Facing the Shadow: A Daylong Exploration of How We Relate to Practice with the Shadow – For Young Adults – with Donald Rothberg and Kate Janke

Facing the Shadow: A Daylong Exploration of How We Relate to Practice with the Shadow – For Young Adults – with Donald Rothberg and Kate Janke

Saturday, December 5, 9am to 4:30pm

For Young Adults, Ages 20-35

Come join us for a day of practice and experiential investigation into our shadows—dark and light, individual and collective—and how “shadow work” can be a major part of our spiritual practice! Carl Jung spoke of the shadow of the individual as “the ‘negative’ side of the personality, the sum of all those unpleasant qualities we like to hide.” Yet, he thought, the shadow also carries energies and insights necessary for wholeness. Through shadow work, we can reduce the shadow’s destructive potential by bringing darkness to the light, and light to the darkness. In a similar way, the Buddha would often invite Mara, a personification of greed, hatred, and delusion, in for tea, like an old friend.
We will also explore the collective or cultural shadow, which often drives groups and organizations (including religious and spiritual ones!), cultures, and societies. It manifests in a number of ways, for example, in the residues from not fully resolved or acknowledged past historical suffering (such as slavery) or in collective ways of forming “enemies” or targeting certain groups for negative treatment.
The day will include meditation, talks, conversation, and experiential exercises, all with an emphasis on supporting each other as a community as we deepen our practice and understanding.

Donald Rothberg, a member of the Spirit Rock Teachers Council, has practiced Insight Meditation since 1976 and has also received training in Dzogchen and the Hakomi approach to body-based psychotherapy. An organizer, teacher, and former board member for the Buddhist Peace Fellowship, he is the guiding teacher for the two-year Spirit Rock program, “Path of Engagement” and the author of The Engaged Spiritual Life: A Buddhist Approach to Transforming Ourselves and the World.

Kate Janke started her meditation practice in 2004 at IMC, followed by a transformative period of practice in Thailand. She is now one of the co-founders of the Saturday Night Sangha sitting group in the East Bay and the creator of the Young Adult Dharma Council. Kate is also a Mindfulness Teacher with the Mindful Schools Project and a participant in the Dedicated Practitioners Program (DPP) at Spirit Rock.