Tami Simon: You’re listening to Insights at the Edge. Today, my guest is Robert Augustus Masters. Robert is an integral psychotherapist, relationship expert, and spiritual teacher whose work blends the psychological and physical with the spiritual emphasizing embodiment, emotional literacy, and the development of relational maturity.
He’s written many books, including a new book with Sounds True called Bringing Your Shadow Out of the Dark. He’s also written a book called Transformation Through Intimacy, which draws on his relationship with his beloved partner, Diane Bardwell Masters, and an important book on Spiritual Bypassing.
In this episode of Insights At The Edge, Robert and I spoke about the time he spent leading an experimental psychospiritual community and how that community turned into a cult with Robert as its leader, and the process, back in 1994, of waking up from that nightmare, learning from the shame that he felt from that experience. And then the process that he’s been in over the past two decades of engaging with students and clients in a very different way. We talked about the difference between aggression and healthy anger, and also the difference between healthy and unhealthy shame, and why these distinctions are so important.
We talked about how many spiritual teachers have what Robert called, “lopsided development,” and how it’s important not to pedestalize spiritual teachers as the good parents we never had, but instead, in our contemporary times, to evolve the teacher-student relationship. Finally, we talked about how shadow work, like love, is endless, and how we need to let go of any notion of arrival. Here’s my conversation with Robert Augustus Masters.
Robert, you’ve written, what I think, at least in my experience so far, is one of the best books on shadow work. I want to begin first of all by thanking you for that. It seems that your intimate knowledge of the shadow and how it works is quite hard-won in your own experience.
Robert Augustus Masters: Yes.
TS: That’s some of what I want to talk about.
RM: Yes, it’s been a very, very steep learning curve. I was thinking just before we started to speak that Alexander Pope has this poem from a long time ago, and the first line goes, “A little learning is a dangerous thing.” I think the same is true of shadow work. A little shadow work can be a dangerous thing. We think we’ve faced our shadow, we’ve unearthed a few things, and we’ve arrived. I certainly have been guilty of that throughout my early adult years and into my forties where I assumed I was further along than it was.
This took a turn, for the spectacular worst when in 1986, I started a community. It was idealistic. I wanted a community of people to get together, work with me, have our children’s school, businesses. There’ll be a new type of tribalism. I began it with great intentions, enthusiastic people around me, but within a year or two, it started to go awry. I became more enamored of the power I had. To my shame, looking back upon it, I didn’t see that at the time. What I was leading shifted from being a community into a cult. I define a cult as any self-enclosed entity that is closed to inside dissension and outside feedback. I’d already had plenty of experience with that.
When I was younger I’d been part of organizations that were cults and I’d seen it from the inside. I was determined to do a better job. Not a better cult so to speak, but to have something that was non-cultic, community-centered and I thought I had the tools to do that. What I didn’t have was sufficient shadow work. I didn’t recognize, for example, a hell of a lot of my empathy was still in my shadow, it would come out when I did groups or private work with people, but I hadn’t had empathy since I was a kid. I’d had a difficult start to life, and my empathic capacity had been shut down and pushed into the dark.
Part of my solution to my being shamed a lot as a child was, like many males, was to get aggressive, to get ultra-competitive. This tendency followed me into my adult years. And in this community, it flowered. Flowered darkly, I guess. Once things went awry, I was too deluded, too caught up in being at the centerpiece of this experiment. I called it an experimental community right from the very beginning. I was so caught up in it that I didn’t see that I was letting what was working, there was a lot of love, and care, and beauty, obscure what wasn’t working. People were being run over, I was making this community’s existence and furthering more important than individual needs. I was starting to make the same errors as those I criticized so profusely a few years ago. I was making the same errors in my own way and didn’t see I was doing that.
Again, that understanding was in the shadows, a lot of my shame was in the shadows, my empathy, and this was a recipe for disaster. Even though I was doing a lot of good work, I was also crossing lines, I was being too aggressive, arrogant. And I look back upon that time, I can see the deludedness of myself, I was off. I was off.
TS: Robert, just to dig in a little bit here. The subtitle of your new book is, “Breaking Free from the Hidden Forces That Drive You.” You talked about how empathy was in your shadow. It wasn’t available to you. So there was a hidden force driving you in a sense to not empathize. Then you also said that shame was in your shadow. Can you help me understand how these were hidden forces driving you?
RM: Well, the empathy is easier to explain, because empathy is simply feeling an emotional resonance with another. That went early from me in life. I was an abused child, I was very scared and very competitive with my younger sister, et cetera. I was shamed heavily by my father. I didn’t know that at the time, but that’s what it was. And I entered my teens hardened and determined to never let myself be shamed again. That followed me into my adult years where I did not want to feel that painful, painful sense of toxic self-shaming from myself or from others.
One thing I did when I created that community, I put myself in a position where I could not be shamed. I didn’t know I was doing that, this is all hindsight. I was in that position, and the shame I had would morph into aggression very quickly. I think in most people who haven’t worked with themselves very much, when shame arises it either goes into aggression, inner or outer, or emotional withdrawal and dissociation. My path was more that of aggression and driving myself like crazy. Being driven by these forces to get ahead, get ahead, do better.
That shame didn’t really emerge until after the community ended, when I started to feel shame for what I’d done, the lines I’d crossed, how I’d hurt people. And it was very unpleasant. But I also recognized, thank God, that it was workable. I could sit in the fire, I could start to shift myself, not just to say I was sorry for what I’d done or make amends, which I did, but also to change myself in a way where I became incapable of enacting the behaviors that had characterized me during my community leadership years. And that’s what happened. That’s what happened
That’s continued to this day of not assuming I have arrived, my shadow work is done, my spiritual work is done. It’s more like—how can I put this? Instead of assuming I’ve arrived, which I’ve made the error of, many times in my life. I now have a sense that I’m on a journey of endless discovery, which is inherently humbling. Because no matter how awakened we are, delusion can show up at any stage. There’s more delusion, there’s more clarification, there’s more realization. There’s a sense of evolution there. And of course when I ran the community I assumed I’d already reached that point. I’d done a lot of work for myself, and I had an excessive pride in that, which I didn’t recognize. That pride inflated me where my shame would deflate me.
I was very unaware of shame. That was one of my regrets in the community time, I used shame sometimes to get people to open up. This happens in a lot of psychospiritual communities, spiritual organizations. The student is not doing what they’re supposed to do according to the teacher, the teacher may then use some shame, inadvertently, usually, to get that person to go deeper, do more. “You need to meditate more, you need to sit more, you need to do more of this, more of that. You should, should, should.” I became a student of shame when the community ended, it ended in 1994. And I still am, and I wrote about it in every book, I teach it, and I take great pains to never shame those that are in work with me.
I’ve become quite adept at seeing shame and working with it, but that’s because I was so caught in it, in the denial of it when I was growing that community a long time ago. And hand in hand with that was the lack of empathy. As soon as the community ended—and it ended very dramatically with a near death experience I had, which I’ll describe later—my capacity for empathy came back, it was as if I was reconnected to who I was when I was very young when there was empathy, there was kindness, there was a sense of natural compassion. Not partial compassion or selective compassion, it just was there. I felt I couldn’t shut it off. It was painful to feel it, then it became a delight, in a sense, a sobering delight to have that capacity back.
That was a part of my life changing very strongly in the mid 1990s. Understanding shame, empathy, and also I had made the error of equating aggression and anger. Personalities, my books are filled with my insights into how aggression and anger differ: here’s healthy anger, here’s unhealthy anger, here’s aggression. At that point when I was younger, I simply … I assumed my aggression was anger and I didn’t question it. And I can see now, that when my heart wasn’t in it at all, that wasn’t anger, that was aggression. It was too forceful. And I see many, many… my manuscripts are filled with guys that haven’t learned that difference. Once they learn the difference between anger and aggression, it’s like a light’s gone on. A big light. There’s a sense, “Oh, I don’t have to repress my anger, I can share it, but I need to do it from my heart as well as my guts.”
And when I get aggressive, I blame, I shame, I find fault with the other person, I put them down. When I’m angry in a healthy way, I don’t do that. That’s another gem that emerged from the mud of the time with the community for me.
TS: OK, there’s a lot that I want to make sure is clear for people. First of all, in our own experience, how do we know the difference between aggression and anger?
RM: Between aggression and healthy anger. The difference is that aggression attacks, it has no heart and it dehumanizes to varying degrees, the object, its target. In healthy anger, we don’t dehumanize the other. We are underlining what we are saying. We are emphasizing it with the intensity of our expression, maybe the fieriness of it, but we don’t lose touch of the fact we care for this other, whom we’re angry at. And we don’t put them down, we don’t shame them, we don’t blame them. We’re not on the attack, we’re just trying to underline something that’s really important to us, and we’re vulnerable in it.
When I’m angry in a healthy way, say at my wife Diane, I’m always vulnerable. If I’m not, that’s a sign to me that the aggression is trying to creep in. I’m starting to lean towards being right. When I cut through that, I’m vulnerable, maybe some tears, there’s a tenderness and I can feel my caring for her, even though at that point I may feel not that caring. So in healthy anger there’s always a willingness to bring some degree of heart into the anger, into that expression.
TS: Robert, do you think it’s fair to say that when we’re feeling aggressive, we’re not emphasizing with the other person, we’re just in our aggression?
RM: Exactly.
TS: That there’s some shadow material at work at that point.
RM: Yes, in aggression, and that’s another sign, there’s no empathy. We’ve lost touch with our caring for the other and they’re an object to us. We carry it far enough we enter into what I would call violence, which is the brass knuckles of aggression. Into things like ethnic cleansing, we start to dehumanize further and further. It’s a very tricky thing, because we can dehumanize others in a way that’s quite subtle, it doesn’t seem like it’s very dangerous, but if it’s there, it’s there.
What I have learned, over the last decade, is when I feel myself shutting off to someone, I may not even know them, but I have some involvement with them. I won’t dehumanize them. No matter what they’ve done. I just won’t. I may be disgusted by what they’ve done, angry, upset, but I won’t dehumanize them.
TS: You mentioned, Robert, that at the end of this experimental community, that you had a near-death experience that was hugely transformative. What happened?
RM: It began innocently enough. I’d had Ayahuasca in 1993, some people in the community had given it to me and it was a profound experience. And I’d read about the powerful ingredient in it called DMT and I found out there was another drug that was even stronger, called 5-methoxy DMT which was legal at that time, it was legal until recently. It was not very popular, because it was terrifying for a lot of people who were taking it.
I read the literature on it and I decided I want to do it. And, it was kind of foolish looking back, because the literature did say it will probably knock you unconscious in the first minute or so, it dissolves reality. I had this kind of bizarre chutzpah at the time, I would take huge risks, I’d try things and I kind of prided myself on that. So I sat down in the living room in Southern California, in 1994, in February. And the guy who had it, the supplier of it in our community, gave it to me. I took a puff and I felt very altered in the first few seconds, but I said, “Please give me more.” I felt this wasn’t strong enough. I took another puff and within 10 seconds, I was gone. I was knocked unconscious. And I was fully conscious elsewhere. It was like being in a lucid dream, but I could not leave it and I knew I was dying. I just knew, and there was nothing I could do about it. It was absolute horror.
Unbeknownst to me at the time, the two people in the room with me were giving me respiratory help, because I’d stopped breathing. I had breathed for I think it was two or three minutes. They said I turned purple, respiratory failure I think is the right term. And I didn’t know any of this. I was under for probably 20 minutes and when I came out of it I felt very blissful, open, connected to God and then people said, “You almost died. You stopped breathing twice for a long, long time. We were terrified you were going to go.”
And one guy knew CPR and had pounded on me really hard, and I lived. I thought, “Well, wow, what a journey.” Next morning I get up and my whole body is shaking, and I am in agony and I’m terrified and I feel insanity creeping in. And it got worse from then on. I could not sleep. I was shaking like a leaf. I was terrified. My sense of self was basically completely blasted apart. And there was no one who could help me. I had a famous psychiatrist come to work with me at some point. He said, “Well, you are a having a shamanic breakthrough.” And I said, ” You know what, I haven’t slept for five or six nights, all I need is something to help me sleep.”
There was no glorification for me of the experience. I was at a dark, dark edge. Suicidal, terrifying to people around me. They saw me in this state. I’d previously been this kind of powerful, charismatic leader. Now I was a basket case. I felt myself at the edge of madness.
So that persisted and I learned to sit with pure terror. And along the way I felt my heart got blasted open, I felt myself able to feel the hearts of all those who I’d interacted with, those I’d hurt. I felt empathy, I felt like a child again, I felt like a wise elder. But I was a complete mess. My locus of self was splattered everywhere and there was no quick repair. None.
This went on for—basically, it was nine months before I was done with it. And I had to sit night after night in terror, pouring sweat. And eventually, I started to feel compassion for the terrified me. I was forced to dig really deep and I could feel myself transforming, but I wasn’t at all proud of it. I was at the edge every day, many times a day. And by the time I came through it enough where I could function again, I’d disbanded the community, because I had no energy to be the leader anymore. It was kind of mutual too, the others were kind of tired of the whole thing and they didn’t trust me. They were scared to see me in the state.
So it ended. And I started my life again, from ground zero. I had no money, my sanity was in shreds still, to quite a degree. But I was grateful in an odd way, Tami, I was really grateful that I was still fucking alive! I was still here and it didn’t matter how hard things were outwardly—and they were hard, they were very difficult—I was grateful to be alive. That changed my life, because things didn’t go back to the usual after the nine months. I could not resurrect my former way of being. I was a very different man, with a very clear sense of what I’d done as the community leader, I had that karma on my plate. But I felt so, so different and that continued on and on, and I still feel that. There’s a sense of continual evolution. And that time broke me. It broke me, and I needed to be broken. I look back and I’m grateful for that experience.
I wouldn’t wish that 5-methoxy experience on anyone, but it shattered me to enough of a degree where I could not reassemble myself. I could not go back to how I had been at all. In fact any desire to lead a community of any sort was gone and has been gone from me ever since then.
TS: You mentioned that as part of that process, that you felt the pain that you had caused other people. I am curious to hear more about that and what that was like.
RM: Prior to that I would say and do things and if someone had a difficult time with it, my basic message was, “OK, I’m just being honest, whatever, this is your stuff.” Afterwards I could no longer do that. I became aware of the impact I had on others, and I have that to this day. What is the impact I’m having? I’m responsible for my delivery as well as my content. Back then I didn’t care, that was my arrogance. I didn’t care, I was the expert, “This is how it is.” And that caused hurt.
When I felt what I’d done, it cracked me open further. I could not believe that I’d done that. I could see myself at the beginning of the community, idealistic, et cetera, but I saw myself lose my way and become deluded, thinking the community was this sacred experiment that no one dared to mess with, and I was its guardian. Delusions of grandeur. I had lost my sanity. Not enough to be put away in an asylum, but I had lost my sanity by the time the community had ended, when I look back.
And so I was glad, afterwards, that I got interrupted so dramatically, I got blasted open within. That one day shifted everything. Then I just spent a long time adapting to that change. Of course afterwards there was empathy, working with shame, I felt shame. I stayed in the area, so I was around the people I’d led, so I felt shame being around them. Some of them were quite kind to me, others weren’t. But I felt myself wanting to… I needed to stay there and stay with the shame and not run from it, so I didn’t.
I began working differently, went back to school, got a doctorate in psychology. I became a student again to do that. It was a huge turnaround for me, and it made possible the work I’m doing now. That was the crucible. My job was to stay in it and allow the fires of transformation to do their work. It was hell sometimes, but I knew I trusted the process. I trusted it.
TS: One of the things, Robert, that is important to me, is understanding the difference between a surface level apology and, “I’m back into a position of power and let’s get right back” into the teacher role, or the powerful person role, versus a deep transformation. And I think from the outside, people are suspicious in general. We see people in our current time whether it’s through the Me Too movement, or other ways that people are starting to say “Wait a minute, oh person in power, you can’t just abuse your situation.”
And then sometimes people will come back around and say, “Yes, I’m really sorry.” And then they’ll just go right back at it. And you can tell that the apology is sort of surface level.
RM: Even when it’s authentic, it’s not enough. A lot of apologies, for example, like, “I’m sorry if what I did hurt you.” That’s not a real apology, but even a heartfelt one, which I’ve seen people do in therapy where it’s really needed. It’s not enough if there isn’t some action taken to cut through the very forces that drove us in the first place to act out. Otherwise, we can say, “I’m sorry,” in a heartfelt way and cry with it, it’s real. Then we do the same messed up behavior again, and again, and again. And after all that pattern of doing the harm, saying “I’m sorry,” doing the harm. It’s not enough. There has to be work done on oneself, so that you become incapable of acting out the same way again. And that requires knowing our shadow.
Figure out what drove me, what in me was running the show? And you can’t just get it intellectually. You have to dig deep, and that’s the essence of very deep psychotherapy. I also don’t see shadow work just as this kind of Jungian discovery of archetypes. It’s more like, I see it as a storehouse for our un-illuminated, not yet faced conditioning. We all have conditioning. The matter is, are we going to face it, do we face it? If not, I could say “I’m sorry” to you a hundred times because I’ve hurt you, and after a while you’re going to get sick of me just saying “I’m sorry,” even if it feels real, because it’s going to be followed by more of my dysfunction.
TS: I know for me, I have some kind of intuitive sense, when someone’s apologizing, whether or not it feels surface level or whether or not I think there’s a deep transformation going on. But I haven’t been able to put it into any kind of criteria that I could use. It’s just kind of an intuitive feel. And what I hear is-
RM: -but I think that’s part of the criterion. You want to be able to feel it in your heart of hearts, it resonates with you. You don’t need a big explanation from the other person, you can feel if it’s authentic. You can feel how deep it goes. I think it’s hard to say we’re sorry in a really deep way if we don’t also let ourselves stay with our shame.
If I’m pushing away my shame over something I’ve done, say with Diane, and I say “I’m sorry.” That pollutes it, it makes it more shallow. If I’m in touch with my shame, like I hurt this person I love so dearly, then I say “I’m sorry,” she can feel that my whole being is getting what happened, that what I did say was unkind. And then when I say “I’m sorry,” I don’t have to sob with it, but it comes from an authentic place in me. I think we all have that capacity to recognize when another is coming from that deeper place in themselves.
TS: Tell me more about sitting in the fire in the crucible of shame. I want to go here for a bit because I can imagine people listening who are also thinking about something shameful in their own life. And wondering, “Have I really transformed it, or have I just sort of, I kind of know I’m ashamed about it, but let’s move on.”
RM: I’m thinking of some of the men’s groups I deal with, when someone has a lot of shame over something, I have them face the group and guide them into the depths of it. The art there, always, eventually, is stay with it. Sit in the fire, it is a fire, shame’s fire isn’t the same as anger’s fire, but it does burn. It’s got more of a clammy, close quality to it, but it does have a heat.
When someone’s sitting in their shame, that means they’re not giving in to the temptation to flee it, into aggression or dissociation of some sort. They’re staying with it. What I’ve seen when someone does that is remarkable. Their posture initially has collapsed, their heads hanging, their eyes are downcast, they feel like crap, “Look what I did. Oh my God, I’m telling you guys, what I did to this woman, or what I did to my kids.” And everyone’s listening, but the man is really—and this happens in women’s groups too—but the man is really suffering. Then he starts to straighten up a little bit. I may help him a bit with that, and I often use the language that, you know, “You’re reclaiming your dignity.” You don’t have to crawl when you have shame, you don’t to cringe and shrink and make yourself into a guilty little puddle of whatever. Sit tall in it. Feel it, don’t be tall in too prideful manner, but sit tall in it and lift your head and meet the eyes of the people who are with you. Look at them. Make the eye contact.
It’s tempting to look away when we feel shame. But I found if I look, or if the people I work with look at the other person. After all they’re not in shame anymore, there’s a sense of, sometimes there’s grief, there’s tears, there’s a sense of connection, communion, and a sense of camaraderie, like, here we all are. We all have shame, we’ve all messed up and it’s in our best interests if we can be in settings where we can actually say what we’re ashamed of, and say it in a way that makes us quiver and shake a little bit. That makes us… we feel it. We feel it. I think sitting in the fire of our shame is an incredibly good practice and it’s not easy. You can’t just read about it in a book and the next day you do it. It’s so tempting when we feel shame to get away from it, to flee it, and to keep most of it in our shadow, so we don’t have to feel it.
Once we’re aggressive, it seems like we’re just aggressive, we’re not fooled, there’s no shame. I know every time I do a men’s group and women’s groups now, shame is always a huge topic. Healthy shame, unhealthy shame, how to work with it, and how to stop pathologizing it. Make good use of it. How to work with the inner critic. The self-shaming tendency we have, in toxic forms usually. It’s a huge thing.
TS: You said something interesting, Robert. Healthy shame and unhealthy shame, what’s the difference?
RM: In healthy shame… healthy shame activates our conscience. Unhealthy shame activates our inner critic. Of course our inner critic often can masquerade as our conscience, but in healthy shame, we feel what we’ve done. We don’t flee the feeling, we stay with it, and we make room for connection with the other whom we’ve hurt through our actions. We don’t just barricade ourselves against it and beat ourselves up with guilt.
Of course the guilt I speak of is a sign of the unhealthy shame, where we close in on ourselves. We’re so busy beating ourselves up for what we’ve done, we’re not available for any healing with the other person. They’re just sitting there watching us flagellate ourselves. That doesn’t help.
So the healthy shame, we’re out front with it, we’re connected, our conscience kicks in. Unhealthy shame, our inner critic will kick in, we feel bad about what we’ve done and we put on a hair shirt, so to speak, we degrade ourselves. And the other person is probably not going to feel close to us when they see us doing that, because they want us to connect, to be available for relationship.
So in healthy shame, if I’m feeling that towards you, for example, I’m staying in relationship with you. I’m not expecting you to suddenly forgive me or like me, but I’m staying in relationship. Unhealthy shame, I would close way from you and cringe and feel bad, or else I’d harden myself and kind of get aggressive with you because you make me uncomfortable, you’re making me feel like I’ve got shame.
TS: I want to talk about this idea of a teacher that uses shame to get students to grow and change. Because this is something that I actually think is pretty common, especially if the teacher identifies as some type of “crazy wisdom” figure. I’ve heard you talk, Robert, about how in this period when you were leading this community from 1986 to 1994, this was during a time when the crazy wisdom teacher and the culture was being celebrated by many people.
And it was this idea that the teacher can do whatever it takes to help you get enlightened. To help you be free. Even if they have to, you know, shove your face in your own shit, whatever to do it. It’s the right thing to do, because the end result is worth it. I’ve heard you say that at the time, you didn’t know what you know now about the results of shaming people. So talk about that?
RM: At that time I was enamored of that way of teaching. I thought I’d do a better job of it if I brought it out, but still, I’ve done my time with Rajneesh in India, there was Trungpa, there was Adi Da, all of them are crazy wisdom teachers, whatever they did, however outlandish was seen, viewed, presented as, “This is good for the student.” The student may not like it, so if Adi Da is going to sleep with someone’s wife, that’s because it’s going to further this man’s growth. There’s no sense of calling bullshit and saying, “Hey, that’s abusive. You’ve crossed the line there.” It’s a sense of where the teacher has no accountability, because whatever they do is supposedly for the student’s good. And I think that’s been seen through more and more in the past decades.
It’s very tricky because we can use shame. It’s not just in spiritual communities, a lot of parents use shame around their kids. Kids having trouble doing math, and the message is, “You should be able to do this, what’s taking you so long. You should know this by now.” The shaming actually makes the child less functional. The same with adults, if I shame someone for what they’re doing. Like they’re not responding deeply enough to my wise commands, then it’s going to backfire. They’re going to feel really bad and even if they have a breakthrough, they’ve had it at a real cost.
I think it’s very dangerous and it is very common, especially in spiritual communities, for the teacher or guide to use shame to supposedly further the student’s growth. All of the heat is put on the student. The student’s not responding well to a teaching, and they may be told, “You should be meditating more, if you meditated more, if you did more of the practices then you would understand this more.” It may be inadvertent, but it still is shaming.
Or in a couples session, maybe the woman says to the man, “I wish you were more of a man.” I’ll say to her, “You may not mean to, but that’s shaming.” And vice versa, it’s not specific to either gender of course, but shaming is very common. I think it’s very important to recognize it, and call it out when it’s happening with our friends or partners, and not allow it.
TS: There’s never a good use of shaming someone to get them to grow. There’s some other approach we can take.
RM: Yes, I think overall the compassionate approach, which can be forceful at times, it can be challenging, but it’s not shaming and it’s not going to demand of a person what they’re not capable of. When we shame someone, often we are pushing them to do more than they can do. Or we’re pushing them to do something that’s not natural for them to an extreme. I think a compassion-centered approach that’s appropriately penetrating, that remains caring and connected is really important.
I know when I’m working with someone and they’re in deep wounding, my approach is always super-intuitive and, even though I’m leading, I’m being led moment by moment by their energetic responses to me, their needs, so I’m being guided by that. And if I have any sense that this isn’t working in this direction, I’ll shift direction.
Whereas when I was younger I might say, I’d want to stay with a certain therapeutic process, because I thought it would be good for the person. Nowadays, if it doesn’t work for someone, I will shift and find a different path, a different approach. I teach that to therapists now, how to approach the whole matter intuitively and always from a place of compassion and connection and interest and curiosity about that other person’s process.
TS: We’re talking, Robert, about the value of going into the crucible of shame, our own shame and what can come from that. In your book, Bringing Your Shadow Out of the Dark, there are four sections to the book, and the third section is all about working with pain, becoming intimate with our pain. I thought it was interesting that in a book on the shadow, you would devote a whole section to becoming intimate with pain. So why is becoming intimate with pain a necessary passage if we’re going to illuminate our shadow?
RM: Because when you approach your shadow, you approach what’s in the shadow, there’s always pain of some sort. And if we’re not capable of working with pain, we’ll tend to only keep our exploration of our shadow relatively superficial. We won’t take that deeper dive. If we know how to work with pain skillfully, we’re more likely to be able to spend a little more time at our edge when we’re facing something in us that’s kind of difficult to see, painful or uncomfortable to face.
I think having the ability to work with pain is really essential. And I often say, when people say at the end of an interview, “What do you want to leave our listeners with?” I’ll say, “Whenever possible turn towards your pain. Turn toward it.” Not all at once, but make that gesture of turning toward what you normally would turn away from. That’s shadow work. Most of us don’t naturally turn toward what’s in the shadow. It takes courage and it takes a capacity to stay present with pain. Apparently the irony here is of course, the more intimate we are with our pain, the less we mind it. It still hurts, it may hurt even more, but we don’t mind it as much. We in a sense take the pain out of pain, by getting closer to it. So a lot of my work is teaching people how to become more intimate with their pain, and how not to turn it into suffering. In other words, how not to make a melodramatic tale out of it.
TS: Can you give me an example of turning towards your own pain and how you actually do it? What it’s actually like, are you, you know, writhing on the floor? What’s going on, Robert?
RM: Well, there’s physical pain, and I think it will involve writhing on the floor if my back goes out or something. But I think a lot of the pain we have to deal with is psychological and emotional. Psycho-emotional. And our discomfort.
If I’m in a position, say I’m talking with Diane about something, and something she said made me feel squirmy inside or uncomfortable. It could be anything, it’s uncomfortable and there is some pain to it. What I will do, if I feel something going on with me and we have time for it, she becomes my witness. I start to take my attention toward that area of discomfort, maybe my solar plexus, maybe it’s two inches behind my left rib cage, the small of my back, forehead. It’s somewhere in my body, and maybe moving around. I look at its qualities. What shape is this, if it had a shape? Does it have a color, and if so, what kind of colors are showing up? What’s the texture like?
And as I do this, I get more curious about it, and she’s simply being a witness to me. I feel curious about the pain, the details of it. The more curious I get, the more I see it, the more I sense it, and the less I mind it being there. It becomes an object of curiosity and wonder and it can be very strong pain, but still you approach it. You take your attention into it gently but directly. It tends to soften the areas around the pain, so the pain is being given a larger arena in which to flow and operate and evolve.
In other words, when there’s less contractedness around the pain, it shifts. And there’s also knowledge, because certain images from my childhood may come up. Certain other memories may come in. And pretty soon, we’re not looking just at a thing called pain, we’re looking at this whole complex of sensations. They’re uncomfortable, unpleasant, but there’s also some parts that aren’t unpleasant. There’s a sense of discovery, of going deeper, going through the backside of the pain.
And in that, that’s also the essence of shadow work. Where we take our conscious awareness, wearing it like a miner’s headlamp as we enter the caves of our difficulty.
TS: Interestingly, Robert, one of things you talked about was how your empathy was something that wasn’t fully online earlier in your life. You know, quite honestly, I can relate to that to myself, in my own experience. And I think part of it is, when I genuinely emphasize, sometimes people’s experience is so painful. I don’t want to feel it. Other’s people’s experience is so painful.
RM: I think this is cultural, too, Tami, it’s collective, because I mean … I think that most people looking at the news, for example, and not really letting themselves feel what’s really there, because it’s so horrific sometimes. Then after a while, horrific news and trivial news, entertainment news co-exist side by side in our consciousness and we’re not really letting ourselves feel. If we do, if we de-numb, it’s very intense. Someone else is close to you, they’re hurting like crazy, you open to them, you feel their pain. And if you don’t have a good empathic wall or shield, you can be overwhelmed by their pain, you can be swamped by the other person’s state. Which is one of the hazards of deep empathy. And yet without empathy, we don’t have any compassion.
I just think that it’s such an important thing to cultivate. I know that inside out, because I spent a lot of my life with far less empathy than was natural. That shifted when I had that drug experience and it’s been the same and stronger ever since. So when I’m working with someone, I always feel empathy for them, and I also feel what I call an “empathic shield” at the same time.
That means, I get really close to what’s happening, I feel it and at the same time, I keep just enough distance from what’s going on so I can keep it in focus. So I’m operating at a very high skill level. In part because I’m keeping that little bit of distance, but I’m still intimately connected with what’s going on. If I didn’t have that shield in place—I hear such awful things in the work often—I’d get swamped by it. It’d be too much for me.
TS: I like that notion of a shield. Meaning a shield, I think of, you know, Captain America, or something, but a shield is something that I can wield that doesn’t have me fully walled off, but yet I still have some protection.
RM: I like it more than the word “wall.” Wall sounds too thick to me and too heavy, whereas a shield can be semi-permeable. It can be like this psychoemotional membrane that’s in place. Some days it will thin to almost nothing when you’re with someone you’re very close to. Other times it will be a little firmer because you’re with someone, you feel good with them, but you don’t want to let them in too much. We have to have boundaries to evolve in our relationships and empathy. Without the shield, it doesn’t make for good boundaries.
TS: I want to talk more about this idea of the shadow and spiritual teachers. And I want to talk about this, because here in my work, as the publisher of Sounds True, I’ve seen so many spiritual teachers who are very gifted when they’re teaching. But when they’re not on stage or sitting on the meditation cushion in front of the room, and instead they’re working with me on a business deal, or I’m hearing about what it’s actually like in their intimate relationships. And this has been something I’ve been working with, for three decades. It’s so confusing.
It’s so confusing to see someone be so brilliant in one part of their life and so undeveloped in another part of their life, and somehow not doing the shadow work, such that they’re brilliant in all parts of their life.
RM: Yes, well that’s lopsided development. And it shows when you see the person outside of the place where they shine. And that’s how I was when I ran that community a quarter of a century ago. I was gifted in that one area, in certain areas, working with people, my group work. Other areas I wasn’t, but I was given credit for being gifted in the other areas, because I was gifted in this one area.
My input on things I knew nothing about, like investing or something, was given more weight than it should have been. Since that time, I’ve taken great pains to develop myself in multi-dimensional ways. So I became more emotionally literate, more empathetic. I think that we’re called to develop in a full spectrum where every dimension of us gets attention. Every dimension.
When I was younger I had more profound spiritual experiences than I have now. I practiced lucid dreaming, I did this, I did that, I met different teachers. But I still was a pretty messed-up guy. Despite all of these credentials, I had my spiritual résumé. Now I have less of that happening, life’s more ordinary, but it feels more spiritual in a very organic, down-to-earth way. Just my day-to-day stuff with Diane, my work with people, writing another book. I like it, it’s more like I’ve embraced my base level ordinariness. I don’t have that pull to be someone special anymore. That makes a huge difference.
TS: I know some people who have seen this uneven development of spiritual teachers have said, “You know, forget it. I don’t want a spiritual teacher. I mean, look at them, so many of them are so messed up if you really get to know them, so I’m not going to go there.” What I’ve noticed is that, deep in my heart, I have a devotion that there’s something in the teacher-student relationship that can be very healthy, very helpful, very beautiful. But that the relationship has to evolve and there has to be a new mature understanding of it.
RM: I think that relationship has to be free of parent-child projection, conflicts with the teacher becomes the parent. It’s more like they’re a spiritual friend, maybe a little wiser than you are in some ways, but there’s a sense of camaraderie and there’s not a sense of, “OK, you’re different. You’re more special.” It’s like we’re all in the same boat, just because maybe I’m in the captain’s role, does not make me any more special or better than the deck hand. We’re all needed for the journey. And I think that there’s a sense of unhealthy hierarchy in a lot of the settings you’ve been describing. Where the teacher is given too much power, status, and they’re ordinariness, their humanness which… of course it’s good to see the teacher’s relationships, how are they, how do they treat their partner, how do they treat their friends? How are they when they’re having a rough time and they’re not on stage?
Of course they’re going to be more human. I remember one time I was with a teacher, forgotten his name, but in the 70s he was supposed to be an enlightened guide. He had an assistant who could sit 10 hours without moving, a young Indian woman. And I was suspicious and I walked into the kitchen unbeknownst to him at one point when just the two of them were in there. And I watched him treat her like shit. And I knew that would never be seen on stage, and I happened to see it. And I thought, “Wow, here we are.” Imagine presenting yourself as being not that, or that you’re free of anger. And in private here you are, you’re kicking the dog, you’re messing up.
It’s such a relief to be able to be one’s human self. Without excusing bad behavior, but saying here it is. The goal isn’t perfection, the goal is something…maybe it’s more to do with authenticity and ripening into all of our dimensions.
TS: You mentioned that we have to get out of a parent-child dynamic. I want to hear more about what you think the responsibility is of a student in spiritual work, who’s doing their own shadow work, such that they’re not getting engaged in a teacher-student relationship, where they’re giving the teacher this power.
RM: Well, first of all, they would need to have done a fair bit of their own deep work. Looking at their early life, their conditioning relationship with mother and father. What worked, what didn’t work. And getting conversant with that at a deeper level than just the intellect. And then seeing to what degree ,if any, this has been projected onto the teacher? Is the teacher a better version of either parent? If so, there has to be work done, otherwise you’re not going to see the teacher as he or she is.
I think it’s important that the student can’t just sit back and play victim to the teacher, especially if the teacher crosses lines or is sloppy. The teacher should be held accountable, but the student also is accountable, because they put themselves in that position. If they just look to the teacher as the one with all the answers, and become a child before that person, they’re missing something. They’re missing their own maturity.
Ideally in those settings, the teacher and student would work together in a way that furthers the student’s maturation. There’d be a sense of doing it together. The teacher’s not a finished product either, neither is the student. We’re all works in progress. And once that context is embraced, I think, then there’s a chance for a really healthy co-evolution. Because the teacher’s also learning from the student. It’s a different way of being, it cuts through the old guru-student model where the one is on the pedestal, the other is devotionally inclined to them. I think there can be something devotional in this too. A devotion to the deep truth.
I feel very devotional energy towards Diane, she does towards me. There’s something sacred, but it’s in the inter-subjective space between us. We’re together, we generate something that is very sacred and we get to bask in it, live in it, enjoy it, and also know that it’ll be devastating when one of us dies. There’s a sense of surrender in that. I think in that there’s a devotion to the, you could say God, or you could say the Mystery, a devotion to what’s ultimate. To what’s the source and substance of all of us, the great Mystery.
TS: Robert, you’ve referred to your own near-death experience and I know that you’ve come close to death now a few times, and I’d love to know how these experiences… You’ve talked some about the intense near-death experience that happened at the end of this experimental community. But how your other brushes with death have illuminated shadow material for you? Maybe even shadow material related to dying.
RM: First of, I’ve had maybe 10 really close calls. Diane’s counted them for me. And not all of them are an emergence of shadow for me, or a deeper knowing of self. The 5-methoxy journey, of course. And most recently I had a heart attack, a massive heart attack in June of 2016, and I literally had five minutes left to live. That’s what I was told after. Diane, thank God, called the ambulance right away. The ambulance was here in less than five minutes.
An hour later, I’d already reached the hospital and had a stent put in and I could now breath, and I was alive, and I was so happy. Didn’t matter how painful the succeeding operations were, with tubes being pulled out or whatever, I was really, really happy. I’ll tell you what emerged then. This is interesting, I never thought of this before. A deep joy emerged. I’ve always had some joy, but it was a deeper joy that emerged. Because if we can keep our joy in our shadow, we can keep our beauty and bigness in the shadow, it’s not just the dark stuff. I think that emerged.
And the other thing that emerged for me was a really profoundly visceral sense of impermanence. I’d always known it through all my studies, impermanence has importance to be considered. This time it hit me so deeply and stayed with me, and still is, it’s with me daily. The sense of that. That gives my life a perspective. It’s very humbling and it’s very beautiful. It makes life more precious.
So that emerged for me very strongly, a sense of the radical impermanence of everything, including my sense of self. I have a sense when I die, one of my prayers as I prepare for that, I do it every day, is, how can I say it? “May I…” Trying to find the words now. “May I let go of all that I took to be mine and all that I take to be mine.” Repeat that, for sink or swim, “May I let go of all that I take to be mine.” That includes my body, sense of self, everything. Everything. It has a depth-less depth to it. I do that every day along with prayers for my death, preparing, getting ready. Even though I may be around another 20 years, I feel pretty healthy now. That heart attack really shook me, I’ve had other experiences that were similar when I was much younger, too. But they didn’t alter me in the same way.
TS: It’s interesting, Robert, you’ve made it pretty clear that your view is that shadow work is endless, there’s no end to this depth-less depth and in the book Bringing Your Shadow Out of the Dark, you compare it as an analogy to love, and how love also feels endless. I love that analogy because it was easy for me to relate to it. I thought, in my relationship, which is a 17-year relationship, it’s clear that it just keeps getting deeper and that there’s no end to it. But when it comes to shadow work, I notice there’s this idea I have. I’d like to be able to check the box and say, “Good, I confronted all of my unfaced conditioning, it’s done.” With love, I’m fine with it being endless. What is that, why do you think people want to have this idea of, “I’ve resolved it.”
RM: Because we want to have a sense of arrival. There’s a kind of a promise of immunity in that. “Now that I’ve reached the peak, I don’t have to suffer anymore, I’m immune.” And I think it’s harder to face the reality that maybe as we evolve, deeper and deeper , we get more and more sensitive, and things hurt even more. We feel even more.
One little flicker of pain in your partner, maybe you tear up. You feel more and more sensitive to the whole thing, even though you know how to handle it more. Does that make sense?
TS: It does, and yet some teachers do promise this realm of liberation where there won’t be any suffering. There won’t. It won’t happen any more. Do you think that’s –
RM: That’s the ultimate carrot. That’s such a, that can be so seductive. Because if someone’s suffering a lot they hear that promise, and the people around saying “Oh my God, it’s real,” in different ways. I think it’s just more delusion. I think you can have an incredible awakening, enjoy it, rest and that, and at a certain point you intuit a deeper one. I think love is endless, the Mystery is endless, the Mystery of our being, the deep Mystery, the irreducible Mystery. And I think the shadow work, after all, maybe we should get a different word for it, because it’s not work. To me it’s not work now. I do this with Diane, we don’t say we’re doing shadow work, it’s just how we are. We’re transparent and we like to share whatever’s going on with us. We do that all the time, and it’s really easy, it’s not a big deal, it doesn’t take up all our time. It’s not really shadow work, it’s just simply keeping the inquiry going to where nothing is off limits for exploration. There’s always new stuff, it’s not like, “OK, now I’ve finished my shadow work.”
That was my delusion back in 1986 or whatever, way back then. “I’ve done my work, I’ve suffered, I’ve been to tons of groups, I’ve trained, blah, blah, blah. Look at me.” I was just beginning. I thought I was at the top of the mountain. I was probably a little way up from the base camp. And I had bit more view than I had before. I assumed that was the top. How deluded! I mean, I look upon that, who I was then, with some compassion and humor now too, because he was so sure he’d arrived. And my sense of the “I have arrived” notion, that means that I’m not looking at something that’s there. There’s more.
Just like with love. Imagine if you thought you’d arrived at the deepest possible love with your partner. Wouldn’t that feel strange?
TS: Yes.
RM: Yes. Imagine by contrast, here’s love that’s got no ceiling, floor, boundaries—it goes on and on, and maybe that’s what God is, it’s infinite. It’s so profound. And what a joy to know that you’re going to get closer and closer to your partner.
TS: Now, Robert, you and I have had some previous conversations where we’ve talked about the shadow, and in one of those conversations I asked you, I said, “So the shadow is what I’m not aware of, so how do I know when my shadow’s operating?” And you said, one clue that you gave me, and I thought it was a really good one, is that you can track your reactivity. And I thought to myself, “OK, that’s great.” Because I know when I’m reactive. I totally know it. I get flushed inside, I’m hot, I’m weird. I say inappropriate things sometimes. I know when I’m reactive. What I’d love to hear now is the next step. So I discover I’m reactive, and I want to investigate what part of my shadow has been triggered.
RM: One of the first clues is when you’ve been triggered, you’re reactive, and you can name it, like you are. Then you can ask yourself, how old do I feel? That often is a huge clue. You may say, “I feel like I’m 8, or 6 or 12 or 18.” You sense it and then certain memories come with that, and there’s an increased capacity to see, “OK, what happened, what was happening then and how did that shape me? How’d that shape me?” And maybe something from that time was difficult or painful enough that you had to bury it in whole or in part in your shadow. To get away from it, you just didn’t want to deal with it.
And when we get reactive and something like this happens then we have a chance to dig into what we perhaps had buried quite a long time ago. And when it surfaces, then we can work with it. We can explore it, we can name it, we can feel it, we can cultivate some compassion for its presence. And if we’re with a partner or dear friends, we can explore it, we can share it.
I think it’s a wonderful thing. The good news is everyone gets reactive. I’ve never met anyone that doesn’t get reactive. And the question is, can we name it, do we work with it, do we justify it? How willing are we to turn our reactivity into a zone where we can see more deeply into ourselves?
TS: Very good. For those of you who are interested in exploring your shadow in deeper and deeper ways I highly recommend the book, Bring Your Shadow Out of the Dark: Breaking Free from the Hidden Forces That Drive You. It’s the new book by Robert Augustus Masters and there are many different doorways and approaches to starting to identify, work with, and turn towards these hidden forces.
Robert has also created an audio series with Sounds True, called Knowing Your Shadow: Becoming Intimate with All That You Are, as well as several previous books. A book on Emotional Intimacy: A Comprehensive Guide for Connecting with the Power of Your Emotions. And also another book with Sounds True, called To Be A Man: A Guide to True Masculine Power.
Robert, I really appreciate this very straight ahead, and confessional, and open conversation about your own process as a teacher. I think it’s been really helpful for so many people. Thank you. Thanks for being so straight ahead with it all.
RM: Yes. Thank you so much.
TS: SoundsTrue.com, waking up the world. Thanks for listening.
