E.2-10: Your Shadow Is Not Going Anywhere. The Inauthenticity Inside You Can.
Season 2: Episode 10
Your Shadow Is Not Going Anywhere. The Inauthenticity Inside You Can.
listen by clicking the audio player here:
In this episode you will learn:
You have been told wholeness means the end of the struggle. It does not. It means something better, and far more sustainable.
In this episode you will learn:
• Why integration is not the elimination of the shadow, and what wholeness actually is in the language of Scripture and of this arc.
• Why the struggle continues, and how to recognize the real sign that the work is taking root: the end of being two of yourself in the same room.
• How to maintain the integrated life over time, including the daily prayer of Psalm 86:11 that keeps the divided heart finding its way home.
Episode Length: 27:00
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Transcript
The single most reliable sign that the work of this arc is actually taking root in your life is not that you have stopped struggling. The struggle continues, for a long time. Sometimes for life. What changes is something else, and once you know what it is, you can see it in yourself, often before you can even name it. The struggle stays. The inauthentic ends. And today, on this finale, that is the entire point I want you to carry out of all ten weeks of this arc.
INTRO (0:30 to 2:45)
I am Angela Meer, and I welcome you into the sacred meeting place where the timeless patterns of Scripture meet the deep symbols of the soul. This is The Christian Jung Podcast. This is the finale of the shadow arc, week ten, and the title of today’s episode is Your Shadow Is Not Going Anywhere. The Division Inside You Can.
I want to name a particular resistance some of you will be carrying into this last episode, because I have learned to feel it coming by now. When I start talking about Christian wholeness, two reflexes show up. The first one says, this sounds like self-help. Christian wholeness, in plain English, can sound very close to secular self-actualization in a thin Christian coat. And the second reflex says, but Scripture is clear that we are not going to be made fully whole until we see Him face to face. Both of those reflexes have a point, and I want to honor both of them right at the front of this episode.
So let me be precise. The wholeness I am going to describe today is not perfection, it is not sinlessness, and it is not the end of struggle. The struggle stays. Paul still wrote Romans 7 near the end of his life. We will be made finally whole in glory, exactly as Scripture says. But there is something this side of glory that Scripture also names, repeatedly, and that is the undivided heart of Psalm 86:11. The wholehearted love of the Shema. The end of the double-mindedness that James warns will make a person unstable in everything. That is what we are talking about today. And it is biblical wholeness, not psychological self-perfection. We will use Jung to see the territory more clearly. Christ is the destination.
[pause]
It is time to awaken holy wonder.
[music]
WHY THIS MATTERS PERSONALLY (2:45 to 7:30)
Let me tell you what wholeness has actually looked like in my own life, because the word gets thrown around in ways that can mean almost anything, and I do not want you walking out of this episode with the wrong picture.
Wholeness, for me, has been worth it, and worth it because it has opened up a fuller measure of the abundant life Jesus paid for. John 10:10. I came that they may have life and have it abundantly. Now, when most people hear that phrase, they tend to picture one of two things. They picture prosperity, or they picture fame, or some other version of an externally impressive Christian life. I am not talking about either one of those. I am talking about something much quieter, and something that does not budge.
So here is what I mean. The abundant life that wholeness has opened up to me is a life in Christ with hope attached to it. The kind of hope you can actually rest in. It is an overwhelming love that does not shake when the enemy’s lies arrive in the dark, because the love is in me, not on top of me. It is a faith that has become a byproduct of my relationship with Christ rather than something I have to muster up from scratch every single morning. I do not work my faith up anymore. It just is, the way a healthy tree just bears fruit.
And then there is peace. Peace has become one of my greatest weapons. I look at the world, and the world is not gentle right now, and it does not shake me. Not because I have made myself impervious. Because peace is working in my life as a resting and abiding fruit. Galatians 5:22-23. Not as something I produce by effort. As something Christ produces in me by His presence.
Do I have problems? Absolutely I have problems. My life is not perfect, and I am not going to pretend that it is. But what I have come to know, having done the work that this arc describes, is that the fruit of the Spirit that comes from living undivided is worth every single bit of what I have paid to live this way. It is not the abundance of money or admiration. It is the abundance of Him.
DEFINING THE CONCEPT (7:30 to 12:30)
So let me define plainly what we are doing today, because we are still, exactly as we have been all arc, talking about the shadow. We have not, in this finale, changed the subject. We are talking about what the integrated shadow looks like.
Here is the central claim, and I want you to take this with you no matter how much else you forget from this episode. Integration is not the elimination of the shadow. The shadow does not vanish. The integrated person is not a person with no shadow. She is a person who has, by hard and faithful and very long work, brought the shadow into conscious relationship, so that it is no longer running her life from below. The shadow stays. It just stops being in charge of her.
That is what we have been walking toward all this time. We have not been walking toward a finish line where the shadow finally goes away. We have been walking toward a self that is no longer at war with itself.
And the easiest way to know what we are talking about today is to be very plain about what wholeness is not. Wholeness is not the disappearance of your shadow. The shadow is still there. There will still be a part of you that flinches, or that hides, or that grasps for the wrong thing. Wholeness is not the end of struggle. Paul, near the end of his life, after decades of mature ministry, wrote one of the most honest accounts of inner struggle in the New Testament, in Romans 7. That is not a baby Christian. That is a saint. The struggle stays. And wholeness, on this side of glory, is not perfection. Scripture is plain: we will be made finally whole when we see Him face to face. Confusing the wholeness we are talking about today with that final wholeness will rob you of both.
What wholeness is, in the language of this arc, is the end of the divided life. The end of being two of yourself in the same room. The end of the curated version of you in the front and the hidden version of you in the back. Whatever you bring to one room, you are now bringing to all of them. The shadow has been brought home. The hidden self has been brought to Christ. The resisting parts have been met, the gold has been reclaimed, the cost has been counted and paid. And now, with all of those parts of you finally on the same page, you walk into a room as one person.
REAL JUNG (12:30 to 17:30)
I want to bring in Carl Jung one last time in this arc, because this finale is the place where I most want to give him fair credit, and also where I most want you to see the edge of him.
Jung was clear, to his credit, that integration of the shadow does not remove the shadow. He did not promise people that the work would result in some shadow-free wholeness on the other side. He said the goal of the work was wholeness, by which he meant exactly what we have been describing. The person no longer running two of herself at the same time. The unified self. And Jung was honest, near the end of his life, that the work is never really finished. There is always more shadow to face. He never told people they were going to graduate.
So he was telling the truth. And he could see the wholeness. He just could not, by himself, supply the One in whose presence the divided heart finally rests.
This is the edge of Jung, and I want you to feel it clearly because we are about to step past it. Jung can describe the territory of the integrated life. He cannot be the home of it. He can tell you that the divided heart wants to be undivided. He cannot be the One the undivided heart was made for. And this is where, in the finale of this arc, Augustine finishes the sentence Jung could only start.
Augustine wrote, fifteen hundred years before Jung, the most famous line of the Christian inner life. Thou hast made us for Thyself, O Lord, and our heart is restless until it finds its rest in Thee. That is Confessions, book one, chapter one. The reason the divided heart cannot find rest in itself is not psychological. It is theological. We were made for Someone. And the doubling does not end when the shadow is finally gone, because the shadow is not finally going to be gone. The doubling ends when the whole, integrated, scarred and limping self finally arrives in His presence, without a curated version out front, and discovers the rest it was made for.
SCRIPTURE (17:30 to 27:30)
So let us go to Scripture, because the whole arc has been a long walking into what Scripture has been saying about the undivided heart for thousands of years.
Psalm 86, verse 11. David prays. Listen to this. Teach me thy way, O LORD; I will walk in thy truth: unite my heart to fear thy name. Read it slowly. The last clause is the entire prayer of the integrated Christian. Unite my heart. That is the prayer of a person who already knows the heart can be divided, who has felt that division in himself, and who is asking God plainly to be the One who makes it one. He does not ask for the absence of the parts of him that pull in different directions. He asks for them to be united. That is the difference. The integrated life does not ask Him to remove the pieces. It asks Him to gather them.
The Shema. Deuteronomy 6, verses 4 and 5. Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God, the LORD is one. You shall love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might. And Jesus repeats it in Mark 12, verse 30, when He says it is the greatest commandment. Look at what He is commanding. He is not commanding feelings. He is commanding the integration of the whole self in love. All your heart. All your soul. All your might. The whole you, all in the same direction. That is wholehearted love. That is integration, in the language of the Old Testament and of Jesus.
And James. James 1, verse 8. A double-minded man is unstable in all his ways. And he says it again in chapter 4 verse 8, in case we missed it. Purify your hearts, you double-minded. James, the brother of Jesus, the pastor of the Jerusalem church, is being very plain about the price of the divided life. The double-minded life is unstable. Across the Old Testament and the New Testament, Scripture is calling the same thing. The integrated heart. The unified self. The end of being two of yourself.
And now, the picture. We talked about Jacob last week. The man who wrestled with God all night at the river called the Jabbok, and walked away with a new name and a permanent limp. I want to read the very next verse, because we did not get to it last week. Genesis 32, verse 31. The sun rose upon him as he passed Penuel, limping because of his hip. Sit with what that verse does and does not say. It does not say the limp went away. The limp stayed. He carried it for the rest of his life. But the sun rose. And the man who walked into the morning at Penuel was one man, where the night before, at the river, there had been two men, the heel-grabber Jacob and the man God was making him into. After the wrestling, the doubling was over. The limp stayed. The two of him did not. And he walked into the morning whole, and limping, and finally one.
That is the picture of integration. Not the limp gone. The two selves gone.
MID-EPISODE (27:30 to 29:00)
I want to pause here for a moment. If this episode is naming something you have walked the whole arc into, and you want help maintaining what you have built over these ten weeks, I want you to come and find me. Go to Substack and search for The Christian Jung. The free article this week lands the whole arc in a form you can sit with slowly. And inside The Inner Room, the paid companion, I teach the three practices for maintaining the integrated life after this arc closes: praying Psalm 86:11 daily as the unite-my-heart prayer, a bodily practice for recognizing what it feels like to be one self in a room, and a weekly fruit ledger that lets you see, in your own hand, what the Spirit has actually been doing.
The episode helps you land. The Inner Room helps you stay. Go to Substack and search for The Christian Jung, or come to angelameer.com.
Now, the three things to carry out of this whole arc.
THREE TEACHING POINTS (29:00 to 39:00)
Movement One: Integration Is Not Elimination.
This is the reframe that holds the whole finale together. The shadow does not vanish. The integrated person is not the person who has gotten rid of the shadow, and anyone who promises that wholeness is not telling you the truth. The shadow stays. The integrated person is the person whose life is no longer being authored by what she has refused to face. The shadow has been brought into conscious relationship. It is not running her from below anymore. That is the goal, and that is the whole goal. Anything more than that, this side of glory, is not on the menu.
Movement Two: Wholeness Is the End of the Divided Life, Not the End of the Struggle.
The struggle stays. The single most reliable sign that the work of this arc is taking root in you is not that the struggle has ended. The struggle continues. The doubling ends. You stop being two of yourself in the same room. You stop bringing the curated version to God and the unedited version to dinner. Whatever you bring to one room is now what you bring to all of them. That is integration in plain language, and Scripture has been pointing to it for millennia, in the undivided heart of Psalm 86, in the wholehearted love of the Shema, in the warning against double-mindedness in James. We have not invented this. We have only walked back to it.
Movement Three: The Rest the Integrated Heart Was Made For Is in Christ, Not in Itself.
This is where Jung stops and Augustine continues. Jung can describe the integrated life. He cannot be the home of it. The reason the divided heart cannot find rest in itself is theological, not psychological. Thou hast made us for Thyself, O Lord, and our heart is restless until it finds its rest in Thee. That is the last sentence of the arc. The doubling does not end because the shadow has been removed. The doubling ends because the whole, integrated, scarred and limping self has been brought, finally, to the One she was made for. And in His presence, the restless heart, at last, has somewhere to rest.
RECAP (39:00 to 41:00)
So let me bring this whole arc home.
Three movements out of ten weeks. One, integration is not elimination, the shadow does not vanish, the doubling does. Two, wholeness is the end of the divided life, not the end of the struggle, and the struggle stays. Three, the rest the integrated heart was made for is in Christ, not in itself.
And if you carry one single practice out of this finale and into the rest of your life, let it be Psalm 86, verse 11. Teach me thy way, O LORD; I will walk in thy truth: unite my heart to fear thy name. Pray those eleven words slowly, every morning, as a request and not a recitation. Notice which clause catches in you on which day. Stay there for a minute. You are letting God author the prayer back into the part of you that most needs uniting today. That one prayer, prayed for a year, will hold the integrated life together more than nearly any course you could take.
PAUSE, PRAY, HEAL (41:00 to 44:00)
Let us end this time, and the whole arc, with a moment to Pause, Pray, and Heal.
First, take a long deep breath, and rest into all ten weeks of what you have walked.
[longer pause]
Pause. Bring to mind the whole walk of this arc. The wounds you faced. The gold you reclaimed. The parts that refused to move. The hidden self that was met by Christ. The cost you paid for becoming real. Then ask, slowly, one question, and let the answer come slowly too. Where in your life are you already, today, more of one self than you were ten weeks ago.
[longer pause]
Pray. This week’s prayer, on this final week of the arc, is the most famous sentence in the Christian inner life, from Augustine of Hippo, the fourth-century bishop and doctor of the Church, from the very first chapter of his Confessions.
Thou hast made us for Thyself, O Lord, and our heart is restless until it finds its rest in Thee.
[pause]
Heal. Here is the question to carry into your journal this week. Where in my life is my heart still restless because it is still divided, and what would it look like, this week, to bring that divided place into one piece, in Him.
[longer pause]
FINAL
Subscribe to The Christian Jung Podcast wherever you listen. Share this episode with someone who has walked this whole arc with you, or someone who needs to hear that wholeness is on offer this side of glory. Find me at angelameer.com, or on Substack as The Christian Jung, where the free article and the Inner Room companion for this finale are waiting for you.
This is the end of the shadow arc, but it is not the end of the work. The next arc will turn in a different direction, and I will tell you about it when it begins. For now, walk this one in. Pray Psalm 86:11. Keep the fruit ledger. Stay in the body of the one self under Christ. There is no need to hurry, and the work, mercifully, does not stop at week ten.
Until then. Heal Deeply. Walk Holy.