Shadow Work Part 1
It isn’t what you do but how you feel. The most flawed premise of all the flawed premises humans have conceived of is that the more that you do the more you’re worth.
The premise that serves our highest good and is at the basis of the universe is that the better you feel the more you allow the truth of who you are to act through you. In our truest nature we are love, peace, joy and enlightenment.
As amazing as these energies and emotions feel we can only act from them when we have faced and integrated our shadow. Otherwise, the shadow, with its darker and heavier emotions keeps us vibrating at the lower frequencies of apathy, jealousy, greed, anger, pride, fear, guilt and blame.
When we are vibrating at such low and draining frequencies life can feel like such a struggle and suffering becomes a constant companion. We inevitably think we need to work harder and longer to get anything good to happen. Things may happen, but most of the time they are counter-productive to what we really want and all aspects of our health suffer tremendously. If we believe we need to struggle and suffer for good things to happen than we will definitely need to struggle and suffer for good things to happen.
Our beliefs create our reality.
If we believe that we can simply raise our internal vibration and begin feeling predominately love, peace and joy and that life will reflect those vibrations back to us than that will be our reality. As we have heard before, like attracts like. Our external reality is always a perfect mirror of our internal reality. Where we are acting from is far more important than the action itself.
We become much more efficient and effective when we act from a place of love, joy, and peace than from anger, fear and pride. Simply put, we get what we give. Shadow work is the process we undertake to raise from a lower vibration of say anger and fear to a higher vibration of love and peace.
There is so much to cover so I’m going to break up shadow work in to several parts. The very first thing to know: What is shadow work in the literal and practical sense?
Step 1: Identify
In the simplest sense, shadow work is intentional feeling. If you can feel, you can undertake shadow work and yield fruitful results.
When first starting shadow work all that is required is that you become aware of what you are primarily feeling throughout the day. Just simply explore and label your feelings and your experiences that you are having within. Being able to label your experience as anxiety, anger, apathy, jealously, guilt or shame is a huge step. If you aren’t sure what you are feeling you can always just go with ‘okay’ ‘decent’ ‘bad’ ‘horrible’ or what ever the case may be.
Feeling what is going on within us isn’t something that comes naturally to a lot of us. We have been conditioned to not feel or show our emotions to our own determent (especially men).
Identifying and working with our shadow may require that we cultivate our inner gifts (sensitivity, intuition, expression, strength) so that we are more able to sense the subtle aspects of our mind, body and emotions.
Great exercises and practices to develop these inner gifts that we all possess are yin yoga, meditation, sitting in quiet and stillness while doing nothing at all or maybe journaling. The underlying commonality with all of these practices is that they get you out of your head and in to your body and heart. The simplest and most effective practice I’ve found is to lay down, close your eyes and put your hands over your heart center. This draws your consciousness in to your heart.
The electromagnetic field in the heart is 60 times greater in amplitude than that of the brain. When we become solely focused on what is happening in our head we mistakenly cut ourselves off from our real power source.
If you are finding that you aren’t able to access how you are feeling it is an indication that you are living in your mind and not your heart and body. It’s no big deal, just a wake up call that it is time to cultivate your inner gifts so that you can begin reaping the huge benefits of working through your shadow.
Once we have cultivated the awareness to label our experiences emotions we can move on to the next step.
