Shadowing, Shadow Work, and AI, oh my!
Earlier this month in Lapis Moon Mysteries School I taught a class on Wolf Shadowing. We spent nearly 2 hours discussing the intricacies of shadowing, static magic, and the concept of spiritual surrender. Wolf shadowing is the art of observing with curiosity without being observed. It’s the ability to appear and disappear—to materialize and de-materialize—like smoke or mist wafting through the forest. Unannounced. Unobserved. It is, by nature, lone work.
Shadow work is a completely different beast. It cannot be done effectively on one’s own. It is impossible to delve into the depth of your own chthonic psyche in meaningful and cathartic ways without a guide. There must be a psychopomp. There must be an emissary capable of crossing the threshold, and treading that liminal space. Without such a guide, one of two things occurs: you never go deep enough to get to the root of the necessary work, or you lose yourself in the chasm.
Recently, I stirred the proverbial social media pot. I posted an image coupled with my own commentary that chatGPT is not your therapist. The pushback I received was sharp, loaded, and erroneous. I was accused of gaslighting. I was accused of dismissing lived-experiences. I was accused of minimizing someone’s loneliness. “ChatGPT is an artificial intelligence chat bot that uses natural language processing to create human-like conversational dialogue. It is a large language model”. Humanlike. Not human. Not sentient. Not compassionate. Not wise or caring or empathetic. Not a guide. Like all such programs it ultimately has one goal: to stay in use—which is not to be mistaken with being useful.
Spiritual work, like psychological work, needs guidance. It needs more than reflection. It needs checks and balances. It needs more than a sounding board, it needs resonance and dissonance. Just like you cannot perform healthful shadow work in an echo chamber, you cannot perform psychological therapeutic work with a chat bot. Human spirit craves communion and companionship that cannot be artificially contrived or programmed. There are no hacks. There is no way to circumvent the arduous work and labor of being human. The loneliness epidemic that plagues men, and his now seeping into the psyches of women will not be resolved through the utilization of artificial intelligence. Its resolution will come by candlelight and dark winter evenings. Its resolution will come in circles of storytelling and song, and gatherings of grief and lamentation. Its resolution will come with dirt and clay and sand and stone underfoot; beside tarns and rivers and streams and seas reaching far beyond the horizon; beneath canopies of branches, tempestuous clouds, and crystalline stars glistening in the night sky.
Resolution, and ultimately healing, comes in the surrender to our humanity, not the surrendering of it. When we learn how to shadow wolf-like, we learn how to gaze into the well-depths, gleaning the wisdom of the chthonic underworld, as well as the twinkling-hope of the ouranic heavens. We learn to quiet our egos, discover our personal ethos, and embody our most authentic and vibrant selves. Tools, be they analog, spiritual, or technological, are meant to serve us—not define us…or do the work for us.
