“Without leaps of imagination or dreaming, we lose the excitement of possibilities. Dreaming, after all is a form of planning.”
~ Gloria Steinem

A few weeks ago, my husband and I braved cross-country flights to visit our grandsons in California. It had been seven months since they’d been here for the holidays, and we couldn’t wait a moment longer to see them. And their parents, of course. :)

I took along a book the almost-five-year-old had loved when he was here. It’s a Kohl’s Cares book called How to Catch a Star. After we read the book together a few times, I started pointing out some funny things I noticed about the kid in the book. Illustrated in an artsy watercolor style (which is part of what first drew me to the book), the boy doesn’t have all of his body parts. Worse…the parts he does have change from page to page. He has a shirt but no pants. Stick legs and no feet or shoes. His arms come and go. When he has hands, he has three fingers and a thumb. He’s frequently missing a mouth, but it does appear in a scene where he’s having lunch. The more we focused on the missing body parts in each scene, the more we giggled.  

On many pages, the kid has a shadow, but it’s mostly just a long dark blob. Somehow I got the idea that we should recreate the images on a sheet of paper so we could give the poor boy his missing parts. We gave him curly hair, flashy tennis shoes, and hands with all five digits. Once that was done, we started enhancing his shadow. I suggested that since the boy’s own parts come and go, the shadow didn’t necessarily need to match him, so we drew different accessories on the shadow. I even wondered if the shadow, fully formed, might sneak away and look for the star himself?

As I was relating the incident to a friend, she mentioned that it reminded her of the psychological concept of the shadow self. Not necessarily negative, this self, first proposed by Carl Jung, is made up of those traits we perceive as dark or weak within us…so dark that we refuse to see them ourselves, and hide them from others as best we can.

Jung’s idea was that if we bring these tendencies into our awareness (rather than repress and deny them, which can cause them to grow in power), we can learn to accept all the parts of ourselves. Acknowledging our shadow selves gives us an opportunity to become more whole and balanced. Many people do this type of shadow work in therapy.

Depending on the direction of the light, at various times our physical shadows can be in front of us, behind us, or traveling alongside us. What an apt metaphor for our outlook on life! At different stages of our lives we can be focusing on what’s to come, glancing back at where we’ve been, or content to be with ourselves just as we are.

At this point, my friend and I, who have done our recovery work, are focused on continuing to develop positive traits to help move us forward. We decided we preferred the image of a light and whimsical shadow—a happy one, full of potential. The self we will grow into if we continue on our path of learning, stretching ourselves as we go. One who looks like us but is more fully formed, and is able to step out more on her own.

What might our “shadow of possibilities” look like?

Calmer in the face of adversity?
More accepting of ourselves and others?
Increasingly open to new ideas?
Confident about our place in the world?
Truly happy to be us, in all our uniqueness?

A hallmark of being spiritual seekers, my friends, is that we tend look to the future more than the past. All the exploration, the reading, the growth is about imagining the possibilities for a better, more purposeful life for us and those we love.

What’s on the list for your shadow of possibilities? What steps are you taking to help him or her grow into existence?

Affectionately,

Elaine