A Mason's Work

[00:00] I want to start today's episode by talking about a concept that is central to Jungian
[00:06] psychology.
[00:07] Carl Jung was a guy who was really influential in the history of psychology as an alternative
[00:14] to this kind of Freudian root cause analysis process.
[00:19] Jung had his own take on the way you identify and solve problems with your own personal
[00:26] experience.
[00:26] And one of the core concepts of Jungian psychology is called the shadow.
[00:32] And the shadow as a concept is essentially your behavior that you can no longer see.
[00:42] It's the stuff that's outside of your visual field of view, for lack of a better way to
[00:50] say it.
[00:50] The behaviors that you execute, maybe even on autopilot or the stuff that's moving sort
[00:57] of below the waterline, if you will, that has not broken the surface and become something
[01:03] that you can adjust or trim or work with.
[01:07] In Masonic terms, this is the rough parts of the stone.
[01:12] They're the pieces of you that have led to a certain set of behaviors or a way of being
[01:19] in the world that isn't serving the overall design.
[01:25] It's not helping you build a better version of yourself.
[01:28] It's the kind of leftover stuff that isn't working for you.
[01:35] And so when we start sitting down to do shadow work, the first thing we have to understand
[01:42] as we look at this is that our shadow is invisible to us for the most part.
[01:50] It doesn't have something you can grab onto until you learn kind of where it is.
[01:59] And this is an odd experience when you start to really pursue it because it feels like you're
[02:10] having a disproportionate reaction to a situation.
[02:13] It feels like you're angry or upset or mad at someone.
[02:21] And sometimes that feeling doesn't match the situation.
[02:27] You're irrationally upset.
[02:31] You're irrationally moved to a certain set of behaviors.
[02:36] That is kind of a first order indicator that your shadow is there.
[02:47] You can take a mental or emotional inventory of the situations in your life where you overreacted.
[02:56] And in those situations, there's work to be done.
[03:00] There is an opportunity for you to cultivate consciousness in a way that allows you to assume
[03:06] that level of agency we talked a little bit about yesterday.
[03:10] So one way is to look for those sort of discontinuities or those challenges where your response is
[03:19] disproportionate.
[03:20] Another way is to start to look across the patterns in your life, the things that you perhaps wish
[03:29] were different.
[03:30] I wish I did this or I wish I was in this situation.
[03:35] That you kind of push into the periphery.
[03:38] You take those wishes, but you never turn them into concrete steps in action.
[03:43] Those wishes are another source of understanding some of the parts of you that you've pushed out of
[03:50] view and kind of hidden behind this hoodwink where you refuse to acknowledge or see.
[04:00] The causes of that behavior.
[04:04] We'll talk a little bit more as we go through the week about how we're going to address some
[04:08] of these things moving on, you know, moving through them and understand what to do and all
[04:13] that kind of stuff.
[04:13] But for now, it's probably the most useful thing you can do is start to look for indicators of the
[04:22] shadow.
[04:23] And one of the third ways you can do that is to look for the patterns.
[04:28] What is it that you do that keeps showing up as a recurring theme?
[04:36] Every time this happens, I do that.
[04:41] Every time I feel this way, I find myself doing this thing.
[04:46] Those kinds of connections are really about helping you identify that place where your behavior has
[04:57] moved from a visible and obvious cause and effect to a subliminal cause and effect to that shadow.
[05:07] Pursuing your shadow is the beginning of great Masonic work.
[05:12] If you can continue to find it, and let me be quite clear, your shadow will always exist, just like in real life.
[05:21] You may refine and improve your capacities over time.
[05:26] Our mission here is to essentially reduce its impact on your ability to respond,
[05:32] to give you more agency and more capacity to develop solutions in your everyday life.
[05:38] questions.
[05:39] So, I wanted to express my background.
[05:56] Can you expand your behaviors in tomorrow?
[06:02] Get tooЬНАЯ感度!