were so many “ah-has” about how I had been wounded in this or that way. It explained a lot of things about myself; it was like a map for my psyche that I’d never been given before. All of a sudden I could see how things had come about and were working in my life.

I liked the connection between all of us in the training, too. It felt deeper than in other groups I’d been in.

As a facilitator, though, I thought, There is no way I’m ever going to learn this. I was really scared. Of course, and this is exactly how it should be, there were people who could memorize the steps to the processes easily, and I was in total awe of them. Once I was around it more, though — when I started working for Shadow Work as the office administrator — I felt more comfortable.

AB: Were any of the techniques or concepts useful to you as a teacher?

Vicki: Yes, especially when meeting with parents. I could see their woundedness and how they treated their children or had fear up about me being the establishment. With each training, I could see a whole lot more. With the kids, it was much easier to see and make it okay for them to be doing what they were doing. I’d think, Here’s self-building, and they need to be doing this, and I need to put a boundary around it so they don’t hurt themselves or somebody else.

For me also, there was a comfort level as I came to understand my personality and the reactions I had internally. I have always been very aware of things going on inside my body, like feeling anxious or scared or whatever. I became so much more relaxed, and I could present things to parents in a way that would calm them down and help them not feel ashamed and see that this was just a learning process in parenting. I was grateful for that. I had a lot of skills already, but this made them that much more clear for me so I could articulate those things better.

AB: How did you come to start working for the Shadow Work office?

Vicki: I knew that when I retired from teaching, I would need to work part-time to make enough money to pay my bills. Brad Gallup and I were having lunch with Susan DeGenring and Cliff, right around Christmastime in 2000. I was saying I was going to retire and needed a part-time job, and Cliff immediately said, “Why don’t you work for Shadow Work? I’m looking for someone to work part-time in the office.”

So I started working on Saturdays for about four hours. For me, it was a dream come true because I dreaded figuring out where I would work. Most of the time was spent getting the database caught up. Cliff was living on Buckhorn Road in Loveland at that time and trying to run the whole business by himself. He found keeping up with the paperwork really hard. I knew absolutely I didn’t want to substitute teach. Some people were saying, Cliff had better be nice to me, because everybody saw me as Little Vicki. How on earth could she hold her own?

AB: I was in Illinois at that time, and in regular contact with Cliff by phone. I remember him telling me how badly it was going, running the business by himself. He hired different people, but some of them didn’t stay long and others didn’t work out. After you started working for him, I remember him saying, “If Vicki ever leaves, I’m going to put a gun in my mouth.” [Laughs]

Vicki: So much of the busywork was just like teaching: collating manuals and stuff like that, which I could do with my eyes closed. At that time, the manuals weren’t in one document; I had to run off sections within sections and put them together. It became a job of mine to put each manual into a single document. It seemed like a miracle to Cliff that things could be caught up.

I worked two days a week and had a day off in the middle of the week and a four-day weekend every week. I kept saying, Thank you, God! You don’t get that in teaching so much. [Laughs.] It seemed so little to me, but it was so huge to him. There is so much to running a business.

Then we moved the office from Buckhorn Road to Susan’s house on County Road 29, and that made things a lot easier because there was more space. The house on Buckhorn Road was so cramped. Plus, if it was icy, you could only go 15 miles an hour on that road. Oh, the adventures of driving to Shadow Work.

AB: I guess historians will remember the Buckhorn Road house as Cliff’s bubble light period.

Vicki: I came in one day and there was red everywhere. One of those little bubble lights had exploded, and the red dye inside had gone all over the computers.

Another job of mine was to attend a facilitator training when they were one person short. I started feeling more comfortable with the Model and how I facilitated. I thought, I, too, one day could do this! In the advanced processes taught in the AFT, there were so many steps that it was really scary for me. I many times don’t give myself enough of a break, and sitting in on the trainings helped with that.

AB: Now the office is in your home in Boulder, what’s that like?

Vicki: I usually spend two days a week on administrative stuff. Sometimes there’s a little more than that, getting CD orders off the web and shipping them out.

AB: What kinds of phone calls do you get?

Vicki: When I first worked for Shadow Work, people called and asked me, “What is this 9/11 CD?” “I’ve heard of Shadow Work but I’m not sure what it is.” People who had been in a Shadow Work seminar in the early days had come across the website and wanted to find out about it again.

These days, email is the way people communicate. Sometimes I get a pretty vague email, like, “Will ya ever come to Texas to do this?” A lot of times, if I look at the time the person sent the email, it was 11:30 at night.

AB: When did you become interested in feminine spirituality?

Vicki: I had been interested in it since my early twenties, being a little hippie-dippie girl. I had somehow, by the grace of the Divine, been introduced to Wiccan traditions and read different things. I can’t even tell you what they were now. My first introduction into spirituality beyond what I would call basic Christianity was Edgar Cayce’s work, where I first became aware of the idea of reincarnation. That made so much sense to me.

Then, when Ms. Magazine first came out, one of its first issues ran an article on how to run a consciousness-raising group. So a group of about six of my women friends got together every week for months and months, and spirituality was one of the things we talked about. That’s how I got introduced into the pagan traditions, with a Wiccan twist. I read a lot about the different holidays and sabbats, and practiced that with some of those women for a while. This was before I left Texas. I lived in a college town, where there was a Buddhist ashram with a vegetarian restaurant — I was a vegetarian at the time. I started hearing about a much wider array of spirituality and religions around the world.

I moved to Colorado when I was 23, and from then on, I had discussions with different women at different times about the feminine side of spirituality, and the whole idea of goddesses. My realm was still pretty limited to Greek and Roman goddesses. I didn’t recognize at that time that Goddess religions went back much further than that.

Then, life intervened. When I get focused on something — in this case, being in relationship and learning to be a better teacher — I let that part of myself go, even though inside it’s always operating. I went away from it for a while.

AB: This would have been the 1970s. Would it have been a risky thing, even in Boulder, Colorado, to “come out” as a pagan or Wiccan?

Vicki: No. In Boulder there was a bookstore called the Pentagram which sold these homemade incenses that were just lovely. It had lots of books on pagan and Wiccan traditions, and I would go up there when I could afford it. It was quite normal for Boulder.

Then, when my first husband and I were looking for a place to get married, we found Unity Church in Boulder. It was the first time I’d experienced Christianity from a metaphorical perspective, and it made so much sense to me. It plugged in the holes that were the reasons I left Christianity originally. It worked for me, although it still didn’t have enough of the feminine piece in it. When my marriage went on the rocks, I started pursuing other spiritual practices, too.

AB: I remember, about three years ago, looking at your bookcase, and I was struck with the wide variety of books on different faith traditions and personal growth methodologies represented there.

Vicki: I was always looking. One idea that made sense to me was that what you believe in, happens. That seemed so magical to me, that there was something about the power of our thoughts that was helpful. When I could be really focused, and have a goal, it would come true. It was the beginning of creating my own reality, but I didn’t have those words for it yet. That belief also made me believe that I could change my world any time I wanted.

I certainly didn’t grow up with those ideas. Once I was on my own, that’s what kept coming up, that I needed to be more in touch with that feminine side. I started seeking out classes and workshops and started getting involved in women’s circles on a regular basis.

Right now, I’m taking care of my daughter and my grandson, and I’ve let that spiritual practice go. When that happens, I feel really out of balance, and there’s a sadness to it for me. The world lacks the feminine nurturing energy, and the feminine belief in the power of creation, that life is about connection and communication and community, as opposed to power and things and stuff. I feel great sadness because it’s out of balance in me and out of balance in the world. It’s hard in this culture, because it’s not a church on the corner you can go to. It’s something in my life that I’ve had to seek out and/or make.

Actually I am kind of leading a women’s group right now. I’ve found that people often have trouble committing to certain times. My friend Marnie and I are committing to being together for Solstice, for example, even if it’s just the two of us. Right now that’s working for me.

For me, what brings the deepest satisfaction in my spirituality is women being in circle and being grounded in that feminine energy. I want to feel grounded in knowing that I don’t have to put it aside and get my masculine energy online to get through something. Feeling that energy makes me feel more in touch with what I would call the Divine.

There’s a part of me that believes at some point Cliff will have a church or something where people gather regularly. Not just to do Shadow Work, but to use Shadow Work as a vehicle to spirituality. Maybe there will be a place in that for women’s spirituality and a way that we can grow as women together and then bring that to men and let them incorporate that, if they want, into their spirituality.

I have a lot of questions about why there are all these books — the Bible, the Koran, the Bhagavad Gita. Where is the women’s book? Maybe it’s not about having words to follow but being so in touch with ourselves and our feelings that that’s what leads us. But I know I get really pissed off that there’s not a book. [Laughs]

AB: The closest thing I’ve come to it, which isn’t really spiritual, is the work of Clarissa Estes, and sometimes Marion Woodman’s books, though they’re rather intellectual.

Vicki: Hard to read. I always rush out and buy her books and read about four pages, and go, Oh! [Chokes]

AB: Her titles are so interesting. The Owl Was a Baker’s Daughter.

Vicki: Yes. The Pregnant Virgin. I guess Jung was not an easy guy to read either.

AB: Has Shadow Work changed your view of life in general?

Vicki: I think that I’ve held a belief for a long time that all the things that happened in my life had a purpose. Painful or not, there’s a reason they happened, and usually the painful things are the biggest teachers. Without those, we wouldn’t be who we are. Shadow Work has helped me see the gold in all these hard things, thus moving me closer to my connection with the Divine. Hopefully our wounds will ultimately lead us to a higher view of ourself and the world and get us in touch with the Divine, because maybe it is in those wounds that we even have a reason to look for the Divine.

AB: When you talk about the Divine, it sounds as if it’s playing a very active role in your life.

Vicki: Yes. What I’m missing is scheduled time to be in that energy and call it forth. I need time just being in that energy in order to feel fed. It’s a huge pattern that I get away from it when I’m overwhelmed in my helping Twoness. Somebody turn it off! [Laughs] Or down, or something!

AB: You’re leading facilitator trainings now with Cliff and did three of them this fall within about six weeks. How is that going?

Vicki: I know that I’m capable of holding a lot in a container and a lot in general, and I think that’s the sign of a leader. That you can hold that level of pain for people and let them transform it, is a spiritual event, in my opinion.

I am becoming more comfortable with being a trainer. My cutting edge is to find my place, as opposed to trying to be like Mary Ellen. I have different things to offer. That’s my M.O.: I learn somebody else’s way of doing it, then I Vicki Woodardize it. I like being on that edge where I learn something. And there are days you feel totally retarded because you can’t.

I think there’s a mystique that I’ve always held about “the guru.” To be married to him is an incredible adventure, for sure. But there’s also an incredible amount of comfort for me, I think, in Cliff’s calmness and tenderness and wanting Shadow Work to be such an incredibly safe way to do personal growth work. I take comfort just in being around him and knowing that it’s okay to just be me as opposed to being scared of the guru. Not that you’d marry him if you were scared of him. It makes me understand even more why this work is the way it is. One of the draws to Shadow Work is that it’s a place where your shadows are welcome. In this relationship I have with Cliff, my shadows are welcome there, too. So it’s no surprise that this work is as safe as it is and that it continues to unfold. I like that part, always having something new on the horizon.

AB: You’re living with a guy who’s almost always coming up with some new idea for the world. That would be perfect for someone who likes something new on the horizon.

Vicki: Works pretty well. I get confused about why Shadow Work isn’t more widely known. It’s helped my world, why wouldn’t it help everybody else’s world? I guess we have to be ready to come to it. Maybe as the consciousness, at least in our culture, begins to change, more people will see that.

AB: I take comfort in what Jung wrote, that the portion of an individual that’s conscious is like a tiny island in a huge ocean. And my parallel is that the portion of the world that’s conscious is like a tiny island in a huge ocean. My daughter occasionally asks me, Wouldn’t it be easier to be like everybody else? To not be aware? And then one of her friends’ families goes through something horrible, and I say to her, That’s what I believe can happen when you’re not conscious. When you haven’t been conscious all along, and life comes knocking, it can have something pretty awful to bring to your door.

Vicki: I go unconscious sometimes, as we all do, and that’s when life comes knockin’. I would rather be conscious and suffer the consequences than be unconscious and suffer the consequences. At least I have a little bit of control of this side of it.

Luckily, the world never fails us. It always provides us another chance to learn. We can learn it with the balsa wood or with the two-by-four. That’s always been my experience. It whispers first, then it knocks, then it starts bringing out the big boards. [Laughs]

You can reach Vicki by at (303) 442-7989 and read more about her here.

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

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Shadow Work® co-founder Mary Ellen Whalen talks about her new path as a Sufi healer and what it means to her to step away from Shadow Work after 15 years.

Mary Ellen, or Maryam (pronounced MAHR-ee-um) to use her Sufi name, is in her third year of studies at the University of Spiritual Healing and Sufism in California, working towards a master’s in spiritual ministry. “Frankly, I didn’t sign up because I wanted the degree,” she says, “I signed up because I really wanted to learn what they’re teaching.” I interviewed Mary Ellen by phone, and our conversation touched on these topics among others. 

January 11, 2006, by Alyce Barry

AB: Did you first get into Sufism as a result of your relationship with John?

Mary Ellen: Yes. A guy in John’s Warrior I-group had started connecting on this path and gone to the Sufi healing school. He’s an acupuncturist who started adding spiritual healings to his practice. John saw the changes that were happening in him and went to him for some healings, and it was really, really powerful for him. John started going to weekly healing circles in our local Sufi community and met Salima, our local teacher. This was right at the beginning of our relationship. Salima is the head of the community in a ministerial role. John was really impressed with her.

It’s funny, I’m going to become a Sufi minister, but it’s an oxymoron because Sufis technically don’t have ministers. Everybody has their own personal relationship with God.

AB: At the time, did you have a spiritual practice of your own?

Mary Ellen: I was doing my women’s pagan spirituality thing, and at the time that felt okay. There were parts that weren’t fitting, but I thought that was more about the particular group of women I was with. I could see what the Sufi circle was doing for John, but I didn’t feel drawn to it at all for several years.

In fact, when he took the Sufi promise, it freaked me out a little, frankly. The Sufi promise is when you make a commitment to put God first in your life. I thought, Oh Geez, now what are we getting into? But I could feel that it was important to him, so I was as supportive as I could be, even though I was scared.

A month or two after that, our Sufi guide, Sidi, was in Maryland. He lives in Jerusalem and is the caretaker and Imam at the Dome of the Rock Mosque in Jerusalem. He comes to the States every summer and travels around teaching. John wanted me to come with him to a weekend Sidi was leading. I was in Colorado working and flew home. We had this big discussion about it, and I said I didn’t want to go. And John said, Salima says if you come, Sidi could marry us.

At this point, John hadn’t completed his divorce, and I said, Whatare you talking about? John said, Just come. So I went.

AB: What was the weekend like?

Mary Ellen: When we got there, Sidi was marrying one couple after another. They weren’t legal but more like spiritual marriages. Salima was gesturing for us to come up, and I was saying, “No! I don’t know what this is!” But I listened to the marriages and was really impressed at the vows that he was having people take. They rang true for me. So I turned to John and said, I can do that. And then Sidi stopped doing marriages and took a break!

AB: Easy come, easy go.

Mary Ellen: I wanted to know if Sidi could still marry us when John was still legally married to somebody else. So John suggested we go talk to him.

A few months earlier, John had made the Sufi promise and received a Sufi name. Your Sufi name is inside of you already. Sidi energetically goes into your soul and feels the deep quality of your soul that God has given you. He asks God to show that to him, and then he tells you what it is. John had taken the promise with Salima, and she had told Sidi about John over the phone. He’d told her, His name is Amin, which means, The one that the people can trust to be faithful.

This workshop was an outside event, and Sidi was sitting in a screened tent. Sidi doesn’t speak very good English, although there are stories about him needing to speak another language and God giving it to him for a short period of time.

We walked into Sidi’s tent, and John, who had never talked to Sidi in person before, said, Hello, Sidi, can we talk to you? Sidi said, Yes, come in. And John said, My name is Amin, and Sidi said, I know. And I thought to myself, O-k-a-y.

John explained our situation, that he wasn’t yet legally divorced and we wanted to get married. The name Sidi means Teacher and Grandfather, it’s an affectionate nickname for someone who’s in that elder-teacher role. I liked his energy, but I had no idea what he was understanding of what John was saying.

AB: What did Sidi say?

Mary Ellen: Basically, what he said to us was, “Your legal marriage are about the laws of this country, and the laws of this country have nothing to do with God’s law. I can marry you.” And that was totally what I believed! That really spoke to me.

So when he started resuming teaching later on, he did a few more marriages, and one of them was ours. It was very beautiful. But I still walked around that whole day saying to people, This is great, but this is not my path.

AB: And when did that change?

Mary Ellen: About eight months later, Salima was doing a workshop called “Creating Holy and Loving Relationships.” John asked me to go with him, and I went. For the first day and a half, John described me as a bobble-head dog because I was nodding at everything Salima said. It really spoke to me. A knowing in my heart just opened up.

At some point, I turned to John and said, I think I might have to make the Sufi promise. He almost fell off his chair! He had pretty much reigned himself that I would never join him because I had been so adamant about it not being my path. So I took the Sufi promise, and I was off to the races.

AB: What’s it like when you make the promise? Is it a ritual?

Mary Ellen: Four or five of us took the promise with Salima on the same day. One at a time, we knelt down with her, and we held all our four hands together, with her hand on top. She had me repeat some formal words after her and then some promises. The Sufis say, “I promise you, Allah.” Allah is the Arabic word for God, which literally means, “The One,” “The All.” We often use the masculine pronoun, but God does not have a gender. If you have a gender, you’re not in The One, you’re in part of The One.

There are a number of things you promise. One of them is, I promise to take care of my mind, my heart, my soul and my body. One of them is promising to take Sidi as your guide, to help walk you closer into connection with God.

When Sidi gives the promise, he’s being with what God gives him to say each moment. That’s what Salima did with me. The way she describes it is, she reads the promise off your heart. She was reading what was in my heart and putting words to it. It was very emotional for me because she would say something, that I repeated after her, that was very true for me but that I hadn’t realized in a conscious way. She was making conscious and explicit what was in my deepest heart.

AB: That strikes me as remarkable, because I think of that as one of your greatest skills, to put into words what’s happening around you.

Mary Ellen: When I went into that workshop, I had heard from John and other people about the teacher telling people what was going on for them. From my Shadow Work place, I was saying, That’s just wrong! That’s what we like to call projection! My Risk Manager was very suspicious about a facilitator putting their agenda on people.

I was flabbergasted and floored at the work that Salima did with people. It was clear to me that she was not projecting when she was telling people what she was reading in them. She did it in a very polite, respectful way that gave them lots of room to disagree. It was such a different way of being than we have traditionally been in Shadow Work. She wasn’t staying a step behind. It was more even than we do in an AFT process.

AB: I think you’re referring to the Tombstone, God-Split and Predator processes, where we explain a certain wound, and how we’re seeing it in the person’s work, when we’re suggesting a certain process to address it.

Mary Ellen: It was clear to me, I’m not sure how or why, that Salima was bringing truth through. I was so watching, and I was positive that this was not her projected agenda.

She said she was so tuned into her own heart that God was showing her what needed to be brought to the person. And I realized I wanted to learn how to do that. It was so different from holding back my own insights or intuitions, as we do in Shadow Work. I really had a fear of putting my agenda on people, and I saw her doing this in a way that was so clean.

I also saw her handle container-busting objections. I’d never seen anybody be as good as us in Shadow Work at handling challenging participants. Since then, my experience with the faculty at the healing school is that they are as good or better than we are in Shadow Work at handling challenging participants. They come at it in a slightly different way, but they do the same thing: help hold the person, bring them some healing, but contain them so the group can keep going. Sometimes the situation becomes the teaching for the whole group.

So it was those things I saw Salima doing that led me to want to go to the healing school.

AB: Are you saying that’s when you realized you wanted to become a Sufi minister?

Mary Ellen: I don’t think so. I knew I wanted to go and study, to learn what she was doing. The workshop was in June, and I started at the healing school that October.

AB: What are the trainings like?

Mary Ellen: In some ways it’s similar to Shadow Work. It’s very intense, emotional work. The lectures are different because the teachers are consciously doing what they call “transmitting,” energetically transmitting from their hearts to the hearts of all the people in the room. You hear the words but it’s a deeper experience than just listening to a lecture.

Sometimes a teacher leads everybody through an inner process at the same time, very similar to the way we do a group Tombstone visualization. The main difference is that all Sufi processes are about walking through, or washing, to use Sufi lingo, so that you move closer and closer to proximity with God. Any issue you have is about you being in separation from God in some way. The ultimate goal is to live from a place in your heart of what they call The Unity, where you are in constant connection with God in a deep way.

There are also small-group activities where we exchange healings with each other. It wouldn’t be all that unfamiliar to you.

AB: And when did you realize you wanted to become a minister?

Mary Ellen: This past November, for the first time we had some of our classes in our major. Alyce, I spent the whole week weeping, because it felt like I had come home to what I had always been meant to be. I could not stop crying. I always said that Shadow Work was like church and spiritual, there were inklings of that for me. Even years ago, I sort of knew that Shadow Work wasn’t going to be what I was going to do for the rest of my life. I just had no idea that it was going to be like, you know, being a minister, for goodness sakes.

I have had that feeling on the Sufi path before, that it’s been like coming home to a home I didn’t know I was looking for. That’s sort of the way I’ve described it. I couldn’t stop crying, because it was felt like such a gift, and such a blessing. This is who I was always meant to be, and finally letting myself have it or admit it.

AB: What was it that was hard to admit?

Mary Ellen: I think for a long, long time in my life, I was really embarrassed to be spiritual in that way. It’s still hard for my mind to get that I would be someone who would connect with, essentially, this monotheistic religion! With a religion at all! But it’s been what, in a deep way, I’ve longed for, and I made it not okay for myself to go there. Going into spiritual ministry has been very, very profound.

AB: Have you found in your classes that your Shadow Work experience in doing things energetically has helped you learn this kind of work more readily?

Mary Ellen: It’s funny, because I would say yes. But compared to what a lot of people can see and read in someone else, I was blind as a bat. I’ve learned a lot that’s really opened up for me.

I had several advantages. One is all the work I’ve done. Compared to a lot of people, I don’t have a lot of shame. So it was easy for me to trust what I was getting as the teachers were teaching us how to go in and feel what was going on for someone else. A lot of people have a hard time doing that. And I think all the work I’ve done on my emotional stuff helped me move through things much more quickly on the Sufi path than it has been for a lot of people.

AB: Are there ways in which the two kinds of work are similar?

Mary Ellen: In doing Sufi healings, we’re working with the same issues as in Shadow Work. We’re just doing it in a little bit different way, with a different end goal.

This morning, I was talking with a healer in my class who did a healing with a client last night. The client said she wasn’t getting anything. The healer told me a little about this person: that she’s really depressed, she’s in her house all the time, she doesn’t go out at all, she’s gaining weight. I said to her, It sounds to me like she’s pissed off! I was able to give this healer a number of ideas about how to work with this person. A lot of that was based on Shadow Work.

AB: And how are the two different?
Mary Ellen: The Sufi personal practice is about learning to be in your spiritual heart in your body, in your upper chest, and that’s the doorway to all the deeper realms within. You want to be in your heart, and then energetically reach out and connect with someone else’s heart. You have God to show you what’s happening for them.

That was actually a hard thing for me to learn because it was so opposed to everything that I had always believed in Shadow Work. How could I know what’s going on with someone else? I’ve come to see that I can do that.

You need to be polite. You don’t say, This is what’s going on with you! That’s rude! But I’m learning more and more to trust and use what I see in a way that is really useful to my healing clients.

AB: How is your life different as a result of doing Sufi work?

Mary Ellen: I would say that my life is unimaginably better.

So the Sufi path is all about coming into unity with God. And it’s knowing that you are a holy jewel in your heart of hearts. Knowing that you are a holy jewel of God. And that is all about having a deep experience in your heart of Divine Love, of what Sidi would say is the Love, with a capital L. It’s about gnosis, it’s a path of gnosis, it’s about direct tasting.

They tell a story about the teacher holding up a jar of honey and saying, What is this? And the students saying, Honey. And the teacher saying, How do you know? They passed it around. And finally one guy took the jar and put his finger in and stuck his finger in his mouth and said, This is honey. And the teacher said, Yes, you know that it’s honey because you tasted it. Everybody else just looked at the jar.

That’s what this path is about, it’s about tasting, having a direct experience of the Love in my heart which helps me know who I really am in a way that nothing I’ve ever done before has ever brought that to me.

My marriage with John continues to go places that I never imagined, and it just gets better.

I have much more an experience of going through my life with this deep certainty at my core. Which doesn’t change that I get pissed off at the kids on the outside and have all kinds of crazy, hard, day-to-day stuff on the outside. But my inner experience of that is vastly different now. That’s what I mean by unimaginable, because I always thought somehow that I would do enough work on myself so that the outer would shift somehow, and that’s not how it’s happened.

AB: I’m not sure what you mean by the outer.

Mary Ellen: The outer self, and the outer circumstances, both. Things that happen, and my outer self. I more and more experience a difference between my personality and who I really am.

And that’s part of what the Sufi path is all about. The Sufis say, Die before you die. Meaning, who you think you are needs to die in order for you to come into closer proximity with God. Because you are so much more than you think you are. And that’s part of what leaving Shadow Work is for me.

I really thought I was Shadow Work. Mary Ellen equals Shadow Work. And part of deciding to leave Shadow Work has opened up so much more in my heart because it’s like letting that identity die. Letting myself separate from thinking that that’s who I really am. For me, that’s why it’s important for me to step away from Shadow Work, because I don’t think I could — this is really good, Alyce, I’m going to cry, I didn’t realize this — that I got something in my heart, that who I really am isn’t Shadow Work. I have gotten that in a way since deciding to leave Shadow Work, and I don’t think I could have gotten that staying in Shadow Work.

I’m seeing the depths of my holy being separate from all the things my outer self likes to think I am, and that’s really what this path has brought to me and continues to bring to me. And not just from a place where, Yeah, yeah, I know, I’m really holy, I’m really special. But from a deep place of gnosis.

AB: It sounds like a huge change. Shadow Work has been a huge part of your life for a dozen years.

Mary Ellen: I think actually fifteen years. When I first started working with Cliff, it was 1990.

AB: Would you describe the healing work you do now?

Mary Ellen: I start by saying a few prayers and an invocation, which helps me step out of the way, so to speak. It isn’t me doing the healing, it’s me surrendering and opening myself to God that then allows God to come and do the healing.

The core practice is called Remembrance. You close your eyes and let your spiritual awareness drop into your upper chest. Then you repeat a sacred name of God. We Sufis use the word Allah. In many traditions, the “ah” sound opens the heart chakra, and Allah has that sound in it twice.

Then I might ask, as we do in Shadow Work, What do you want to have happen? Or I might ask, What do you want to focus on? The person talks about what they want, and we feel where that is in their body, and go there.

At first, I was afraid that this Sufi path might be a spiritual bypass: Just go to God and you’ll get over it. But it’s not. You feel what’s really going on with you, which I love. Then you bring God to that and see what happens. My job is to help you get down to what’s really going on for you in the moment. Whatever it is, you bring the name of God to that and allow God to do what God does. It’s like a shift in a Shadow Work process. I’m always amazed at what people get when they’re in there.

The healing happens over time, as it is in Shadow Work. If you come to a weekend and do a process, you’ll get something. But it’s when you do it over time that you’ll see a lasting change in yourself.

AB: In your own learning path, is there a cutting edge that you’re working with right now?

Mary Ellen: In my own healings lately, I’ve been working on a place in me that’s always been embarrassed or ashamed to be a deeply spiritual being. The family I come from is very religious, and when my Dad died, I know that my Mom’s relationship with God is what got her through. But it used to be just like hearing fingernails on a blackboard when she spoke it out loud. “Lord, I need you to help me, Lord” she’d say, and I’d feel, Yecch! In Shadow Work lingo, it put that part of me in shadow! But that is me, I think, and it’s still a little hard to say it to you.

I think my work in the world, cutting edge, is really standing as a minister. Really standing in that. I’m still walking through some stuff on that. That’s what I’ve been working on in my own healings as I’m being the client lately, is the places where I’ve been. And I can look all the way back, where in high school and college, I was the cool, punk rock, dressed all in black, chick. The avant-garde theatre chick. Taking on nihilistic poses, and not caring about anything. This definitely feels like stepping out of my coolness. And even, in Shadow Work, being cool in some way.

So that’s another piece of really owning and landing in who I really am. But it’s certainly been challenging to go, You mean that’s who I’m gonna be? What, are ya kidding? Come on, God, have a heart here! Can’t I be cynical and wise-cracking? You want me to be all gooey and spiritual?!

AB: Tell me about your Sufi name.

Mary Ellen: Unlike most people, my Sufi name, Maryam, is a version of my birth name. The Sufis honor Mohammed as The Prophet, but they honor all the prophets, so they honor Jesus, Abraham, Moses, all of them, including Mary. And my name means, She who carries the deep love.

When I first got it, I said, “MARY?!?” I’ve always hated it when people who just called me Mary! But this is Maryam, and I’ve grown to really like it. And now when I go into the bank and they call me Mary, I don’t freak out!

My mom got it right. Maybe my mom was really in tune when she named me.

You can reach Mary Ellen by email at maryam@maryamwhalen.com. You’ll find her also on the Founders page.

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