🌕🌖🌗🌘🌑 Light, Dark & Shadow — Exploring the Qualities Within Ourselves

Intro:

We are woven from forces that radiate like light and forces that root us like darkness, each carrying its own wisdom and shadow.

We often speak about “being more light,” or “embracing our shadow,” but these concepts are rarely explored in the nuanced, embodied way they deserve.

This article is an exploration of Light, Dark, and Shadow — not as abstract spiritual ideas, but as living, felt qualities within us. Each of them carries wisdom, each has a purpose, and each becomes distorted when isolated. Understanding these dynamics can help us live with more wholeness, honesty, and freedom.

A recent, co-facilitated workshop with @Ulrikke_mysen in Oslo, Norway, offered the space to explore these qualities in an embodied way. What follows is a universal reflection — about the polarities we all carry and the integration available when we stop rejecting parts of ourselves.

The 4 qualities:

Integrated Light & Light's Shadow,
Integrated Dark & Shadow of the Dark

The Integrated Light

The Integrated Light is the part of us that shines outward with radiant clarity and warmth. It holds the qualities of loving-kindness, generosity, care, devotion, and wholeheartedness. Of uprightness, integrity and love. It is visible. It uplifts. It inspires. And in many ways, it is the “socially approved” way of being — a mode we are encouraged to stay in and pursue as much as possible.

But when we focus solely on the light and stay within these qualities, something happens, and we easily slip into:

The Light's Shadow:

Generosity can turn into over-giving. Kindness into self-abandonment. We stretch ourselves out of our own center, forget to listen to our needs and desires, become overly focused on how we appear or how others perceive us. We often try to be good, spiritual, high-vibe — all the time. And in doing so, we deny the complexity of an expanded human life: the rawness and power held in grief, anger, the emotions that are “not pretty” but just as sacred, important and necessary as the ‘light’ and joyful ones.

The remedy for an overextended light is not “more light.”
It is its polar complement:

The Integrated Dark

The Integrated Dark is mostly misunderstood in our culture, which might be why it is largely avoided. It is not danger, harm, or destruction for its own sake. Integrated Dark is the fierce clarity of discernment. It is the ability to set boundaries, speak truth, and honor one’s desires without shame.
It is radical self-expression and deep self-presence, regardless or despite what others may think. It is wildness, magic, mystery. It is the force that destroys only what no longer serves, so something new can be born. It is unwavering, unflinching inner power — the part of us that says, “This is who I am, and I show myself fully.”

Because Integrated Dark is so direct and unapologetic, whimsical and unpredictable, it can feel intimidating — but this intimidation is misleading. When we embody the healthy Dark and have integrated it into ourselves, we actually become safer. Our fears, insecurities, and desires no longer need to find unconscious sideways and behaviors to be expressed. We stop trying to please. We stop manipulating. We stop hiding. We simply stand in ourselves.

But just like the light, the dark also has a shadow.

The Shadow of the Dark

appears when power becomes addictive, when desire disconnects from integrity, when action loses its heart. It shows up as manipulation, aggression, unchecked seduction, violence, and overpowering dominance, or collapsing into helplessness and victimhood. It is the dark cut loose from the connection to true Self and Others — power without compassion, or feeling. Often cold and isolated, unbalanced.

And just as the remedy for the unbalanced Light is the Dark – so is the remedy for the Shadow of Dark, the Light. Love, compassion, kindness, gratitude, connection — these soften and re-align the Dark so it can return to its integrated form.

Our ‘natural’ Self with a capital S, by origin, holds both polarities. It becomes distorted only when one side is isolated or rejected.

These Qualities & The Work:

When we really look at it, Light and Dark are not opposites at all — they are complementary forces, like breathing in and breathing out, holding and releasing, surrendering and challenging. One cannot exist in a balanced and grounded way without the other. Whenever one tries to stand alone, it tends to fall into its shadow, the unintegrated, disconnected, unconscious form.

The work, then, is not about becoming “only light,”: good, clear, bright and giving.
Nor about becoming “only dark.”: mysterious, powerful, unwaveringly fierce and independent.

It is about expanding our capacity to hold a wider spectrum of human experience — to embody the wholeness of life rather than a curated slice of it. Being able to hold seemingly opposing polar opposites (that are really not polar opposites at all, but polar complements) and enjoy and lean into our full experience of them. To recognize that the unfamiliar shapes within us, the impulses that feel strange or uncomfortable, often hold the very medicine we need.
If we are able to expand our own ability to embrace these unknown forms and dance between these polarities – we can examine our Shadow and integrate it back into it’s healthy, Light and Dark parts.

And this becomes real when it is felt in the body.

In the workshop, we explored how Light and Dark live as sensations, postures, and energies. How they shape our stance (inner and outer), our breath, our emotional landscapes, our sense of Self.
When we can create a safe-enough environment for these parts to show themselves vulnerably – and we can listen to them without judgment or wanting to force them to change, something magical can happen: We can begin a conversation with these Shadow-parts — the ones that still operate from old coping strategies that may no longer serve us.

When we externalize these voices, as in parts work (like Internal Family Systems or in the Sufi tradition meditation Feeding Your Demons), something powerful happens: the tension held in those parts begins to loosen. The energy that was frozen there starts to move and become available for other areas of our life and growth. This is integration – making whole.

A Living Example — The Lion King exemplifying Light, Dark & Shadow

To make these qualities more tangible, I want to offer a simple yet powerful example from The Lion King.

Even though it’s a children’s movie, the characters carry surprisingly rich archetypal energies. They don’t embody a single quality perfectly — no one does, not even in fiction. But each of them highlights aspects of the four expressions: Integrated Light, Shadow of Light, Integrated Dark, and Shadow of Dark. A character might primarily express one quality, but they also carry threads of others. Just like in life, no-one is pure Light or pure Dark. It is a blend — a living pattern.
Still, The Lion King gives us a beautifully accessible starting point:

🔆 Integrated Light – Mufasa
Mufasa, the wise king, represents the strength and nobility of Integrated Light.
His leadership is grounded, protective, compassionate. He shines from within, not to be admired but because clarity and benevolence are his natural state. He holds boundaries, but not with harshness. He nurtures, yet stands firm. His light is not performative — it’s lived.
Mufasa shows us that Light, when integrated, is warm, stable, and anchored in service.

🔅 Shadow of Light – Zazu
Zazu is the loyal and well-meaning, rule-bound advisor of the king, embodies the Shadow of Light. He clings to rules, appearances, and proper behavior. He avoids discomfort, avoids depth, avoids anything messy or unpredictable. His “goodness” becomes rigid. His morality becomes fear-driven rather than soul-driven. He wants everything to stay orderly, bright, polite — even when truth or authenticity would require stepping into shadow or chaos.
Zazu shows us how Light becomes distorted when it’s used to avoid the real, the raw, or the unknown.

🌑 Integrated Dark – Rafiki
Rafiki, the mystical shaman-guide, holds the essence of the Integrated Dark.
He is wild, mystical, playful, unpredictable, and deeply wise.
He doesn’t lead through logic or politeness but through initiation. Through riddles, ritual, truth, and a kind of sacred mischief. He doesn’t destroy for pleasure — he destroys illusion so truth can emerge. He is rooted in ancestry, in the unseen world, in the edges that Light alone can’t reach.
Rafiki shows that the Dark, when integrated, is not danger — it is transformation.

🌘 Shadow of Dark – Scar
Scar, the estranged brother whose pain twist into ambition, embodies the wounded, unintegrated Dark. He uses power manipulatively, driven by bitterness and unworthiness.
He distorts truth to serve himself. He rejects vulnerability and connection, cutting himself off from the reciprocity that keeps power healthy.
His darkness is not mystery — it is resentment. Not transformation — but control.
Scar shows what happens when power loses connection to love and to the greater whole.

Even in this simple story, the four expressions are not boxes but fields of energy.

Each character expresses a primary harmonic, but they are not limited to it. Mufasa has moments of Dark. Rafiki laughs with the Light. Zazu isn’t malicious — just afraid. Scar, tragically, was not born evil; he is a twisted mirror of unintegrated potential.

This is the same for us. We are not one thing. We are not fixed in one mode. We hold all four qualities — Light, Dark, and their Shadows — and we move among them depending on awareness, integration, and the pressures of life.
The work is not to eliminate any of them, but to recognize them, integrate them, and return them to their healthy expression.

Appreciation, Staying connected and Upcoming Events

I want to appreciate the following people who shaped this experience and made it possible:

Deep gratitude to Ulrikke for a beautiful collaboration filled with mutual inspiration, joy, flow, and an easeful sharing of power. Thank you for all the organizational, promotional skills and the engagement without which this would not have been possible.

Thank you, House of Consciousness, for hosting us and the special environment and energy you create and uphold.

A heartfelt thank you to all participants for your engagement, presence, and courage — for meeting the rich, tender, and sometimes unfamiliar parts of yourselves with openness and curiosity.

And a special thank you to Håkun, whose enthusiasm and insight (shared with us after the workshop) reminded us of the importance of working with concrete examples to deepen understanding and insight. The section above is for you.

If this exploration lights something up in you — or awakens curiosity to meet your own Light, your own Dark, the Shadows, and all other parts that you consist of — you’re welcome to read about more topics in the slowly growing blog-page linked here or join the newsletter for future workshops and retreats, just write me an email.

Upcoming Event:

There is a 4 Day retreat coming up March 18-22 2026 in Lithuania about merging Human Design insights with Embodiment, Ritual, and Integration. The flow of intellectual insight of our divine soul blueprints into grounded, felt experience in an individualized, powerful retreat over equinox in the middle of an ancient forest by the lake 1.5h from Vilnius, Lithuania.

With warmth,
Immanuel

Feel free to explore both facilitators’ (from the Light & Shadow workshop)
to learn more about the work we each do:

Immanuel Holtmannspötter:

mindbodyworkflow.com

info@mindbodyworkflow.com

IG:@mindbodyworkflow

Ullrike Mysen:
IG: Ulrikke_mysen
Website: Animo.no