I have been spending these weeks with Rilke, Weil, and Kierkegaard as part of the preparation for the next Hedge School. Their writing doesn’t stay politely on the page. It gets into you and asks questions you thought you had already settled. Almost without noticing, you find yourself reconsidering the shape of your life. You question the why of a decision. You rethink the story you have been telling yourself.
While reading them, I kept circling back to an idea from Jung. He believed that each person carries a shadow, a part of ourselves we have not yet allowed into view. It holds the impulses we deny, the weaknesses we disguise, the fears we refuse to name, and the possibilities we have not claimed. The shadow is simply the part of us that has not yet found a home in the light.
Rilke, Weil, and Kierkegaard never wrote in Jung’s vocabulary, yet all three understood the gravity of what he meant. They knew that the growth of the inner life doesn’t solely depend on what we admire. It also depends on what we resist. We don’t deepen by brightening the light. We deepen by turning toward whatever lives just beyond it.
In many of the conversations I have with people who carry responsibility, a similar theme appears. They tell me that so much leadership advice feels hollow. It offers templates, strategies, slogans, and the promise of certainty. It promises clarity without cost. But those who have lived through real responsibility know that leadership does not begin with strategy. It begins with the self, and the self is rarely tidy.
What unsettles most leaders is not the external pressure. It is the encounter with their own shadow. The impatience they defend as efficiency. The fear they disguise as prudence. The ambition they recast as principle. The exhaustion they hide until it hardens into distance. These are the hidden influences that shape decisions long before a meeting begins. They are the forces that determine the moral weather of a workplace far more than any formal document.
I am struck by how often I return to Jung while reading Weil or Kierkegaard. Jung’s language does not feel like a foreign strand of thought. It feels like another expression of the same underlying question: just what is a human being asked to do? Weil teaches the discipline of attention, the willingness to look at what is before you without trying to remake it. Jung asks us to extend that attention inward, toward the neglected rooms of the self. Kierkegaard reminds us that such inwardness has a cost. A person who flees that cost becomes divided within themselves. Rilke understood that the unresolved places of a life have their own timing and that the task is not to force an answer but to live in such a way that an answer can one day arrive.
A old teacher of mine once said that the self we try to control is the very self that slips through our fingers. The older I’ve grown, the more this idea resonates. Leadership often inherits the mistaken impulse that they must hold everything together by sheer force of will. They imagine that certainty is something they can generate. They treat life as a problem to be solved rather than a mystery to be entered. If this sounds highfalutin to you, just pause and think of the consequences. From this posture comes strain. The leader becomes rigid. The organisation tightens around them. The work loses air.
The alternative is not passivity but honesty. The leader who has begun to recognise their shadow acts with a different kind of presence. They can say, even silently, that they are afraid. They can acknowledge when they are defending an old story rather than facing what stands in front of them. They can feel the inward tug toward defensiveness and recognise it before it spills outward. They do not need to pretend they are steady. They become steady by refusing the pretence.
I saw this often in my years working in higher education. The people who carried real authority were rarely the ones who sounded most certain. They were the ones who had spent time in the deep places. They had faced their disappointments. They had acknowledged their limitations. They understood that their influence had boundaries. They did not need to perform strength because they had already lived through their weaknesses. They led not from the surface of their personality but from the deep ground beneath it.
This is where Jung helps. Leadership is not a matter of vision alone. It is a matter of integration. It is the slow, unglamorous work of ensuring that the unseen parts of a life are not at war with the visible ones. When a leader has done even a little of this work, others feel it. Things steady. Conversations deepen. People become less guarded. Something in the atmosphere relaxes. The weather changes.
Rilke once wrote that everything is gestation and then bringing forth. Jung would have agreed. The parts of ourselves we keep in the dark do not disappear. They wait. They wait for our attention. They wait for acknowledgement. They wait to be woven into the fabric of a life. And when we finally turn toward them, the work begins. Not quickly. Not dramatically. But deeply.
In the conversations I have with people, this turning is often the real moment of change. A person stops managing the image they present to the world and begins speaking from a quieter place. They recognise what they have avoided. They begin to understand why certain patterns persist. They see how their leadership, their relationships, their work have been shaped by the very things they refused to examine.
There are times when this work of turning toward the shadow is frightening. People often imagine that only a crisis sends someone in search of support, but that is not true. Sometimes the simple act of seeing ourselves without the old defences is enough to make us feel unsteady. It is no surprise that many seek the company of a therapist or a priest at this point. If they’ve done this work for themselves, the priest or therapist won’t pathologise the struggle. They’ll offer a steady place while a person begins to see what has been avoided. The person is not unwell. They are simply doing the work human beings have always needed to do. They are allowing what was buried to come into the light. They are making room for a larger, truer life. The difficulty of that work is not a sign of sickness. It is a sign of honesty.
The work is slow and does not end. It resists every attempt to turn it into a programme. Yet I have come to believe it is the only foundation that lasts. Strategy without self knowledge becomes brittle. Vision without inward honesty becomes inflated. A leader who has not met their own shadow cannot hold the shadows of a community.
What Weil, Kierkegaard, Rilke, and Jung ask of us is not technique. It is attention. It is the willingness to move through the world with more truthfulness and more humility. They remind us that the work of leadership is not an act of control. It is an act of presence. And presence grows only when a person is willing to turn toward what they once turned away from.
Consilium 
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