Shadow work in winter woods

What dreams have visited you this solstice week - in this time of deep quiet and stillness, of shimmering frost crystals, water snaplocked into tiny mirrors?

Winter solstice has offered me a recurring dream. I'm on a Vision Quest, but one beset by people, and I search for a place in the wilds to be on my own. In one dream I finally find a stone grotto, and not expecting anything more than to sit in the sweetness of the silent rock face and my own company, the rock starts pulsing with life, a lavender dove appears and I know that it’s ‘crone’ come to give me guidance. My toddler woke me up just as the crone-dove-rock was about to speak (!) but the energy of the unconditionally loving and wise crone has been a welcome companion in the dark nights. 

Connected as we are to earth’s rhythms -  the daily tides, the moon and sun cycles -  this time of year where the dark reigns and shadows lengthen is a good time to take notice of our own shadows. By 'shadow' here I mean those aspects of ourselves that are true but we know NOTHING about, and would deny if asked. Yes they are hidden, perhaps outcast elements of ourselves. But more often they are related to our gifts. Think of someone you have intensely admired, maybe even fallen in love with a little (or a lot). Good chance what you’re seeing, or projecting, is ‘golden shadow’, unclaimed qualities of beauty or goodness, gifts as yet unmanifest in you.

Artwork by Doug van Houten

There are treasures in the depths that we only find when we go fishing - in wild wanders, in solitude, in shapes made on the frosty ground, in ceremony, in stirring conversations, in our dreams and longings.

The person who has taught me most about shadow work in nature, Bill Plotkin, will be making his LAST southern sojourn to New Zealand in November, and offering two intensives with a small group of courageous wild humans, one of which is Sweet Darkness, a deep fishing expedition for shadow. I’ll be there. Might you?

Wildly,
Claire