Robert Augustus Masters: The Depthless Depth of Shadow Work

Sounds True: Insights at the Edge

Tami Simon

Religion, Religion & Spirituality

4.6 • 1.8K Ratings

🗓️ 27 November 2018

⏱️ 63 minutes

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Summary

Robert Augustus Masters is an integral psychotherapist and author whose works include To Be a Man, Emotional Intimacy, and Spiritual Bypassing. Most recently, he teamed with Sounds True to publish Bringing Your Shadow Out of the Dark: Breaking Free from the Hidden Forces That Drive You. In this illuminating episode of Insights at the Edge, Tami Simon speaks with Robert about the influence of the shadow side of the psyche—especially Robert's own encounters with it. Robert describes his experiences as the leader of a psychospiritual community that gradually transformed into a cult, including the near-death experience that forced him to confront the reality of his actions and change his life. Tami and Robert also talk about the powerful influence of shame, as well as the important differences between anger and aggression. Finally, they discuss the desire to place spiritual guides on pedestals and what we can do to address the difficult aspects of student-teacher relationships. (63 minutes) Tami's Takeaway: One of the ways that Robert Augustus Masters describes our personal shadow is that it contains experiences of wounding and early conditioning that we have yet to face. How do we know what we haven't yet faced? Robert teaches that one of the best ways we can start to identify our shadow is to pay careful attention to moments of reactivity (we all know what those feel like) and then ask, "How old do I feel in this moment?" By entering the pain of these early disowned experiences, we start the hard task that Robert calls "illuminating the shadow," a great life work that is endlessly deep and endlessly liberating.

Transcript

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0:00.0	This program is brought to you by Sounds True.com.
0:04.0	At sounds true.com, you can find hundreds of downloadable audio learning programs,
0:09.0	plus books, music, videos, and online courses and events. At sounds true.com, we think of ourselves
0:17.1	as a trusted partner on the spiritual journey, offering diverse, in-depth, and life-changing wisdom.
0:24.0	Sounds True.com. You're listening to Insights at the Edge. Today my guest is Robert Augustus Masters. Robert is an integral psychotherapist, relationship
0:47.2	expert and spiritual teacher whose work blends the psychological and
0:51.8	physical with the spiritual, emphasizing
0:55.4	embodiment, emotional literacy, and the development of relational maturity.
1:00.9	He's written many books, including a new book with Sounds True, called
1:06.1	Bringing Your Shadow Out of the Dark. He's also written a book called
1:10.6	Transformation Through Intimacy, which draws on his relationship with his beloved
1:16.9	partner, Diane Bardwell Masters, and an important book on spiritual bypassing.
1:24.2	In this episode of Insights at the Edge,
1:26.6	Robert and I spoke about the time he spent
1:29.6	leading an experimental psycho-spiritual community and how that community turned into a cult with
1:37.5	Robert as its leader and the process back in 1994 of waking up from that nightmare, learning from the
1:47.1	shame that he felt from that experience, and then the process that he's been in over the past two decades of engaging with
1:57.2	students and clients in a very different way. We talked about the difference
2:02.2	between aggression and healthy anger and also the difference between
2:07.0	healthy and unhealthy shame and why these distinctions are so important.
2:13.0	We talked about how many spiritual teachers
2:16.0	have what Robert called
	...

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