Lowering the Contrast
I was thinking about how to bring consciousness, as I work with it in my practice, into words. It is a challenge to translate a knowledge that is, for me, so sensorial. In my guidance, the spoken word is the conducting thread, but never the only resource; I work with symbolic and somatic approaches too, to help each person navigate their own subjective waters. And consciousness, as I understand it, is less an idea than a state of being: the felt sense of being whole. The work of consciousness is the movement towards that state.
It was while I was searching for a way to say this that I came across a painting by Georges de La Tour, Saint Joseph the Carpenter, from the 1640s. I was flipping through the pages of an art book, and the room was as bright as it could possibly be under the Sardinian autumn light. I mention the brightness of the room on purpose, because it matters for everything that follows.
I knew immediately that this was the kind of artwork you appreciate most when the contrast is lowered. So I used my phone’s camera to look at it that way. Later that night, I tested it again under different lights and shadows. It became a playful exercise: trying to place the narrative of shadow work, of the consciousness at the heart of my work, inside this painting.
Because the point of this painting is this: to enjoy the artist’s good shadow work, your eyes need to be able to catch rich nuances that are only faintly lit, nuances a bright room simply would not allow you to see. The painting has the power to draw you inside it, but only if your eyes are willing to adjust to the penumbra that lives there. In full daylight, it stays closed.
This is, to me, a beautiful image of the movement of consciousness. Not flooding the shadow with light, but pacifying it, so that we can illuminate it without making it bigger than it needs to be.
Beyond the technique itself, the chiaroscuro that lets us see the artist’s game of light and shadow, there is the scene. Joseph is being lit by a child. The room is cosy and dark. The child who brings the light is the one who sees, and lets herself be seen by, the years of experiences and choices that lie ahead of her. Joseph, from his side, looks at the child before him and sees the light on her face: a part of himself that had been living there in the dark the whole time he was working on the beam.
When we recognise in someone else a part of ourselves we had lost sight of, something meets between projection and essence. This encounter between projection and essence does not happen in a fully bright room, nor in a pitch-dark one. It happens when the contrast is lowered. That is where we are able to feel present.
Shadow work is accessed through intuition and symbols, and the crossing it asks of us is, essentially, the tolerance of middle tones.
To savour this kind of painting, and this image in particular, is to access the symbolic layers of a very small gesture: a single moment of this movement towards enlightenment. In Jungian words, a glimpse of individuation, of which shadow integration is part, applied to an art reading, through my own eyes.
And here I am, the same person who speaks so often about the prisons we build with our own narratives, imprisoning Joseph and the child inside an enlightenment journey of my own making. Perhaps that is unavoidable. Every reading is a narrative. But what I want to keep from this one is simple.
He is looking at her, and she is looking at him.
It is the encounter of the hermit: someone who has gone inward, carrying wisdom, looking back at the child who once lived in the world, who learned from it, who faced its shadows and the contrasts life brought. And in that mutual gaze, becoming whole. Living in the present.
Perhaps this is why the light in this painting is a candle. It does not illuminate the past or the future, only what is close to it, now. And in this dimension, the present is all we can truly access. We cannot live inside our potential, which has not yet happened, nor inside a memory, which has already become something else. So the more honest we want to be with ourselves, the more present we need to become. That is what practising consciousness means.
This was an exercise in trying to explain what consciousness is. But it is also a point of view, one that invites this same expansion of perception: lowering the contrast, letting the eyes adjust, and seeing what was always there.
Appreciating some good shadow work.
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