And how it relates to Yin in Daoism
Shadow work is the practice of meeting the parts of yourself you’ve denied or dismembered to stay good.
When we are obsessed with goodness, we become evil. I say this as an occultist and medium. My work week involves the dead and the parts of the living they would rather leave unaddressed, or buried (pun intended).
Being good is a full-time self-obsession. It keeps a person preoccupied guarding an image of themselves, and whatever threatens the image is bypassed with a platitude, a positive reframe, or a bit of emotional management about how everyone is ‘doing their best’.
I'm less interested in anger and grief. They've had their rehabilitation in self-help, there are prompt decks dedicated to them now, and people are fairly comfortable talking about them. What I'm referring to is the dirtier stuff, like greed or pettiness, the wish to see someone suffer, the comfort of the victim's position, and the long explanations, the ‘context’, offered in place of change. Underneath it all is a childish equation of right equals good and wrong equals bad. And in the polarized spaces we find ourselves in, online and off, I've noticed that ‘right’ means less and less ‘good’ and more and more ‘acceptable to the people whose approval I need’.
How does an obsession with goodness become evil?
Goodness becomes evil when the appearance of being good matters more than the people that appearance affects. From then on, harm has to be denied, softened, intellectualized, contextualized or otherwise explained, because admitting it would topple the image. The person goes on behaving as they do while feeling righteous, and the righteousness is what keeps them from sensing any other reality.
You can watch this happen in real time. Tell a good person they've hurt you and what usually comes back is context, the kind of week they were having, their ‘good’ intentions, their childhood trauma (sometimes in surprising detail), and while every part of those sentences may be true, what they ultimately amount to is a very polite refusal to examine and change. Context lets them stay right, rightness lets them stay good, and being good is viewed as sufficient reason to end the conversation.
Then comes the part I find intolerable. The injured party starts comforting the injurer, offering reassurance, smoothing things over, because goodness needs to stay good, and forces a swapping of roles. It is a risky thing to challenge goodness, because goodness will go to great lengths to punish when it is named anything else.
The punishing impulse is the thing good people hide best, partly from themselves, because punishment done in goodness's name feels, from the inside, like justice. It looks like a justified withdrawal described as ‘protecting one's energy’, or gossip disguised as ‘concern’, or the exclusion of anyone who saw that flash of you in an unflattering light. The victim position then seals the whole thing shut. In that binary, once I've been wronged, anything I do next counts as self-defence. Nietzsche put it this way in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, “Distrust all in whom the impulse to punish is powerful.”
In spiritual culture, New Age especially, though it reaches well beyond, light became shorthand for good and darkness for whatever needs to be cleansed, cut cords with and sent back where it came from. Love and light went from (a good-obsessed, ‘well-intentioned’) blessing to a coded way to end real and necessary conversations. The pairing of light with purity and darkness with danger is centuries old, and our emotional rigour has lagged.
Love and light is whiteness with a meditation practice. Of strategic ambiguity and plausible deniability.
Where does shadow work begin?
Shadow work begins where your goodness feels threatened. Yin, in the Daoist sense, first meant the shady side of a mountain, and Yang the sunny side, and every mountain has both. The shadow is simply the side of you the sun does not reach, and it belongs to the same mountain.
Being told you've made a mistake or hurt someone is a gift. It introduces you to the shade you've been casting without knowing, in the blindness of your own sun. The trouble is how much we prize the feeling of being good. When that feeling is disturbed, we conclude that a good person shouldn't feel this, or be told this, so we recoil, and then we defend–obliquely for some, directly for others–but it's almost always there. The practice of learning from the Yin is staying in the moment to see what it shows you, before you explain or bolt.
Picturing figures of light, in Jung's account, enlightens no one, and the work is making the darkness conscious, and it is is mundane, unglamorous and even embarrassing. Journals and prompt decks from the self-help industry may help, though they also make it very easy to do shadow work alone, in good lighting, and when done privately, who can disagree with your conclusions?
Is shadow work dangerous?
Shadow work is dangerous, and it should be. Yin is meant to destabilize. She is a holy territory of the unknown, the place where the self-concept wobbles, and we were never meant to be gods, or to spend our lives clutching the pearls of our own perceived goodness. The shadow shows itself most clearly in relationships, in moments of emotional intimacy, when someone sees you. Intimacy has a caveat though, you can't control what parts of you are seen. So often in the age of loneliness and social media and the binary, we opt for parasocial relationships or long distance friendships conducted on our phones. We can tell ourselves we experience intimacy, but want to maintain full control over it. But love is Yin, and love is risky.
None of this makes the shadow bad. Wrong exists to widen what's possible. It is to teach us how to walk on uneven terrain, to teach us resilience, grace for human messes, and the ability to come together. The word wrong, rangr, which comes from an earlier form, vrangr comes from the Old Norse for crooked or awry, bent off the straight line, and crooked paths have a way of reaching places straight ones skip. Once being wrong is survivable, you can try more things, and learn to dare. You may dare to see a friend instead of an enemy.
What good comes from working with the shadow self?
Embracing the shadow gives back the energy you were spending on hiding it.
People in spiritual and creative work are often taught, gently and repeatedly, that speaking directly is unspiritual or aggressive. So they speak obliquely, overgive, and say yes to situations that drain them, and the hunger to communicate truthfully comes back as resentment, as lateness, as pettiness, as envy of a friend's success, as withholding, as entitlement. Directness takes courage, and the person who risks saying something clearly invites the other to meet them there. The resentment drains away because the truth is legitimate, it stands clearly in the shining sun. To betray the shadow is to betray the entire mountain of yourself, and another’s.
Survivable wrongness makes repair possible
If wrong means bad, every mistake is a threat to the self, and the self defends itself with context, justification and the occasional counter-accusation. Once you can be wrong and stay in good standing with yourself, the defenses have nothing left to guard. Someone says that hurt me, and you can say, you're right, here's what I'll do differently, and then do it. Resolution is possible this way.
But what to do when shame creeps in?
In the individual-minded West, shame disrupts the good person whose whole identity rests on approval, and they either collapse under it or refuse to give space for shame. Both responses are self-indulgent. The collapse turns the harm into a story about the person who caused it. Get over yourself. Sure, your feelings are valid, and what about the feelings of the person, or people, you’ve affected?
In Chinese culture, which I’ll speak to here, the self exists in relation, be it through family, friendships, community, in the web of relationality. Shame there reads as information about a relationship that needs tending, and the response is to go and tend it, to repair, make amends, do better.
How does Yin practice work with the shadow?
Yin practice expects and acknowledges the existence of shadow. In Daoist cosmology, Yin and Yang produce each other, so the dark, receding, hidden half is as real and necessary as the bright one. The practice gives exiled parts a place, so they can be met in the open instead of acting in secret.
The Daodejing discusses this in the text's second chapter. When everyone agrees on what is good, the not-good shows up in the same breath, the two of them arising together the way high and low, or front and back, give each other their shape.
Chinese folk practice has a working model I find more useful than a shelf of self-help or love-and-light platitudes. During Ghost Month, households set out food, incense and paper offerings for the wandering dead, the hungry ghosts with no descendants left to feed them. The offerings are hospitality, and a fed ghost is a great deal less trouble than a vampire you have to keep banishing. Yin practice treats the shadow much the same way, with offerings, with names.
That is the ground of WRONG: Yin Rites as Heretic, Villain & Perverse, an eight-week shadow work series beginning Monday, January 18, 2027. Each week takes one of the Yin charges (darkness, heretic, villain and monster, revenge, bane, perversity, pollution, evil) laid against ‘goodness’ and works it through rites, creative writing, and the study of films and stories that have cast these figures as the enemy.
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Following the spirits,
Mimi
Currently also teaching the Finding I Ching Clarity series