The Story of the Raven and the Seaweed Coat

Taken from the book Songs from the Mountain by Djobariab Toor

In Tsimshian legends among the people of the Pacific North Coast there are stories of what happens when a person and their shadow become separate. In the book Raven’s Children, Raven is portrayed as a god, a Creator figure whose job it was to create life and look after it. Over the course of time, however, Raven took on the nature of a trickster, thinking only of the pleasure of food and the good life. One day he met a figure called Shadow and they decided to travel together.

In the story, Raven and Shadow were paddling along the shores of the ocean and Raven suddenly felt very hungry. When he saw some people on the beach drying fish near their village, all he could think of was a way to finagle some food. Realising he probably didn’t look like someone who could impress the villagers, Raven grabbed up some shiny seaweeds and mosses, some fancy strands of small mussel shells, and draped them as impressively as he could over his plain appearance. Then he told Shadow to go ahead of him. So as to impress the villagers, he was to tell them ‘an important chief’ was about to come – a great person they should naturally invite in. Raven hid behind a bush while Shadow went down to deliver the message.

‘Shadow walked along the beach and when the people there turned and looked at him, he called out : “An important thief is stalking by your village, my people, invite him in!” All the people ran into their houses. Everything was quite.’

The story goes that in spite of what Raven commanded Shadow to say, Shadow always said the opposite. Yet no matter what trickery found its way up Raven’s sleeve, Shadow got the blame. Eventually the two parted company.

The story asks how we mortals might keep from alienating, and not underestimating, the power of shadow. We need shadow to remind us when we’re not being honest with ourselves. There are times I drape myself in seaweed and moss pretending to be a wondrous thing in the eyes of others. I stand tall in my inflations, and I forget shadow and I are related at all. The only thing that saves me, when I want to disown my shadow, is to turn instead, and face her head on. The truth is shadow is one of those inner characters that is an enigma; on one hand she’s an embarrassment; on the other, she’s a valuable friend I need to listen to.

When we agree to release anger, pain, grief, or the hurts in the past, we automatically begin to transform the destructive side of the shadow we have been hiding. But most people are suspicious of what they cannot predict or control. Rather than allowing the release of the shadow energy, people often judge themselves, feel shamed, anticipate rejection, get paralysed and like Raven, go around in a wrap of seaweed.

One of the major obstacles to breakthrough is the problem of external referencing. When we are very young we don’t learn how to respond to life without depending on and finding approval from others. The first thing that happens is that we often got lost in other people’s expectations. Willingly or unwillingly we got tangled in the complexes, fears, hopes and dreams in the best and worst of conventions. In order to appease and impress the people around us, the contents of our shadow side had to become the enemy, to be driven out of consciousness.

Clearly the conditioning we experienced as children, namely that of having to placate, survive, or get along with others, means we had to both give up our original self and like all good children, become responsible for the people in our environment.

The complication here is that our self-image begins to live somewhere outside the circle. When any of us relinquishes our ability to think, feel and respond from our own inner point of reference, then our self-esteem is vested in others and what they think; and what we think they might think. Being responsible for others amounts to self-sacrifice; it also means shadow energy will begin its repressive journey and the heart will go into definite hiding. We cripple the ‘power to make live’ because we have betrayed our own identity.

Dreams will often illustrate the conflict between the old identity, the new one trying to surface and the shadow we’d like to disown. “I am traveling by train somewhere. I get on and sit down and for the while the ride is beautiful, the landscape we move through is spectacular. It is like the fields and mountains I knew as a child. The train stops and I start to get off, but my purse is gone. I have lost it, or someone’s stolen it. I am frantic because I can’t get off without it. It’s got all my credit cards, my wallet, my address book, but I can’t find it anywhere. A dark gypsy woman enters the train and looks angrily my way. She sits down next to me and stares hard into my eyes. I feel my heart beating wildly. I sense she will attack me. I want to get up and run from her but I am paralysed.” The dreamer here is moving through the old identity (the landscape reminiscent of childhood) and is attempting to come to a new one. When she comes to the new place, she’s suddenly without means (the security of her old identification, symbolized by everything in the purse). The gypsy enters angry and threatening and the dreamer is terrified. Apparently the old identity has had little tolerance for the gypsy (the wild side, colourful, spontaneous, free, creative, a bit of a renegade). Naturally the gypsy, furious at having been stuffed away and denied in the name of convention, wants to throttle the nice woman on the train.

The way through external referencing is no easy route. It helps to observe how we get caught in it; to note how the world outside controls where our point of reference is. During a weekend retreat on personal growth I asked the group to do a certain exercise as a sort of warm-up. In the first part, I suggested that the participants walk around the room and greet one another, say their name, do whatever they do to introduce themselves. In the second exercise I asked the group to try another kind of greeting, one that might be a surprise to the other person. I asked them to greet one another in a very unconventional way, do something outrageous, socially unacceptable; something they’d never do in the White House. The whole group faltered, the smiles of greeting vanished, the handshakes and how-do-you-dos hung in midair. No one knew what to do to be outrageous; and no one wanted to be socially unacceptable. A silence crept over the room until finally I walked over to a tall, dignified-looking scientist, pulled off his sock and stuck it in his pocket, then turned to someone else and stuck my head under her skirt. Gradually some life came back into the room.

If we are externally referencing most of the time, as most of us are, we’re in touch with somebody else’s feelings (as we imagine them to be) and not our own. This is self-abandonment. A self-consciousness then sets in that acts like Rasputin. When we subsequently strive for self approval, we are a target for an internal judge that will cause us no end of trouble. Looking for self-approval always implies that there’s an inner critic inside whole sole function is to target our slightest mistakes and imperfections. But how can the divine wildness emerge when there’s a critic standing at the gate between the conscious and the unconscious mind? In the West, one learns to identify and confront the internal voices that intimidate and disempower us.

It’s enlightening to ask ourselves what of our vitality and radiance has been tied up in shadow. Most importantly, how do we reclaim the energy that the dark side of the unconscious holds. To the novice exploring the unconscious – whether the territory is the shadow, the pain of past abuse, repressed anger or sorrow, blind spots in a relationship, or a big ego that suddenly crashes – the dark is never the enemy; shame is the enemy. The darkness is fertile. If we can trust destiny, keep our sense of humour, and embrace the thing, the shadow has its light side.

A young boy had a dream once that poignantly sums up what it means for us to begin embracing the dark. He told this dream to his grandmother while they were on their way to a conference. “There was a dragon in this room I was in. He was jumping up and down on a big trampoline. The dragon had no eyes, no ears, no feet, no hands and no heart. I knew I had to jump down its mouth and I was scared. I had to jump down and I did, but I came out its tail.”

Later on during the train ride with his grandmother, he said, after telling her the dream: I think the dragon did have a heart. His grandmother, a psychotherapist, told the dream at the conference, a workshop expressing the power of dreams and inner work. In a sense, if we are going to cleanse the wounds that have hurt us, we have to face the dark of the dragon’s mouth until we are ready to slide out the tail.

I felt very touched by the poignancy in this boy’s dream. When any of us faces the dragon with the huge mouth, we confront our worst fears: we walk into our hurts, our abuses, the wounds of the past. We walk into and face the ghosts in our family tree; we confront the unclean spirits in our own face-saving defenses; we take on demons of self-doubt and self-judgement. We slide through the worst and come out the tail. Then we open the heart.

Going into the darkness inside is a passage we have to make if we’re going to cultivate our feeling world. Shadow is powerful not just because it holds pain and repressed memories from times past and wants release, but also because it guards the gates to our inner brilliance.