The Great Gift of Healthy Mirroring
Beholding Our Golden Shadow in Love
Practicing Community – Part Six
“For now we see in a glass darkly, but then face to face. Now I know in part, but then I will know just as I have been fully known.” – I Corinthians 13:12
One of the tragedies of our age of isolated individualism is the narrowing down of our perspective. As people become more and more sectioned off, they are left with their own thoughts, their own way of seeing things, their own ideas of what the world is like and who they are. We have more information available than ever, but it’s all run through the personal screen of what we choose to engage with and what we filter out.
Sometimes it’s a friend giving you a book that you wouldn’t have bought yourself. Sometimes it’s a passing comment that lands in a certain way and opens up newness in you. Sometimes it’s just a smile or a touch that changes the way you feel about a situation halfway across the globe.
Even more, it is in the spaces of intentional seeing, beholding, and lovingly mirroring one another that we can find such expansion beyond our limited, singular perspective. It is through community that we open ourselves to change and growth in ways beyond our own choosing. We are offered more than any teaching or course can provide, for we are brought into the space of collective sight. We are found in the center of generous attention rather than looking at external content. This is “mirroring,” seeing one another with love and reflecting back what we see.
Unhealthy communities will avoid such ways of direct connection and being seen. They will stay in the realm of the conceptual or play the moral judgment game. They will reinforce the masks we wear and place more power in roles and titles. And they will hide all the mirrors—keeping their gaze outward full of drive and projection.
Healthy community will bring us face to face with one another. We will seek to encourage us to see ourselves more clearly and recognize our limitations and our shortcomings. We will hold up the mirror in love and support us in our growth. We will encourage one another through helping us see and reveal what we have been unaware of, where we can come out from the hidden shadows and find acceptance, and where we can sit together in the darkness of the unknown.
If we do this well, it is a great gift. For we don’t usually see ourselves as clearly as we think we do.
We have a limited self-perspective and areas of our awareness that are hidden, distorted, and unseen. That’s where the loving mirror of community can make such a difference.
Our Window of Self-Awareness
A good way to help us understand this is with a diagram called Johari’s Window:
*note – while Johari’s Window uses the term “blind” I will speak of it more as our “unaware” area
Here we see that there are areas in our lives that or open. They are known both to our own conscious awareness and to others around us. “Cindi is very smart. Everyone knows that.”
We also have areas in our lives that are hidden. Things we know about ourselves but don’t share with others, or keep secret from most people. “Luke likes to watch sports but he doesn’t talk about it much because it doesn’t seem very spiritual.”
The right side of the window is the shadow-side. These are things we don’t consciously know or see about ourselves. If others can see what we can’t, that is what the diagram refers to as our blind area. This is delicate ground we usually don’t encroach upon with others in our lives. “Kathryn is always apologizing after she says something in a group and I don’t think she realizes she does that.” We can be unaware of our own motivations, habitual actions, qualities, and more.
And then the unknown areas are the deep shadow, hidden from both ourselves and others. This can be things that have been repressed and buried in our lives. Or they can simply be the deeper layers of our being that we don’t usually perceive through our ordinary knowing—qualities and aspects of our truest self that are still to emerge. Sometimes we can perceive these about ourselves or others in spiritual knowing.
It's important to recognize that the lines between the window panes are not so straight and fixed. How we see ourselves is often partial, a mix of reality and distortion, a blend of known and unknown. The clouds we hide behind and the clouds that cover our sight intermingle. And the open light of awareness can also be slanted and refracted through our self-projections, our constructs, and our own frameworks of knowing.
The same goes for when we are looking at others. So we are never truly reflecting with a perfect mirror—but we can help bring greater clarity to ourselves and others by attempting to see through the deformations and the veils that cover over our sense of self-awareness.
This is a great gift of healthy community, for by definition we are unable to see our own shadow selves. It requires others to help us uncover and discover more of our true nature, our essential uniqueness, and the scope of consciousness capacity we can come into.
While much shadow work focuses on the unhealthy and negative elements we can’t see, we believe it is especially important to begin in community with first doing this work with the positive things we don’t see or believe about ourselves. This is often called our “golden shadow.”
The Golden Shadow
When it comes to shadow elements, we generally resist these unconscious aspects and project them out onto others. In the negative aspects, we often then “shadow-box,” fighting against these qualities in others, when we are really at war with ourselves.
But we also do this with our positive qualities and highest aspirations. We can have a hard time consciously accepting the good aspects of our self, and so we project them onto others as well. This is especially common spiritually, where we ascribe all the best qualities, hopes, and energy onto the spiritual teacher, the guru, the prophetic leader.
We may not have all of the qualities that great spiritual leader has, but often the things we are drawn to most in them are that which our inner being is longing for in ourselves. And these are not the external aspirations for a place of status, but the interior energy and spirit that are the sinews of the fabric of our becoming. The latent capacities and qualities that are already present in us, even if perhaps not fully realized and opened up.
Photo by Inga Gezalian on Unsplash
Mirroring the Light
We all love to receive a compliment. A word of affirmation or encouragement goes a long way. Some people are naturally good at this and others find it much harder to find the right time and way to say such things.
In community, we can consciously take up the golden shadow work of reflecting back to others the wonderful and beautiful qualities we see in them. This is mirroring the light back to one another. Many people are so busy shining their light to others that they forget what it looks like, how it feels.
We are generally conditioned to see our own faults, to focus on our flaws, to listen to the critical voice in our head. For whatever reason, most of us have a very hard time welcoming and accepting the goodness within, the beautiful aspects of our personhood, the wonderous light of our being.
When we show this to each other, we are offering a great blessing by helping see our golden allure that we often have such a hard time seeing and accepting in ourselves. If we hear it enough, we may even start believing it.
Beholding in Love
We can do this casually and in any setting with others, but in our WeSpace groups we have established an intentional spiritual practice that centers this type of interaction. In Integral Prayer, we focus on each person in the group one at a time, placing them in the center of loving attention.
Here, we are beholding one another in the loving gaze of radical acceptance. There is no judgment, only openness to seeing them with the care of deep perception and gracious attention. Every one of us is capable of seeing each other in this way, sharing from the heart the light we perceive.
At the same time, in this practice, we are opening up to the deeper perception of spiritual knowing. This is not so we can know secret things or offer psychic predictions—we aren’t seeking to expose hidden areas so much as help reveal the light that is already present in the other, sometimes unaware. It is often through the realm of metaphor, symbol, and story that these shadow aspects can be allowed in, underneath the filter of our conscious mind.
So in this practice we are learning to open to our spiritual knowing and be with one another in mystical consciousness that perceives more deeply and lovingly. Over time, this transforms our way of seeing and being with ourselves, the world, and one another. We learn to dwell in the communal flow of deep spiritual intimacy that becomes a prism of light refracting all through and among us. The golden shadow is reflected back to us and to the whole of us all.
Growing to Welcome the Mirror
It is a great gift to see another with the eyes of love. And it is great gift to be truly seen.
It can also be a little terrifying.
We may feel hesitancy at being seen in such a way. Or at letting ourselves look so deeply at another. Maybe we’re afraid of hidden faults coming to light. Or fear that underneath the faces we portray they will see something they don’t like. Or we are afraid of intimacy and being hurt.
We may prefer the neutral ground of silence, the safer territory of concepts, the predictability of a personal practice.
In all of these spaces, our ego can hide out relatively disturbance-free. It is in the spaces of relational presence and connection that we open up to a bigger window of awareness, to a wider and fuller sense of being within.
This is one of the profound ways community can move from shoulder-to-shoulder to heart-to-heart. To the greater wholeness together where deep meets deep. With all of our seen and unseen aspects of self, where all of our known and unknown gifts and limitations are welcomed.
As this is sensitive and vulnerable ground, it is vitally important that permission has been granted, that there are established guidelines and collectively agreed-upon boundaries. Safety and trust are essential. We should always enter these spaces with gentleness and care, for mirrors require gentle light if we seek not to blind each other. And we must always be aware of our propensity for projection. We’ll speak to these more next week as we further welcome our shadow in community.
Practicing Community:
Using Johari’s Window below, take up a practice of engaging with each quadrant in your spiritual community. This week we’ll focus on the golden shadow:
For the Open Area, choose to lovingly affirm something you see in a person in your community, even if they already know it about themselves. Share from your heart something you see them doing intentionally that you appreciate.
For the Hidden Area, tell one or two close companions something they don’t know about you. This week, let it be something good or special they might not be aware of. Give a humble flex of your strengths and ways you have grown. (You can tell them it was an assignment so you don’t come across as prideful 😉)
For the Blind Area, ask one or two people you trust to tell you something they see in you that you may be unaware of. It may be a little awkward, but ask for something positive they see that you may not recognize—again, you can tell them it’s an assignment you were given. Give them time to think about it before responding.
For the Unknown Area, engage in a collective practice that is open to emergence, to not what we already know but what we’re about to know. For spirit to speak in our midst and arise with the wisdom we need to know now. At the same time, welcome the unknowing together, accepting the Mystery always in our midst.
Golden Shadow work through Integral Prayer is a primary practice in our WeSpace groups.
To start sharing this practice in loving community, join a WeSpace group today!
Groups are starting next week:
1st & 3rd Wednesdays at 7:00pm CT — Starts 9/7 — Full
2nd & 4th Mondays at 1:00pm CT — Starts 9/12
2nd & 4th Tuesdays at 7:30pm CT — Starts 9/13
2nd & 4th Wednesdays at 11:00am CT — Starts 9/14
1st & 3rd Thursdays at 4:30pm CT — Starts 9/15
1st & 3rd Fridays at 1:30pm CT — Starts 9/16
(ALL TIMES LISTED ARE U.S. CENTRAL DAYLIGHT TIME)
(International times available here)