When it’s time to do the Work

Yesterday I held a workshop on shadow work at Casa de Luz village in Austin. It went very well. It was small but well received. If anyone would like to be part of an online version or attend another one near Austin, let me know. I'll keep doing these but the next workshop will be on "The Alchemical Relationship".

This was the speech I delivered to open up yesterday's presentation:

"When we cut ourselves off from the shadow side of life we lose our connection to depth. When we structure our minds and lives to bypass the shadow, we are forced to live at the surface of life. This means we become spiritually starved. And this is what we are experiencing in our culture today. We have a superficial, surface level experience because we have become afraid of our own shadows, literally.

When we look at nature, we see that everything grows up towards the sun. So it’s understandable that we seek the light. But the energies of life come from below the surface. The soil that contains the nutrients for growth is made out of dead life. Life comes out of death. But when things are growing and the sun is shining, there’s no reason to look down. Looking down may actually make you lose your balance. But inevitably we eventually slip and fall and when we do, we lay face down in the dirt. We're in the dark night of the soul, so to speak. And our first impulse is to get out of that immediately.

But the reason we fell is because while we were so focused on the light and on our own visions of what is and what could be, we were unknowingly creating blindspots, and what grew in those blindspots eventually brought us down. And this is all for a very good reason. This cycle is actually the cycle of life and evolution. And what we are looking at when we eventually fall face down in the dirt is actually that which we need, if we are to grow and to evolve into a new stage of life. This applies to us as individuals and to entire cultures. The dirt, the shadow, the darkness contains what we need to evolve.

Truthfully, it’s only when we are in the bottom of the cycle, in the so-called nigredo, when we have the greatest opportunity to see our weaknesses, our short comings and our shadow material. Because when we are flying high, there is no way we can see those things. But our culture is so incredibly solar and we have so little tolerance for darkness, that we have lost the wisdom that comes from below, which is related to the dark feminine archetype. This is Persephone who spends half of her life in the underworld with Hades and the other half with the Earth mother Demeter in spring time ecstasy. Both energies are part of the equation of life. Duality rules. Light and dark are true equals.

What we are in need of now, as our culture is degrading and we are slipping and heading for a fall, is the wisdom of the dark. We need perspectives and tools that we can use to turn darkness into new growth, into true evolution. And this is what the alchemical path is all about. It’s like a composting operation. A refinement operation. A transmuting operation where we convert the old and degraded into new life. Alchemy is a process that takes nature’s wisdom of the seasons and uses it in our own lives for the cause of evolution.

It’s natural that we might be afraid of what lies in the underworld when we have no tools, no flashlights or maps of the terrain. So what we are doing here now is to create maps and tools for the Great Work that we must do when nature puts our face into the shadow and says: “ts time for you to do the Work”. "

Posted to Facebook on July 12th, 2026.