Creator said: “I want to hide something from humans until they are ready for it. It is the realization that they create their own reality.” The eagle said, “Give it to me. I will take it to the highest mountain top.” The Creator said, “No. One day they will go there and find it.” The salmon said, “I will bury it on the bottom of the ocean.” The Creator said, “No. They will go there too.” The buffalo said, “I will bury it on the Great Plains.” The Creator said, “They will cut into the skin of the earth and find it even there.” Grandmother who lives in the breast of Mother Earth and has no physical eyes but sees with spiritual eyes, said “Put it inside of them.” And the Creator said, “It is done.”
Shadow work is one of the most important elements of your healing journey. It’s also important to note that if you aren’t able to recognize what a shadow is, you might not even be able to do the deep healing work you are longing to do.
It’s all well and good to focus on peace and love and light, but those feelings are generally fleeting, and can’t be held as a static state of being by simply meditating peacefully. As you raise your vibration, you will experience more love and light, but if you’re on the healing path, you’re also going to walk through the dark woods, facing fears, and even death (ego death) along the way. This is often referred to as the dark night of the soul in the spiritual world. Even if you decide to lock yourself in a cave, or commit yourself to an ashram, those shadows are going to come looking for you. I’ve experienced some dark energy while spending time at ashrams as people attempt to embrace only love and light and shove their shadow side away in the dark corners of the basement of their psyche. Communal living has a way of triggering people, I tell ya.
What is happiness?
Before we dive fully into shadows, let’s start on a light note and discuss the notion of happiness. Everyone, it seems, is striving for happiness. But what is happiness? Happiness is a fleeting state of emotion dictated by external circumstances. Very few of us tap into real happiness, or grace, which comes from within. In western culture, we are so hooked on the idea that happiness comes from external events or circumstances that we have a difficult time understanding people that are content with “simple” or even “poor” existences.
I saw a great TikTok video the other day of an African tribal woman who spoke fluent English and had lived abroad for a time. She came home to her African village because she preferred the simplicity. She was baffled how people in the west think that because they have a dirt floor and lack of mod cons, they must be poor and unhappy, or that they may even be in need of “saving” or “rescuing.”
Research shows that the biggest variance in happiness is between those who struggle with basic needs such as food, water, and shelter, and those that don’t, but there is very little evidence of a substantial happiness difference between those that have their needs met and the uber wealthy. If anything, mo’ money, mo’ problems, right? There’s a line in a song that always resonates with me, “Hungry ghosts in the land of milk and honey. There are people so damn poor, all they have is their money.”
Hungry ghost = that unending need to fill yourself with external things. In a world where many people feel a disconnection with the earth and other humans, oftentimes desires are extended past needs and we end up filling voids of unhappiness with vices such as food, shopping, sex, alcohol, gambling, or anything else that may get our endorphins pumping for that quick fix. The hole is endless, it’s never satisfied. This can also happen in the spiritual world. We buy crystals, read self-help books, and sign up for meditation courses, hoping that something outside of us will “fix us,” but we are really only attempting to fill a spiritual void stemming from a lack of connection with our higher self.
On the flip side of these fleeting glimpses of “happiness” is fear, anger, hatred, and sadness. Maybe you find yourself fluctuating between dark emotions and hints of happiness. To move from fear fully into grace (internal happiness) entails shadow work.
What is a shadow?
So, what is a shadow anyway? Imagine your real shadow that your body projects onto the ground. When does it show up? Only when we shine a light on it, right? Otherwise, you can’t see your shadow. Simply put, your shadow is all that you can’t see or don’t know about yourself. This goes deeper than obvious traumas that you know are affecting you, such as abuse, divorce, and the loss of a loved one. A shadow often dictates your behavior when you face traumas or difficult situations. If you are going through a divorce and find yourself acting badly and getting triggered, there is likely something underlying that. If you lost a loved one and you find yourself shutting yourself off from the world, there’s probably something there. It’s not to say that you shouldn’t grieve or feel hurt or that life feels completely unfair at times, but the problem comes when you get stuck in a loop those emotions either remain stagnant or spiral downhill over the course of time.
The reactions of your shadows often appear when you’re going about your day-to-day life and something unexpected comes up. Let’s say your husband wants to go out on a boy’s night, and you have a meltdown. You’re not really sure why, but if you went deeper into it, you might find there are feelings of abandonment. Or let’s say you feel panic every time you have to travel somewhere, maybe this is because traveling was stressful for your parents when you were growing up. Or maybe you have a difficult time giving and sharing, even if you know there’s more than enough, which could come from a sense of lack. There is a high likelihood there was an incidence in childhood that you’ve been subconsciously holding onto that relates to your behaviors as an adult.
I always like to use this fairly simple example when pinpointing a shadow. Let’s say you’re a child and you are shopping at a department store with your mom. You wander off and get separated from her and suddenly you’re feeling scared and alone. While your mom is panicking and getting all the sales clerks together on a mission to scout out your whereabouts, for you it feels like years have passed and you are trembling and panicking, you may even be crying at this point. You’ve lost the security of your mom, and you may even be thinking that she abandoned you purposely. You don’t know who you can trust now. When you are reunited with her, you are filled with relief, but an imprint was made. From that point forward and into your adult life you may deal with feelings of abandonment, trust issues, or difficulty being alone. To adults, it might not seem like much of an incidence, I mean, after all, it had a happy ending, but to that little child, they might as well have been left out in the woods to be eaten by wolves. The big bad world is a scary place. Even when you’ve grown into an adult and you might not even have a physical memory of the event, the incident haunts you as if it was a very real threat to your survival.
Now, shadows can be much darker than in this example of course. Our conscious minds often block out abuse and trauma to protect us. In your healing work, you may need to revisit the event to understand what happened and to let that child know they are safe, but there’s also a chance that your subconscious feels that it’s not beneficial to show you the incident at all, in the event it’s too traumatic for you to handle at that moment.
In any case, when these unhealed emotions flare up in adulthood, they can be in the form of subtle disturbances, almost unnoticeable (they blend in with the rest of society as personality faults because everyone has shadows) or they can be in the form of lashing out and full-on tantrums. You really only begin to notice them once you bring them to the surface (shine light on them) and then they become quite obvious when they do appear.
Positive and Negative Shadows
The interesting thing about shadows is that it’s not just your “dark side.” There are also shadow elements of yourself that are positive. Think of someone you truly admire. Why do you admire them? Think of all the traits that led you to appreciate them. Those traits are all within you. If it feels difficult to see that, remember it’s a shadow element of yourself and it might be so buried within you right now that you can’t even recognize it. But it’s there, I promise you. The only reason that you can see good and bad traits within others, is because those traits are with you. It’s like a mirror reflection. With negative shadows the more you heal, the less other people’s “bad traits” are going to bother you or trigger you because they aren’t as strong within you.
Turning your shadows into power - Shadow work
Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I fear no evil. Psalm 23:4
When you shine a light on your shadow, they cease to become powerful anymore. It’s like the big scary monster hiding in the closet that turns out to be a pile of dirty laundry.
By healing your shadows you’re going to be better equipped to interact with others – family members, friends, communities, and difficult people in your life. You’re going to find that you begin building strong relationships with people that can help you, lift you up, and encourage you on the path to your dharma (life’s purpose).
The people you are closest to often can trigger you the most. If you heal the reason why you were getting triggered in the first place, you’ll find you can move gracefully through your relationships. You can heal ancestral trauma and pain that was passed down to you from your parents, or grandparents. You can heal collective trauma, incidences such as wars and devastating natural disasters that are held in our psyches.
You become less afraid of dying and more enthusiastic about living. Fear ceases to control you. And one day you’ll catch a glimpse of a knowing that you are infinite. You’ll move through the awareness of “Who am I? and then “Who is it that’s asking the question?” and then you’ll experience Source working through you, and finally that Source is no longer working through you, Source is you, so there’s only Source working, playing, and praying.
Shadow work EXERCISE
There is an amazing crossover between the shamanic and the yogic lineages that I study under. Perhaps you’ve heard of Sankalpa in yoga (practices that move you toward your soul-aligned desires), there is also a term called Vikalpa. Vikalpas (vi means separate from) are things that oppose your soul-aligned desires and will interrupt your Sankalpa practice. Vikalpas are essentially your shadows in shamanic work. Most Vikalpas are formed in early childhood, as I mentioned. They are immature ways in which we solve problems.
Whenever you’re ready to do this exercise, take it in steps. This will help you to pinpoint your shadows.
Consider the past two years as you think about the following questions and write down your answers
What did you want to achieve but didn’t achieve?
What did you personally do, or not do, that contributed to this?
What has been the result of not following my dreams and aspirations?
In which ways do you sabotage your spiritual and personal success?
When was the last time you felt stressed, angry, and emotionally unstable?
What emotions, physical sensations, and actions came up?
Once you’ve written everything out, go back and circle, highlight, or identify keywords or phrases that seem to touch the deepest nerve. Those are connected to the most powerful Vikalpas.
Boil these down into a single limiting statement that has impacted your life negatively. It should reflect how your own hidden self-defeating programs have negatively affected your life up until this point. The Vikalpa will want something, and as a result of not getting it, it causes us to act, and react, in a negative way.
I want… so I …
Example
I want others to feel good about themselves so I play small and don’t embrace my full power and potential.
I want to be acknowledged so I act out in negative ways. Negative attention is better than no attention at all.
I want to feel safe so I allow myself to become dependent, helpless, and trapped.
I want to maintain harmony within myself and in group settings so I get caught up in my mind chatter on “how to do that”
Once you arrive at your statement, sit with it. Just be aware of it. There’s no need to do anything but be aware of when it tends to surface. Once you bring awareness to it, you will begin to deplete its power. Deeper shadow work can be done in healing sessions with a professional.
I hope this was helpful for you! Let me know in the comments if anything came up with this exercise, or if you have your own experiences with shadow work that you’d like to share.
See also 11 Signs You Are Going Through a Spiritual Awakening