Our shadow, like our light, are the things we embrace, love and enjoy. It contains all the things we don’t like about ourselves. It is everything we don’t want people to find out about us, and everything we don’t want to see. Sometimes, our shadow is not so pretty to look at. We try to keep it buried deep inside our psyche.
If left ignored, our shadow can find a way to come to the surface. It can destroy relationships as it shows itself like a faux reflection of others. Yet, our shadow is all about us. It can crush our dreams and spirits or sabotage our life when not listened to or examined.
This same shadow also has the ability to be our greatest teacher. If we can learn to fully embrace it, it can teach us kindness, forgiveness, strength, joy and ultimately our innate beauty. It shows us the beauty and power that each of us hold.
Our shadow only has power over us if we keep it in the dark, ignore it, and use it to blame others for our shortcomings. Continued suppression of our dark shadow will leak out into our lives with a slow seeping poison. Instead examine what we don’t like about ourselves and stop suppressing it. Once we acknowledge these aspects of the self, we become free. Free of fear and pain. We can now live our life with greatness and compassion, love openly in our relationships, and learn how to reach our full potential.
My Shadow Work
While working on my shadow, my mentor gave me a very large rock to carry all day. While holding this rock, all I could concentrate on was the vast weight of it. It felt almost impossible to get out of that situation. I felt stuck and scared, tired and annoyed by it. Once I started to reflect on the weight, I could see how that represented all my fears, worries, doubts, and burdens. Not only just mine, but those of the world.
Then, I started to look at the rock for what it was. It was smooth, had multiple layers of intricate colors and lines to admire. As I looked closer the rock had more beauty, colors and intricacy than I had originally noticed. It was strong and unbreakable. I then began to appreciate the rock for its value, fall in love with it and everything it represented. I was no longer concentrating on the weight and the burden of this large rock, but the beauty of it. The weight of the rock represented the beauty of my pain.
My mentor then gave me a pebble to hold in the other hand, and funny enough, it felt like the same weight. I no longer felt the heaviness as they both were just representations of what I was holding onto and the story I made up about both of these rocks. I ran with both, played with both and found balance between these two sizably different rocks with comfort and ease.
In this work, I discovered how grateful I was for the burden, or my shadow. It allowed me to transmute my beliefs of pain and burdens by breaking through the limitations I had unknowingly set within myself. And, with time, I was able to break through to the next level of consciousness. The weight of my beliefs had been shed allowing me to move forward. Once you can find balance and make peace with the light and the darkness that we all hold, your perceptions shift and your understanding heightens in a cosmic way lifting us out of the constraints that our own limitations had set.
To find out more about breaking through your limitations, beliefs, and situations that can seem painful and heavy, reach out to me. I can show you how shadow work can help you become the best version of yourself. Schedule a confidential discussion to see how this process works. Contact me via email at [email protected] or schedule a call directly on my calendar .