Annie Dieu-Le-Veut

If you’re on any kind of spiritual path, you’ll have noticed that this season, which used to close the Celtic wheel of the year, can be more challenging in terms of ‘stuff coming up’…to use the technical term! The veils between the worlds are thinner around Samhain, but that’s only part of the story. The other part is the moult.

Whether it is mammals moulting their fur and antlers, or trees shedding their leaves, Samhain is the time when we slough off and discard all the Halloween ‘ghosts’ of our previous selves that have passed their sell-by date, and put them on the fire.

We see this Shadow Work in the Judgement card of the Rider-Waite Tarot. The Fool, after experiencing the bright light of the Sun, has to deal with his shadows, the ghosts of his former self, when the angel’s trumpet commands their dead bodies to rise up from their crypts to greet him.

The angel is blowing a trumpet to signify that the Fool’s journey has led to a frequency change, which forces up the ‘dead’ from the old frequency to be dealt with before he can continue.

That’s why it is essential that those on the path know how to recognise when the shades are presenting themelves and how to deal with them. These spectres are buried deep, and surface in our journeys and dreams. But when we don’t realise that we need to process them in our inner worlds, or know how to, they can manifest and recur as adversaries and problems in our outer lives.

The first and most difficult part of the process of Shadow Work is realising that we’re being presented with a shade; that it’s not real and that it’s not a live problem for us to have to confront, grapple with and sort out. We merely have to dispose of it.. and I’ll come on to that bit later.

The shade can appear as someone who looks like us. Or we can be presented with a dramatic scenario in which one character is behaving badly and upsetting everyone else. If you’re a Christian, you could get a demon; a Hindu might see asuras or rakshasas… and so on. In ancient myths, it is the monstrous Minotaur at the heart of the labyrinth that the hero has to slay.

But how ever the Shadow presents itself, it’s not our problem; and it’s not for us to feel guilty or ashamed about. It’s just a ghost of a negative character trait that we once had, based on deep-seated fears, which our spiritual work has enabled us to transfigure and transcend.

Sometimes, when the moulting or shedding is heavy, this spiritual detox can become physical. It can bring on something we call ‘shamanic flu’. It has similar symptoms to ordinary ‘flu, with aching all over the body and a high temperature. I think the physical reaction is caused through some of these spooks having to be winkled out of body parts they’ve become lodged in. But at at least while we’re lying there burning up with fever, we can imagine throwing them on the Samhain fire, like Guy Fawkes on his funeral pyre.

As you go deeper into Shadow Work, you’ll get the opportunity to process nightmares you never knew you had. These are usually existential fears that we developed at an age when we were told bedtime stories about Postman Pat always delivering the mail, Noddy and Big Ears always making up after a quarrel, and Santa Claus always coming down the chimney at Christmas to bring us presents if we’re good.

It is necessary — and in fact vital — for children to be able to assume that the world they’ve incarnated into is essentially good, and that there’s always a happy-ever-after.  So a young tot will bury the signal when their instincts are trying to warn them that their mother is neglectful or even cruel, that their father is cold and often absent. To admit that things are not that good at home feels like a threat to their safety and survival.

Existential ‘ghouls’ are usually the last ones to arise from their graves, and some of them might surprise you. They might even be fears that your mother had and had tried to bury while you were in her womb.

Processing the Shadows

So once you’ve recognised a shadow, what do you with it? Reasoning with it, to try to get it to improve it’s behaviour, makes about as much sense as reasoning with a dead body. Feeling bad as we witness ourselves behaving badly is just as pointless; it is no longer who we are. Our egos might get offended that we were once less than perfect, but that’s where humility comes in. If we have learned forgiveness of others, we can apply that same forgiveness to our former selves as if they are another person….because now they are.

You could think of them as an old dress or suit that you no longer fit into, so it needs to go the charity shop. If you have a lot of these old clothes hanging in your wardrobe, you will need to get through them to reach Other Worlds, like in The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe.

Or we could think of it in the same way as when new hair growth pushes out the old hairs, which plug up our basins and make a mess on our floors. We wouldn’t dream of trying to stick those hairs back on our scalps. We just sweep them up and put them in the bin.

The Shadow is just an empty shell, a husk, that just simply needs to be removed, safely and effectively, and that can only be carried out by asking our spirit guides.

This the form of words for their removal that I was taught by my shaman teacher, Simon Buxton:

“Please remove this Shadow from my being and take it to a place where it can do good, and bring harm to no-one.”

This form of Green recycling is based on the notion that there is a place for everything, and that ‘evil’ is just energy in the wrong place, which makes sense to me. For instance, we need sewerage works; we just don’t need them in the middle of our towns where they will stink the place up!

There are other more ritualistic ways that Simon taught us when on retreats at his place in Dorset. One was just writing it down on paper, and throwing it in the fire. Another time we made masks, some quite elaborate, to represent that part of our character that needed to be disposed of, and we acted them out, theatre-style, before throwing the masks on the fire.

Those were highly potent rituals … and were fun to do. But sometimes, on a cold, rainy October evening, when you don’t want to make a song and dance about the whole thing, you just need a quick and simple formula.

Over time I’ve developed this shorthand way with my spirit guides. I just point and say : “This needs to go to the recycling bin.” It’s as simple as that.

I wish you all a wonderful and productive Samhain throwing out the old in order to make space to bring in the new!

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