Dancing With Your Shadow

BY KIM NATARAJA

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FOREWORD by Laurence Freeman

St Augustine believed that people did not desire happiness enough. He is making a point that we today, still struggling to
integrate psychology and religion, could benefit from considering. Our social level of unhappiness and the violence and emotional dysfunction associated with it (and that often flows directly from it) call both for deep religious insight and the psychological awareness of what it is we truly desire.

What so often blocks us is what Kim Nataraja, invoking a rich psychological term, calls the ‘shadow’. In this book she speaks
from her own experience of the spiritual path and of accompanying others on it, of the art of dancing with the shadow,
rather than repressing or fleeing from it in fear. This is necessary for everyone whatever their way of life because what is repressed or feared has a way of taking revenge and asserting itself negatively. It can block creativity, diminish the capacity to love and be loved and so rob life of its joy and brilliance. It is especially important,however, for people with a conscious commitment to spiritual practice or with a religious identity. For them the shadow can loom as a dark counterpoint to the bright ideal they set for themselves or feel drawn to realise.

Kim Nataraja has learned much of what she shares so usefully from her practice of meditation in the Christian tradition. From the teaching of John Main and, through him, back to the roots of the Christian mystical tradition, she can draw both on ancient insights expressed in the language of a great tradition and on contemporary discoveries. In the wisdom of the Christian desert especially, she finds kindred teachers for whom the psyche and the spirit were twin aspects of the process of prayer. Purification, integration and divinisation are universal dimensions of the stages of human development. In these pages the Christian meditator and indeed anyone who has begun to engage with this essential human process will find a guide, a friend and a teacher to walk – and to dance – with.