The Shadowlands With Connie Zweig

Everything Belongs: Living the Teachings of Richard Rohr Forward

Center for Action and Contemplation

Religion & Spirituality, Christianity

4.8 • 723 Ratings

🗓️ 15 May 2024

⏱️ 90 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

What is the shadow? How do we understand it? In this episode, we're joined by Connie Zweig as we continue our chapter-by-chapter exploration of Falling Upward with Chapter 11: "The Shadowlands." In this conversation with Connie Zweig, we explore the complex relationship between spiritual communities, the unconscious aspects of ourselves, and the potential for growth within ourselves and these groups. Before we dive in to the interview with Connie, CAC staff catch up with Richard at his hermitage to hear his reflections on the eleventh chapter a decade after he originally wrote it. Connie Zweig, Ph.D., is a retired therapist, writer, Climate Reality Leader, and Citizens Climate Lobbyist. Known as the Shadow Expert, she is coauthor of Meeting the Shadow and Romancing the Shadow and a novel, A Moth to the Flame: The Life of Sufi Poet Rumi. Her award-winning book, The Inner Work of Age: Shifting from Role to Soul, extends her work on the Shadow into midlife and beyond and explores aging as a spiritual practice. It won both the 2021 American Book Fest Award and the 2021 Best Indie Book Award for best inspirational non-fiction. Her newest book, Meeting the Shadow on the Spiritual Path: The Dance of Darkness and Light in Our Search for Awakening is available now. It explores shadow-work into the religious and spiritual arena. Connie has been doing contemplative practices for more than 50 years. She is a wife, stepmother, and grandmother. After all these roles, she’s practicing the shift from role to soul. Resources: A PDF of the transcript for this episode is available here. Grab a copy of the newly revised version of Falling Upward, with a new foreword by Brené Brown here. To learn more about Connie's work, check out her website here. We mentioned Connie's book, Meeting the Shadow on the Spiritual Path, several times in this episode. You can find that here. Connect with us: Have a question or thought about this season that you'd like to share with us? Email us: podcasts@cac.org Send us a voicemail here: http://www.cac.org/voicemail

Transcript

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0:00.0	You're listening to a podcast by the Center for Action and Contemplation.
0:04.0	To learn more, visit cac.org.
0:07.4	The following poem, The Holy Longing, by Johann Wolfgang von Gerta,
0:13.3	is mentioned in the latter half of this episode.
0:16.8	It goes like this.
0:19.0	Tell a wise person, or else keep silent, because the mass man will mock it
0:24.5	right away. I praise what is truly alive, what longs to be burned to death. In the calm water
0:33.0	of the love nights, where you were begotten, or you have begotten, a strange feeling comes over you
0:40.3	when you see the silent candle burning. Now you are no longer caught in the obsession with darkness,
0:48.5	and a desire for higher lovemaking sweeps you upward. Distance does not make you falter.
0:55.4	Now, arriving in magic, flying,
0:58.4	and finally, insane for the light,
1:01.5	you are the butterfly, and you are gone.
1:05.2	And so long as you haven't experienced this,
1:08.2	to die and so to grow,
1:13.8	you are only a troubled guest on the dark earth.
1:21.3	To be a troubled guest is to be stagnant, to fear the many deaths of the self that bring transformation,
1:30.3	that bring life. So how does one break free and transform like a butterfly? By working with the materials shielded from the light, what Carl Jung aptly called the shadow. The holy longing is our
1:37.3	innate desire for integration of our light and shadow. Not good, not bad, the shadow just is. Father Richard says, your shadow is what you
1:48.6	refuse to see about yourself and what you do not want others to see. That is the invitation of this
1:56.1	chapter to face your own contradictions and befriend your own repressions.
2:02.6	In today's conversation, we find ourselves back in Richard's Hermitage
	...

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