Brian:
I applaud you for trying to pioneer your way to a useful new perspective on shadow work!
I have appointed myself as chief examiner of Kosmic cartography. My job is to ensure that places that are already named do not get new names.
Let me ask. Are you really doing anything different?
1. You start with the sense that you need to do shadow work on "something." This is a vague sense, right?
2. This presumes that there is a 1st person feeling or impulse or quality that has been repressed or disowned. Let's assume you have accurately assessed this to be the case.
3. But, for this to be the case, those repressed or disowned feelings or impulses have to appear as 2nd or 3rd person events in your 1st person awareness. So, you have a sense in your 1st person awareness that there is something that appears as a 2nd or 3rd person event that should properly be regarded as a 1st person event (which has been repressed or disowned.)
4. You mention that you are having a hard time identifying the "aspect" of the shadow that you need to work on.
5. You are suggesting that you can start by taking a 1st person perspective to start the process, rather than a 3rd person perspective, as the classical ILP model suggests.
6. I believe that the ILP model already is doing this. The act of 1st person sensing of the shadow is a given. There is no work to even contemplate until we do the 1st person work of noticing the irritation or friction of the shadow.
7. Once the feeling or impulse has been identified as a feeling or impulse, then the work itself moves ahead in 3,2,1 fashion to reclaim ownership.
8. My feeling is that in the world of Kosmic Cartography, we need to be as scrupulous as possible to not posit more models and terms than are absolutely necessary. It is confusing enough already for most people.
9. I don't see you doing anything different. You are adding the preliminary and necessary conditional impulse that makes the process even relevant and defining the reclamation process using the process you used to identify that there is something to reclaim in the first place.
10. As an analogy, we could say that the "surgical process for amputating a limb" begins by feeling excruciating pain as a stick of dynamite blows off half of our arm. I mean, yes, if no dynamite then no need to do the surgery. But, the notion of doing surgery presumes that the pain has already been felt, we know which arm has been blown up and that amputation is required.
I know that the analogy is kind of weird. I am weak in the area of good analogies! But the point is, you can say that shadow work starts by doing the "light" work of identifying the shadow. But, identification of the shadow is the preliminary condition for even doing the shadow work. The process then has to begin where the shadow (i.e. the wrongly placed ownership of the impulse or feeling) resides, and that is .... out there! In him or her! They are pressuring me to do it! They are hostile! And it is bugging the shit out of me! How dare they be that way!
Can you give us a verbal orientation toward a particular sense that you have that there is a shadow lurking out there but where you cannot really identify what it means? I am kind of wondering - maybe you don't have any shadows. :)
By the way, I don't even think of shadow work with a light/shadow model. It's not so much an issue of light vs. darkness, as it is an issue of ownership of the motivating condition.
The point of the shadow for me is that my impulses are being squashed before I can even feel them and own them. And they squirt out of me, behind me, beside me, under me (everywhere I am not looking) and later I see them as impulses arising through others. Kind of like a ruptured hose. You kink a hose and it springs a leak behind you and the next thing you know you are walking around in mud. Who muddied the ground? Oh, somebody must have destroyed the hose! Well, how dare they!