Shadow Work, Feeding Your Demons, and Persona
A little while back, I had a productive session in the Akashic Records with Josephine Hardman, PhD. During it, we discussed some things that had been bothering me and, based on that and what she saw in the Records, she suggested that I practice a modernized Buddhist practice called “feeding your demons” to better understand one of my shadows or saboteurs, or in the language of this technique, a demon (it was an inner slave-driver). I talk a little bit about the initial attempt in my second interview with her for her podcast Inner Work, which will release in early March, but it wasn’t the last time I completed the exercise. After that first semi-successful attempt, I decided to read the book outlining the approach, Feeding Your Demons by Lama Tsultrim Allione. I’ve not been a fan of a lot of books in the general self-help category, but I do appreciate books that are grounded in some form of spiritual practice that feels familiar to me.
In the practice, you identify some source of pain or resistance or lack, much like we would during shadow work, feel it in the body, and bring it out as a form that is called a demon (or a god, depending on the appearance of the attachment, which is unhealthy either way). Once it is embodied, you can start to talk with it to understand what’s really going on and what it needs. It’s a practice based in compassion for our demons.
In the shadow work that I have typically done for myself and others, we look at how to turn what could be a weakness or limiting factor into a strength or source of power. And in this practice, the demon is also a potential source of power because it consumes so much of our energy. The premise behind feeding the demon is that you give the demon what it needs rather than just let it keep sucking your energy like an inner vampire. Once you’ve done this, the demon can become an ally who supports you and not only returns that energy to you but also helps you use that energy to heal or otherwise engage in personal goals. There are different types of demons, and they can manifest in physical as well as psychological forms, but they all stem from ego.
That conceptualization of a demon (or shadow) who becomes your ally made me think of the video game series, Persona, in which teenagers battle shadows in a psychological realm to help release people from their pain, fears, vices, and even psychotic tendencies. Once defeated, the demons/shadows can be merged with the individual whose shadow they are to help empower them or, in the case of unattached shadows, they can be recruited to work on behalf of the main character to empower him as a kind of empty slate. As a fun side note—and the main reason I have played the games—the characters (and the shadows) are categorized by the major arcana of the tarot.
As the series’s title suggests, there are plenty of Jungian psycho-spiritual concepts in the games, but Josephine, who knows of the game, suggested that “psychosynthesis” might be an interesting psychological concept to explore here. (I mentioned the game after reading Feeding Your Demons.) I haven’t done that homework yet, but at a simple level, it involves self-actualization and removing limitations on potential. To me, that’s a big part of shadow work and the power of tarot. Removing the pain or fear or blockage naturally lets growth occur, and potential then feels expanded, even if it was always technically possible. I will be exploring psychosynthesis more, but I wanted to give this little preview of the topic as I start to read more from books in this realm, such as Becoming Supernatural, and suspend some of my skepticism on these topics. (I still think that some of the authors in this arena or their techniques can be shady, that they can require problematic self-limitations or relinquishing autonomy and/or cultural critique, or that they can result in what are effectively self-enrichment pyramid schemes, but I’m willing to read books when I trust the recommender to be reasonable and ethical.)
In the meantime, I wanted to share a little bit from an experience that I recently had that felt more complete than that initial session with the slave-driver subpart of myself that you can hear about on Josephine’s podcast when it comes out.
A week or so before I did that session, when I was first planning to do it but not willing to find the time to actually do it, I drew some cards from the Everyday Tarot by Brigit Esselmont and Eileen Grosch while focusing on the Soul Work card from the Threads of Fate, which had jumped out. Seeing the Hanged Man over the reversed 7 of Cups with the 2 of Wands on one side and the 3 of Wands on another was really the clarifying point for helping me see that what seemed like distractibility was actually something deeper that needed my attention.
Over the months of COVID “quarantine” (here in Texas it’s pretty much just masking and social distancing, but we’ve been trying to isolate as much as we can), I have found myself increasingly distracted and distractible. It’s gotten to the point where my partner wonders if I have undiagnosed AD/HD, and while that’s possible, I’ve come to recognize that there are some other explanations that feel right on the spiritual level (even if it’s manifesting as a condition). I won’t get into those here—that’s for another post and involves some ideas that a friend and coach, Amanda of Salt and Shadow Tarot and Indie Deck Review, helped me articulate—but that was part of the focus of my demon feeding. With the cards from that earlier tarot reading in my mind, I was curious about my need to produce while also being totally unfocused in that work because of so many ideas, which made it impossible to actually produce anything.
To start, I grounded myself with a special routine described in the book and then felt for the energy in my body. Real talk: I did not take great notes on the experience, but I recall there being a bluish and greenish spiky energy, sort of like a psychic thistle in retrospect, which was drawing my attention. I have a note here that it went from my “headband” (the space where one would be) to my neck, which I would assume includes my throat.
As that energy took form, it started to look like a kind of humanoid Venus fly trap, but its “mouths” opened up to eyes, and it was wearing high heels. It was like an amalgamation of the main characters and main villain of Aaahh!!! Real Monsters, a cartoon I enjoyed when I was in junior high. I don’t think I’ve thought about that show in more than a decade, but it must have been down there in the subconscious because I recognized it almost instantly (albeit imprecisely, as it turns out) as being like one of the characters on the show (rather than a combination of four of them). Once I fed it what it needed, expression, it was able to transform. I think it became something unhelpful, but then that disappeared and I welcomed the ally to me. It was an adorable little humanoid flower, and I had the impression that it was a childlike fairy kind of thing. I know. Who would have thought? But it made me so happy to see, and I’ve seen fairy-like scenes in my own trips to the Akashic Records, so off-brand as it seemed, it seemed right.
We talked about how it could help me before it integrated with me, and while I haven’t done the inner child work it was subtly signaling, I did play a video game (Persona 5) for a couple of hours for the first time in a year, and I have been able to do some of the other work it called me to do. Ooh, looking through these notes, I see some other recent synchronicities that I need to focus on soon.
Anyway, it’s a fairly simple process that can have big effects, and I highly recommend trying it in addition to any other shadow work (or therapy) and coaching that you might be exploring. And if you like the Persona games, you should definitely read the book because some of the shadows in the games seem like they were probably dreamed up during a process like demon-feeding.