Shadow work is something that we all have maybe heard of or is at least starting to get more popular. It is something I'm really passionate about and I think it's so important to address. The hidden aspects of yourself or the things that maybe you avoid or don't want to acknowledge is what we are going to explore. This is how you can take control and power back of your life again
Shadow work; until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate" by Carl Jung. I can't talk about shadow work without bringing up the powerful psychologist Carl Jung. He was someone who researched and taught us about what the shadow self really is.
What parts of you are hidden?
What have you been avoiding?
What are your unprocessed emotions?
Shadow work is addressing the pieces of you that you have avoided, the parts that have not been processed or acknowledged in the unconscious right below your conscious monkey mind. You know, there's pieces of you down below that we don't always slow down enough to listen to, address or pay attention to.
Shadow work is the parts of you that you don't accept. It's unhealthy habits, the repressed or ignored parts of you. It could be trauma or impulsive habits that you learned when you were younger. Shadow work is really important to do so that you can actually love yourself fully and accept the hard parts.
It's important because we can't move forward and create the life that you want without addressing the pieces of you that are hurt and broken and upset. We can't take our control or power back until we can fully stand in who we are, love ourselves and not have any shame judgment or guilt.
There's a lot of societal constructs out there, especially for women, on how to be, we're raised to be polite, to sit down and listen and be quiet and let other people speak up. And we people please, we let everybody else go before us. WE think everyone else deserves our love, time and attention more than us. But it's important to look at when that is helpful. And when it is time to speak up, when it is time to share.
Make sure that you have addressed the anger, resentment and pain that you have inside of you so that it's not running your life. If you don't address what your inner child is still holding onto, what is hurting you from childhood, from when you first grew up, the teenage years, the first relationships, if you don't acknowledge that and look at the habits you learned, you will recreate pain stories.
Look atthe unhealthy traits that you picked up from your caregivers, your parents, your family, friends, people around you, and see maybe those things aren't really who you are or who you want to be.
But to be able to let yourself learn about who you are, what you want, what your values truly are, and giving yourself the permission to show up fully in your authentic self and your truest version of you.
You get your power by being able to have the control over yourself, your emotions, your reactions, so that you can respond and not let your emotions get the best of you. The way we show up in the world and how we choose to interact with the people around us, the way
we attract certain partners, the way we speak to others, the way you speak to yourself is directly related to how much shadow work you've done.
It's all about being able to own up to your own unhealthy habits, dig into the parts of you that have been rejected, shamed or hidden and letting yourself learn about yourself.
Learn who you really are under all the stories other people told you.
There's a lot of times that we have negative self-talk or these fears and these stories about ourselves that other people put on us, that other people told you while you worked at your first job or you were in a relationship. Things people have said to us that have hurt us and that we have carried with it and learned unhealthy coping mechanisms or unhealthy ways to communicate. Shadow work is so important because
Without it, we are faking it and pretending it's all love and light, but it never is. we have to be safe in our own darkness. We have to know how to manage our emotions, how to get through the heavy stuff, because life will be life-in. Life is gonna have its ups and downs. We're gonna have the times where it's really hard, and it's in those times how you show up and how you get to be happy. It's in those times where
You show your true colors. You show how good of a person you are or how rooted and strong in yourself and who you are through those times, that's how you show up. So why do we want to do shadow work? Because that's how we create healthy relationships in our lives. That's how we get to show up is our authentic self, not a fake, dulled down version or a version of you where you're trying to hide parts of you.
so you're not just hiding behind a mask or a pretend version of you. You get to show up and learn new ways of communication, new coping mechanisms, a way to deal with life, to deal with ups and downs. You get to have more of a balance and like a steady flow in life versus the highs and lows and the crazy roller coasters that unprocessed emotions cause in us. Some examples of around...
shadow self or the parts that we have to look at is, you know, when are you being aggressive? When are you being angry or yelling at people? How are you reacting? Are you saying hurtful things or have these hurtful coping mechanisms for yourself or for others? Are you self harming to get through and trying to inflict pain on yourself so that you don't do it to others?
or is it you feel you deserve it? These are some heavy topics and these things that we have to look at, work through, because you don't want to be doing that your whole life. That's not going to be good for you or the people around you. And there's times where maybe you have these impulses and these wants and these desires that are immoral or low value. There's different
and actions or urges that maybe you're doing because of the pain from somebody who hurt you when you're younger or you haven't found any forgiveness for yourself for how you used to be or the shame that you carry around makes you hide and play small so you can't stand up and share your light with the world. Where are you still hurt? Shadow work is about finding out where are you still hurting inside? What haven't you let yourself feel?
You have to dig into the inner child healing for shadow work and let that younger self throw the temper tantrum it wished that they could have yelled and screamed or said no or told somebody to stop. You have to be able to go into those hard dark places and love yourself, hug that inner child, express to yourself that you didn't deserve it, rewrite the story so that it is not your identity. Your pain story, yes.
It is something that has happened to you and it is not fair and you didn't deserve it. And it doesn't have to be your whole story. You have to find the time and the space to do the shadow work, to unravel some of that, rewrite a new story and take it back as your wisdom and your power and how to move forward and what to do to help others in that area maybe or maybe the children you decide to have. how can your wounds be something you
choose to turn into your wisdom. Shadow work is about embracing the power that you have within from all the stuff you have already gone through. Take a second, look back at your life, how you grew up, what you went through, the trauma, the hard stuff, the things that kind of shaped you to be who you are. And think about how that helped you learn lessons, get stronger, learn how to help others.
and so much more. The thing about shadow work is that if you are still hurting and you haven't acknowledged and worked through those parts of you, it's gonna recreate that. The chaos that you learn growing up will be replayed out in your relationships, in your jobs, in your community, in the people around you, if you are not doing the shadow work. I know that I have talked before about some of the stuff.
You know, I was recreating the relationships. I was so afraid of love, yet I wanted it so badly, I was going after emotionally unavailable men. I was creating toxic relationships and I got hurt and cheated on, so then I was like, well, I'm just gonna play and have fun. I'm not gonna do anything serious with anybody, but then that caused a lot of pain for others. I was recreating pain for others because I didn't acknowledge the pain I had within myself.
And I know that's true for so many people out in the world right now that are just spreading the hurt and the pain because they're too afraid to address it, to look at it, to work on it. I think it's really important, especially for people in like high school or early 20s or whenever your first relationships are, what did you learn from those relationships? What did you learn about love, about your body, about sexual interactions? When you were growing up, what did you learn about
success, about money, there's so much that we are shaped as young kids and growing up that might not resonate with you anymore. What you learned and seen growing up probably doesn't align with what you are figuring out and learning now. Especially if you're in this whole area of self-help and healing and spirituality, you're probably really seeing how much doesn't make sense and what you learned and you've seen before isn't the right way to do things.
So here I am to tell you that this is your permission slip to dig into that unprocessed trauma, into that pain. Therapy is really helpful. Working with different coaches and like somatic healing, doing even simple things at home, know, is shadow work is heavy, it's hard, it's scary, it's a lot. So it is important to have support through that. Just digging in all by yourself and having no support.
can be dangerous, can be really hard, so I do not suggest that. Please make sure that you have people, you have friends and community who knows what you're going through or knows that you're interested in doing this work and that are gonna help you. They're gonna hold your hand, they're gonna hug you, but you also learn your own.
ways to nurture yourself, your own new ways to handle emotions because if you've been shoving down emotions and feelings for so long and then you just decide to open up and dig in and you don't have coping mechanisms, you don't have support or community, you don't have a therapist or a coach or somebody to go to when stuff gets really, really dark, it's gonna make it worse. So I want to just put that out there. Please do this carefully, intentionally and
making sure that you have as much of a community and support that you can so that you're not just wreaking havoc and spreading more pain to people. You can do things around like journaling, writing, endless writing I like to do. When I was doing my certification for feminine embodiment coaching, we had to go into shame. And this was years ago, I was still trying to hide some of the pain I had and...
We had to write about shame and I was like, I don't have shame. I'm fine. And then we had to do endless writing for 10 minutes around shame. And so much stuff came up. I was blown away. I was like, no. It opened up so much that I was avoiding and not looking at around who I used to be, how I used to look for love, how I showed up in relationship.
I have lot of shame and guilt around what I dealt with, what I allowed in relationship, and what I kept going back to, what I kept choosing because I was hurt. I kept trying to beg somebody to love me that couldn't love me because I hadn't acknowledged my hurt inner child enough. I did some work, but not enough. So I invite you to do some writing, endless writing. So you set a timer for 10 minutes, you get in a journal, and you start writing about
It could be shadow work, could be the shame you carry, it could be around the guilt you should carry, what are things I'm avoiding, and start writing it out and see what comes up. You'll be surprised even when you're not sure what to write. Just keep writing, do not take your pen off the paper. notice what comes up, and then afterwards take some time to feel into it, process, kind of go through it, and then making sure you have...
healthy ways to deal with that afterwards. Maybe anger comes up. And a healthy way for anger would be maybe screaming into a pillow or punching and getting some of that energy out into a pillow, going for a run or doing a workout, finding different ways that you can process sadness and anger and resentment and some of the harder feelings so that when you...
feel these and notice that you have tools already. You have to start practicing the tools before you dive into shadow work. And you also have to be really graceful with yourself. Having self-compassion is a large part of shadow work because we have to understand that we are not perfect. We're going to have ups and downs. There's going to be hard times and things in life that we have to deal with. But we can't judge ourselves or have the negative self-talk.
And if you are having all this negative self talk, dive into that. Where did you first hear that? What made you believe in that? Who said that to you? What is the area that you are so hard on yourself? What do you focus on and feel like you're such a failure at? And look at it. Be real with yourself. Are you actually a failure or are you just learning? Are you trying new things? Are you listening to somebody else's version of success? Like what do you really want in life and how?
Can you celebrate yourself? Let yourself have fun. Let yourself learn and move through all the ups and downs of life that you don't have to be perfect.
Another big part, of shadow work is self responsibility. You can't make somebody else do it for you. You can't just put it on someone else, especially in relationship, friendships, romantic relationships, our reflections and they put up mirrors to us for us to look at what it is we need to be healing and acknowledging, but we have to make sure the mirror isn't dirty. They aren't shining back to us their own pain and trauma too.
So you have to be able to decipher the difference with the people around you of, is this something that is mine or is it something somebody else is projecting onto you? That is huge and will really help a lot. But you have to own up, have your own self-responsibility and your own accountability. You have to hold yourself accountable to make sure you are showing up for yourself. You're continuing to do the work. You're not just opening it up and being like, there's a lot in there, shutting it and running away. That's not going to help anybody.
So I really invite you to see where you can create healthy coping skills, find different ways to deal with life and get through this stuff, allow yourself compassion and grace while you have accountability and responsibility for your own healing journey. There are other ways, shadow work, to get to the subconscious and being able to dive in deeper is really good to go through meditations.
shamanic journeying, different layers of meditation so you can go down and deeper into the lower realms to anchor into your body and find these pieces of you that maybe you've given away or have taken away or that has disassociated because of the pain and the trauma that you went through.
Having somebody else, having a healer, having somebody guide you through these and be there with you so that when you come out and you are looking at and realizing how much was there is gonna be really supportive to make sure that you don't feel like you're alone in this. So going into altered states through meditation, looking at your dreams, doing shamanic journeying, or there's different psychedelic or plant medicines in safe containers.
with people who are trained and know how to handle and help people through the things can be an option. I'm not saying go out there and be all wild and crazy. Please do everything intentionally, safely, and have someone there to help you. We have to be able to dig into all the different layers of ourselves so that we can stand up fully in who we are, in our essence, our truest, brightest light of ourselves.
And the only way you can be that authentic version of you is to acknowledge your shadows and like look behind you and see like what made you who you are today. What are you doing to heal and get through some of the pain that you've gone through so that you're not passing it on to others and letting yourself be happy, joyous, loving, kind and ripple that out into the world. We need more of that.
So, the more people who do shadow work, the better happy, joyous world we can live in and it all starts with you.
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