Confront Your Shadow Wounds with the Devil card

Week Three of SUMMER OF SHADOW

This summer, I’m guiding you through a tarot takeover of my book, THE SHADOW PATH. Each Monday, I’ll pair a key theme from the book with a tarot archetype to share fresh insights on shadow work (and play). Today, we’re diving into Week Three: Confront Your Shadow Wounds with The Devil, and I’m sharing my notes on how this card invites us closer to the Shadow below.

These brief Monday field notes are free to read. To deepen your journey through the book with access to a private chat + live & recorded Sunday journaling sessions, become a paying subscriber to The Shuffle.

Over the past weeks, we’ve taken gentle steps to see and understand our Shadow. Now, for Week Three of our tarot-informed journey through The Shadow Path, we’ll wrestle with the (often valid) reasons we may have been avoiding or ignoring our Shadow.

Our guide this week is The Devil, which challenges us to look our shadow in the face, taking in our inner reality for what it is, instead of avoiding it.

Need to catch up? All past weekly resources and recordings can be accessed via the Summer of Shadow Playlist here.

The devil is in the distance

This week is about confronting your shadow wounds - not placing blame. I’ve chosen the Devil not to put a demonic mask on your shadow or to cast it as a demon, monster, or aggressor, but because the card represents the dangers of distancing ourselves from our shadow sides. Our shadow isn’t the problem; our fear of looking into it is.

Rachel Pollack writes: “On a wider sense [The Devil] symbolizes the life energy locked up in the dark hidden areas of the self, which cannot be entered by ordinary means. It is called the Devil because for those who are not prepared to receive this energy it can manifest itself as monsters, a sense of the universe as filled with evil, or the temptation to indulge in violence.”¹

But after two weeks of courting the shadow, we are prepared to access that life energy hiding within us.

We’re equipped to look at the vulnerable things in the hidden areas of the self - the painful elements that drove us to look away in the first place, and do the work of pulling the Devil’s chains off our neck, of escaping the real monster - avoidance.

Tip: If you only do one exercise from The Shadow Path this week, aim to complete “Wanted for Shadow Crimes” - this art exercise is a strong foundation for the rest of the week’s work.

Our biggest shadow wound is avoidance

“When we avoid something, we experience temporary peace or relief from the thorniness of the thing. This reinforces the avoidant behaviour, but it also reinforces the belief that the thing we’re avoiding is dangerous,” reads the entry on the Devil from Jessica Dore’s Tarot for Change.²

Dore adds that in avoiding our feelings “we’re also investing in this broader belief that feelings themselves have the capacity to be dangerous, and that’s just not true.”

This belief in danger is the true source of our wounds. Not the things that are unknown or unfamiliar and uncomfortable within us, but our judgment of them. And it’s this story we’re aiming to rewrite this week.

“We slip a chain around our own necks every time we make certain thoughts, feelings, or sensations bigger and more powerful than they actually are,” writes Dore. “There is nothing maladaptive about wanting to avoid what is frightening or unpleasant. Just make sure that what you’re scared of is actually dangerous before you go building a whole life around avoiding it.”³

Tip: Journal about what feelings you’ve cast as dangerous.

Trust the process

So far, we’ve looked at the Chariot, the Hierophant, and now the Devil as useful mile markers along our Shadow Path. When you lay them out, there’s something interesting to consider in the composition. Do you see what I see?

The Chariot, Hierophant, and Devil from the Rider Waite Smith Tarot

With each card, we step deeper into the dark and turn more intentionally toward ourselves.

The sequence moves from natural light to dim temple to total darkness, and yet our eyes - and hearts - adjust.

Another progress to chart: each image makes a kind of triangle - the central figure at the apex, and two figures at the base - and it’s these base figures that interest me.

In the Chariot, the sphinxes face away from each other - still foreign to each other.

In the Hierophant, they face the priest - seeking answers.

In the Devil, they finally face each other - naked and raw.

This vulnerability and willingness to see is the act of confronting your shadow wounds this week. This isn’t about fixing something or making it go away, but rather about the loving work of turning toward the self, seeing and accepting the self more clearly, the deeper you look into the dark.

Tip: Check out different versions of The Devil card from your own deck collection, or use my favorite resource of all time: Comparative Tarot. Which version of the card best represents your Shadow as your teacher?

Join me live on Sunday, July 19th at 7pm UK / 2pm Eastern / 11am Pacific for a tarot journaling event where we’ll connect more deeply to our Shadows through an exclusive Devil-themed Shadow spread.

Below, full-access subscribers to The Shuffle can find:

• Access to our private Telegram chat

• A companion workbook with bonus spreads for reflecting on each week of the journey

• A discount code for my limited edition Summer of Shadow reading