From RuPaul to the Pratyabhijñā Tradition
Approaching Shadow Work through The Inner Saboteur
The “inner saboteur” is a term I first heard watching RuPaul’s Drag Race. In this famous reality show, when a contestant is collapsing under the pressures of insecurity or an inferiority complex, RuPaul often intervenes to name this voice one’s “inner saboteur.”
RuPaul’s encouragement is generally one of domestication: “don’t let that inner critic get the best of you,” as it were. Put her/him/them in their place, and own that this is a part of you that is getting in the way. To truly ‘love yourself’ – as RuPaul is so often at pains to preach – you have to learn how not to listen to the part that tells you “you’re not good enough.”
While this compartmentalizing tactic has certain benefits and certainly empowers some participants on the show, therapeutic approaches like “inner parts work” (often called Internal Family Systems) and Jungian-inspired “shadow work” take more of an interest in understanding what this voice is saying underneath the negative self-talk. The question becomes something like, “What is the unmet need that this part of us is asking for?”
In many instances, what is being requested is precisely not negation, suppression, or compartmentalization. It is rather an “integration.” This doesn’t mean that our negative self-talk should be allowed to run rampant or that we should take its distortions to represent reality. It rather means that the suppression logic reveals a certain kind of relationship with that inner part. It bespeaks a sort of communication style that we are engaged in with that part of ourselves.
On the other hand, this ‘inner saboteur’ — the part that criticizes, reacts, defends, and hides — is often treated in the ‘integration framework’ as something that has gone wrong. It is a piece to recover, a wound to heal, or a fragment to reintegrate. This approach has been deeply effective for many people and is clearly an improvement upon the earlier cultural tendency to silence or ignore all our problems – or follow the admittedly wise-for-its-time Fraggle Rock anthem, ‘dance your cares away, worries for another day.’
In the workshop that I am teaching this Friday, June 5th, we’re looking at an alternative theory that could be applied to ‘shadow work’ or the ‘inner saboteur’ – one derived from the Pratyabhijñā tradition.
To share just one idea, what we experience as that ‘inner saboteur’ (or ‘shadow’) is saṅkoca — contraction. The same consciousness that is svātantrya (inherently free) is, at any given moment, performing a ‘narrower’ expression of itself. The saboteur therefore isn’t a broken part, but rather consciousness-as-contraction. For reason of its own playfulness, it manifests as varyingly situated modes of itself.
This subtle shift of orientation has potentially radical implications for shadow work. You’re not trying to fix something foreign. You’re learning to recognize a familiar gesture of your own awareness — and, in recognizing it, to feel where the contraction might begin to loosen and expand.
Thank you for reading. Interested in the workshop?
In this 2.5-hour live workshop, we will explore this contraction: what it is, why it happens, and how to meet it through a lens informed by Abhinavagupta’s ‘aesthetics of recognition.’ You’ll leave with a short, portable practice for the moments the saboteur arrives — not to ‘manage’ it, but to recognize what it already is.
The Inner Saboteur: A Tantric Approach to Shadow Work
LIVE | June 5, 2026 | 10:00am-12:30pm ET | Recording Included