October in the Galaxy: Shadow Work (let’s hang out with ourselves)

Happy October, Galaxy!

I’m writing to you on a glorious fall day, and I HOPE that you’ve gotten to spend a little time outdoors today, because it’s simply beautiful. I have a swim on my to-do list after I finish typing this.

It’s been a busy few weeks, both at the studio and personally, as we wrapped our fall retreat to Red Clover, began our fall teacher training, and then I departed on a four-day bike trip from Wisconsin, around the south coast of Lake Michigan and up to Muskegon, to then take one of the last Lake Express ferries of the season back home to Milwaukee. My legs are still a little sore, but my heart is full!

The bike trip was something that I envisioned as possibly a group trip, but sometimes adults have a lot of adult-ing to do, and I ended up doing the ride mostly solo. I had my niece who lives in Chicago join me on day two, but days 1, 3 and 4 were just me and my bike.

I had lots of time to reflect while I biked, and that’s part of why I wanted to do it. I call it “good disassociation,” where you’re basically forced to hang out with yourself, and there isn’t a screen or other distraction to take you out of the experience.

As someone who is entering into this very new life phase of parenting older kids who really don’t need me in the same ways they needed me when they were younger, I’m starting to get more alone time. But the experience of just being by myself, with nobody needing anything from me, is still fairly new and novel, and incredibly therapeutic.

There seem to be ever more ways that we can isolate, and the mediums via which we might commonly experience connection can prove pretty false or thin (I’m thinking of the virtual world of apps and social media). Putting yourself in some sort of setting or experience where there is very little to distract you from yourself and the what, why and how of who you are is something that I think we are less and less likely to choose for ourselves.

There was an article that came out in the Atlantic recently about why yoga isn’t cool anymore (LOL okay phew), and if you look anywhere in the online spaces, it’s very clear that modalities like Pilates, especially HOT PILATES are on the rise. And what’s the difference, really? You might take a peek at a Pilates mat class and see that it looks a lot like a yoga class.

I think the difference has to do with being asked to hang out with yourself. Yoga (at least yoga the way we like to do it here at the Galaxy) asks us not to just check out and throw ourselves through the Down Dogs, the Chaturangas, the Warrior Twos - it asks us to do it with attentiveness and responsiveness, via practices of specific gazing points, specific breaths, or specific awareness of what we’re feeling and where we’re feeling it. It’s kind of like the difference between listening to someone else guide you in meditation, and sitting down on your mat and being your own meditation guide.

I don’t want to make it into some sort of hierarchy of achievement, but it does seem kind of obvious to me that one is harder than the other. Or, maybe “harder” isn’t the right word. It’s going to ask a lot more of us in the process. Even better, it might just bring about a sense of healing, wholeness, and interconnectedness that wasn’t as readily available to us before.

We’re diving into shadow work at the studio this month, and the opportunity to really hang out with yourself is at the front and center of what we’re trying to focus on. I think it’s likely that there are some untended aspects of ourselves that need some investigation.

If you’ve walked up the stairs and read this Jung quote I set out on the boards, it’s talking about this exact thing:

“That we are bound to the earth does not mean that we cannot grow; on the contrary it is the sine qua non of growth. No noble, well-grown tree ever disowned its dark roots, for it grows not only upward but downward as well.”

If you’re at all familiar with Jung’s concept of the shadow - the more we disown or leave under-nourished these parts of us, the more insistent they will be on making themselves known, in ways that we probably won’t find pleasant.

I did a lot of thinking about a lot of deep stuff on my bike ride, but when I look back on those four days, there are a few quite simple moments that stand out to me as incredibly integrative, affirming of some lost or lesser-accessed parts of me, and maybe emblematic of some pretty productive shadow work.

Number one, I just snot rocketed whenever I needed to. Incredibly gross, but incredibly freeing.

Number two, I had no one to talk to, so I said hello to literally every single animal I crossed paths with. I’m now very good friends with the wild turkeys and deer of West Michigan.

Finally, there was a moment on the tail end of my day three ride into Saugatuck where I was tired, but so happy. The sun was shining, I was flying down a back road, and I was filled with joy. I know it’s hard to believe, but I’m actually a pretty shy person - I’m certainly not the type to just bust out in song whenever I want to. But singing brings me more joy than perhaps anything else in this world, and I don’t get to do it enough. I very often censor or stop myself from doing things I want to do, because I somehow deem it to not be appropriate for a middle aged lady. I think that’s something I need to Dispatch about on another day.

But this day, on that back road outside of Saugatuck, there was nothing against which I cared to measure the appropriateness of just cutting loose and singing. So I sang for the last ten miles into Saugatuck. I passed a few people, the turkeys and the deer ran away looking kind of scared, but it felt so good to just do exactly what I wanted to do, and know that I didn’t need to explain myself or worry about whether it was what mature adults did.

And although some parts of our shadow self are things we’re ashamed of, often they’re things that start out as pure longings or desires. Ross Gay talks about mycelial networks (aka fungal duff) that exist underground being made up of the most vital living material, while simultaneously being created out of death and dying. And of course, he goes on to say - that really is what joy is. Joy is the meeting place of light and dark. Joy is the unearthing of our forgone desires that otherwise may turn into our shadows. Joy is taking the very necessary time to practice good disassociation and to hang out with ourselves.

I hope we can do a little parallel self-hangout practice in the studio this month (is this a good definition of yoga???).

I look forward to what we will unearth. Pun intended.

Maybe we’ll bust out in a little unplanned singing.

Xo,

a