Inner Council Work

Aug 29

Photo by Steve Halama on Unsplash / Thumbnail Photo by Charles Elizondo on Unsplash

“One does not become enlightened by imagining ﬁgures of light, but by making the darkness conscious.”
— Carl Jung, Collected Works 12

“The images of the unconscious place a great responsibility upon a man. Failure to understand them, or a shirking of ethical responsibility, deprives him of his wholeness and imposes a painful fragmentariness on his life.”
— Carl Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections

Healing doesn’t mean “making perfect” or “making pure.” It means “making whole.” When we embark on our healing journey through psychotherapy or shamanic journeying, one of the first things we become conscious of is the remarkable fact that the voices in our head seem to have a personality, will and desire all their own. Carl Jung developed an approach he called “active imagination” to flesh out these inner voices and impulses in order to relate to and dialogue with them, thus bringing them out of the shadows of unconsciousness into the light of conscious awareness.

Through a process of “dialogues in imagination”, these shadow parts gradually become reintegrated into the conscious personality and, in doing so, lose their power to control us against our will and best intentions. From this perspective, “integration” (a word frequently tossed around the psychedelic and pop psychology world but not well understood) doesn’t mean doing away with unwanted parts or dissolving them into one singular unified entity, it means including them into the whole of what we consider our “self.”

The “big s” Self as Jung conceptualized it, is made up of many parts, and it’s the diversity of the Self and our conscious (or unconscious) relationship to its various aspects that makes us unique individuals. There have been different approaches to this kind of “shadow work” developed over the years by Jung’s descendents, the most well-known being Voice Dialogue by Hal and Sidra Stone, and Internal Family Systems by Richard Schwartz.

My unconventional education and healing journey through yoga, plant medicines, shamanic journeying and depth psychology planted a seed that has grown into what I think is a unique approach to shadow work. As it’s developed in sessions with my coaching clients over the past couple of years I’ve come to understand it as “Inner Council Work.” What makes it different from some of the other approaches is that it offers a “set and setting” (a term borrowed from psychedelic-assisted therapy) for the inner dialoguing with parts. It can be done with a partner or coach, on your own as a meditation, or during shamanic journeying assisted by plant medicines, psychedelics or drumming.

In this short article I’d like to sketch out the set and setting of Inner Council Work and offer it as another way to engage in shadow and integration work that may appeal to folks who don’t resonate with the approaches that are already out there and well-established. Not all paths are right for all people and I suppose this particular approach came to me because none of the others felt quite right. I trust that if it resonates with me and the clients I’ve introduced it to, that it will reach some others out there who are interested in shadow and integration work but don’t have a clear idea how to get started with it.

Mindset

Let’s begin with a discussion of the mindset needed to engage in any kind of “parts work.” The first and most important thing is that we need to be open to and trust our imagination. For modern western folks this is the biggest obstacle to realizing any kind of healing through depth psychology or shamanism. Most of us have been conditioned to disregard and mistrust the imagination that was once the source of so much joy and wonder for us as children.

As we grow up, we hear things like “That’s just your imagination” “Stop daydreaming” and “It was just a dream” — admonishments that cause us to lose touch with our imagination. Imagination is something we’re expected to grow out of. For adults in the modern world there’s not much room for imagination anyway. All day long, from the time we wake up and reach for our phone to the time we go to bed, we’re inundated with images — products of other people’s imagination — that are meant to entice us into clicking, buying, liking and following. Our ability to imagine atrophies and our inner world becomes like a neon sign graveyard in the Nevada desert I visited years ago. Nothing grows there, and it’s where other people's images go to die.

I know it sounds bleak, but this deserting of imagination is the reality for most of the people that come to me for counseling. When I ask folks about their dreams, 99% of them either say they don’t dream at all (or if they do they don’t remember them) or that their dreams are meaningless. I believe that poverty of imagination is a major contributing factor to why people feel so stuck in their lives. If you can’t imagine other possibilities for yourself, what choice do you have other than repeat the same old patterns? If you can’t imagine other possibilities for why someone might have said or done something, not only do you stay stuck in your story, but they get stuck there too.

I certainly know this was the case for me. I felt stuck in the same reactive and addictive patterns for years. Gaining psychological information by reading self-help and pop psychology books helped me identify and name some of my patterns, but knowing is only half the battle. Because I couldn’t see the change I wanted to be, I didn’t know what direction I should be pointed in let alone find any traction to haul myself out. It wasn’t until I started doing dreamwork with a therapist and eventually working with psychedelics and plant medicines that my capacity to envision other possibilities for myself was reawakened. Imagination made the impossible seem possible.

And on a bigger level, if we can’t imagine new, more generative and sustainable possibilities for our society, how will we ever save ourselves and the planet? The capacity to imagine is the key to personal freedom and the prerequisite for any creative invention or innovation.

So that’s where it all begins.

For some people, just setting the intention to honour and take imagination seriously is enough to make the leap. Others will find it helpful to “kickstart” their imagination with psychedelics and plant medicines. To everyone I recommend buying a journal, keeping it by your bed and making a practice of documenting any fragments or images that you can bring back from the dreamworld. Read books and watch movies that ignite your imagination. Allow time for daydreaming. Lay on the grass and watch the clouds take different forms. Do what you did before you disowned your imagination and cast it into the box of “silly kid’s stuff.” Reclaiming your inner child, and with it the capacity to wonder and imagine, is the first step on your healing journey toward wholeness and integration.

Setting

I first encountered the image of the Cave of the Heart when I was in my early 20s through a girlfriend’s copy of Ram Dass’ seminal hippie text Be Here Now. Later on I reencountered it in the Upanishads, the great texts of yoga that inspired so much of Joseph Campbell’s work and provided the inspiration for his now-famous maxim “Follow Your Bliss.” When I began to work with plant medicines, and later working with clients as an integration coach, the Cave of the Heart became the setting for dialogues with the inner figures we call “parts” or “archetypes.”

As I was guided intuitively through this process in my own shamanic journeys it provided me with a way to understand and work with hard to grasp psycho-spiritual concepts like “archetype”, “shadow”, “unconscious”, and “Self”. When I started introducing this approach into client sessions I saw that it also helped others orient themselves within their own complex and murky inner worlds. I hope that this short introduction inspires some new ideas for your own journey of healing and integration and perhaps see it as more inner “play” than inner “work”.

Let’s begin with the image of the cave.

Imagine yourself sitting in a cave, not too big, not too small. In the centre of the cave there’s a fire burning. Feel its warmth. Notice how the light of the fire extends in a circle around it, not quite reaching to the farthest walls of the cave. Place your Dreamself within that circle. This is the light of your conscious awareness. (We could also call the Dreamself the “dream ego” as some Jungians do, but ego simply means “I”, and it’s better to stick with simple terms so we don’t distance ourselves intellectually from the other inner figures.) The fire represents what Jung called the Self, the centre and circumference of our consciousness. The yoga tradition uses the image of a fire in the Cave of the Heart to imagine Purusha or Atman, the individual soul that is not separate from the Great Soul, aka Brahman. In this same way we can imagine how this particular fire (or any fire or flame) is not separate from Fire as an element or archetype.

Outside of the circle of light there are other figures present in what we call in psychological terms the Shadow or Unconscious. These are all the parts of our Self that we’ve either disowned (in order to fit into our family, school, workplace, society) or ones that have developed “in the dark” in response to events in our life. At times you might hear their voices whispering in your ear, urging you to “do this” or “not do that.” They can fill your head with all kinds of ideas about who you are or what you’re capable of. Like the figures in Plato’s cave, they can cast their shadows onto other people or situations, obscuring the true nature of things. We call this phenomenon “projection.” It’s not something we do consciously, but rather, it’s something that happens when we’re not conscious of our shadowy parts.

The journey toward wholeness and freedom involves inviting these parts into the light of conscious awareness and getting to know them. One by one we invite them into the circle and hold an Inner Council. Once they’re sitting around the fire we can ask them questions like, “Why are you here?” “What do you want?” “What do you need?” “What are you trying to protect me from?” From this inquiry we can gain understanding of their needs, desires and motivations.

Perhaps you’re well acquainted with some of these inner voices already but haven’t yet invited them into your Inner Council. So many of us have a voice in our head we call the Inner Critic, but how many of us have bothered to consider that he or she has a purpose and value? Instead, we are taught by pop psychology to tell it to “shut up” or “get lost” which only keeps it in the shadows, growing more powerful and resentful by the day (and night).

When clients invite their Inner Critic into the circle to share in the light and warmth of the compassionate and loving Self, we often find out that the Critic is just trying to help. It learned early on that by doing things perfectly (or not doing them all), it helped us preemptively avoid criticism from our parents and teachers, who seemed powerful enough to our younger self that their disgust, disappointment or abandonment could literally destroy us. There’s an intelligence at work in the Critic’s strategies that helped us endure, or even survive, otherwise overwhelming situations. These adaptive strategies simply outlived their usefulness once we moved out of the childhood home and into our adult lives, becoming obstacles rather than supports.

It’s only through understanding that we can find compassion, and ultimately, forgiveness for ourselves and our early coping strategies.

When we see that the Inner Critic, who we came to think of as our persecutor, was really just trying to be a protector, we can reenlist them as a trusted Inner Ally. There are times when their critical perspective could be valuable, like when we’re evaluating a decision or creative work.

The act of calling in the outcast voice transforms it. When the Critic is welcomed into the Inner Council we find that the tone of voice begins to soften. The criticism gets less harsh and more productive. They become friendly counsel rather than dreaded foe.

As you invite more parts into the circle — archetypes like the Inner Elder, Lover, Sage, Warrior, Wounded Healer and Trickster — you gain a wealth of perspectives to draw wisdom from and inform your decisions. No single part reigns supreme. Where your inner world was once ruled by an abusive tyrant, you now have an egalitarian tribal council.

Through these dialogues in imagination, our Dreamself is able to hold court and allow each voice to have a say in the matter — providing us with infinitely more creative options to consider, and leaving fewer and fewer disowned and disgruntled parts to act out from the shadows.