Cleaning Up - An Introduction to the Shadow and Shadow Work (Special Event)

Effective advanced adult development can be described with the following phrase “Wake Up, Grow Up, Clean Up and Show Up”

"Waking Up" in this context can be distilled down simply as becoming aware there’s still more to learn.

"Growing Up" can be summed up as leaning into the process, creating a strong intention of introspection and practice to move through to higher developmental stages, towards that ‘more’ in ‘more to learn’.

And "Cleaning Up" is the process of healing or of coming into congruence with oneself. It is the stage this workshop points to as a key piece of Cleaning Up is discovering, acknowledging and working with our shadows (Shadow Work).

The shadow is defined as our unconscious behaviors, sometimes considered reactionarily instinctive or irrational. Unowned or unprocessed shadows are often projected onto others and they tend to represent an aspect of ourselves we do not (yet) accept.

From this place Ken Wilber and Dustin DiPerna present “Shadow Work” as one of the three foundational pillars required for a person or thing to be ‘whole’ via their “Towards a Deliberately Developmental Civilization” whitepaper. The document also offers the other two as being awareness of Structures of Consciousness (which ART offers through it’s courses) and States of Consciousness (which ART offers through just about every event we host). The theory is lack of comprehensive awareness in one, leads to fractures -- or to be somewhat hyperbolic, broken people and/or civilizations.

The only existing ART container with an intention to offer explicit shadow work is in Master Circle Level 2, and we have yet to hold that level 2 course yet. Aware of this gap in our ecology of practices currently available under the ART name, we’re looking to offer this workshop to the ART community as an introduction to the Shadow and Shadow Work.

Therefore, this workshop might be for you if you:

• If you feel like you’re well into your personal development journey but notice some areas where you feel stuck
• You feel ready to peel back and examine another layer of your experience
• Have no (or only a beginners) understanding of Shadow and Shadow Work

And as one might be able to determine, if we reserve this work for an advanced leadership course, the work might be fairly intense and/or confronting. As a Trauma Informed space you will have a lot of choice to the degree in which you participate, and as we may be dipping into what is unconscious for us, it’s important that you consider the following...

That this workshop might not be for you if:

• Have experienced Trauma and you are presently (recently have been) experiencing symptoms of that Trauma
• Are presently experiencing difficulty regulating yourself, or consider yourself prone to dysregulation.

What we’re offering in this workshop:

• Discuss the concept of “The Shadow” and "Shadow Work"
• Bring forward some awareness and practices to aid us
• Engage in a process to explore our shadow
• Offer an experience of Shadow Work practice (in a group)
• And then a debrief of our experience

And in closing, as we work to integrate our shadow(s), we’ll be better able to do the “Showing Up” part.

Of course... many of us will mistake our position in the queue from time-to-time where we will likely find ourselves in the seemingly necessary and unavoidable stage of “F@ucking Up”... at which time it’s likely appropriate to re-engage with some of these Cleaning Up tools we’ll touch on in this workshop.

Payment: To get on the RSVP list yourself, you must complete payment via paypal when RSVPing, if you do not want to use paypal, we can manually put you on the RSVP list if you send a $30 Interac EMT to payment@authenticrelatingtoronto.com

Logistics: Doors @ 7, Start @ 7:10, Doors Closed @ 7:20

This event is led by Taylor.