Facing Your Shadow

Welcome, I'm Connor Beaton, and today we're going to talk about Seeking the Shadow. So here's the thing about understanding the shadow. You may have noticed, if you've been following me for a while, that my work has become really embedded in this idea that when we are able to face the shadow, or as Carl Jung said, when we are able to embody the monster within us, we find such a deep sense of completion, we move closer towards. Not that we find completion in its entirety. That's not what I'm saying. But we are able to move more fully towards an actualized sense of self, towards a deeper sense of wholeness within our heart, mind and gut, within our conscious mind, within our emotional body, and within our intuitional intelligence. And so in order to do that, we need to be able to understand where our shadow comes from. So this episode is going to be a quick little dive into what it means to seek the shadow. Because in terms of actualizing your potential, if you are really wanting to unlock more of your potential, it will. And this is what I've seen time and time again. It will come by knowing your own shadow and your own darkness more fully. But there's usually a catch. So, as men, we have often been told that one of our highest values is to know or understand. And because of this, many men believe that they know themselves far better than they actually do, because they need to be able to prove that to the world. And the degree to which a man can sort of say, yeah, I know myself, or.

I know who I am fully, the illusion is that he'll be able to look out at the world and say, I know who I am. I know what I think, I know what I want, and I'm fully actualized in that sense. And this mechanism or belief is already knowing oneself actually hinders our ability to see our own dysfunctional behavior, to see our bad habits, to understand our inner critic better, to get to know the victim within us that is causing us to fall short on our goals, not be able to get into the shape that we want, not have the relationship that we want, not be able to connect fully sexually with our partner. And in fact, this mechanism is a part of the shadow.

It's the part of the shadow as it is almost kind of like a cloaking technology for the shadow that it deploys to remain hidden. And for most men, this can spell disaster. A man who has adopted the ironclad belief that he already knows cannot learn what has been hidden from him since the beginning. So he won't be able to see how his childhood affected the man that he is today. Because, you see, the truth is that your shadow was created before you could become aware of its existence. I want you to hear that again. Your shadow. Shadow was created. It started to become formed before you even knew it existed. And it built strong mechanisms to continue hiding from your conscious awareness. And the work of many, many guys, the work of many men and many women, is to practice the art of not knowing. So this is one of the first steps to practice the art of not knowing. Knowing. What might you not know about yourself? If a man comes to me and he says, I already know everything about myself. I have literally no work to do with him. There's literally nothing I can do. Or a woman. If a woman came to work with me and she says, I already know all of my patterns and all my behaviors, and I already know where I'm dysfunctional, it's very challenging to do any work with them because they already have the belief and the perception that they have reached the depth of themself, where they have found a sense of completion. So with that, what is someone supposed to do, right? If someone comes to you and says, I know all of my bad habits, I know why I do all of them, the only thing really left to say to them is, well, then stop doing that.

If you already know why it is that you do these stupid things, why you can't get up and go to the gym in the morning, or why you sabotage your relationship, or why you're overweight or not eating healthy or not treating yourself well, if you already know that in its completion and you're still not doing it, then I'm not really too sure what it is that you expect me to do for you. Are you just wanting me to be by your side to get you into the gym, or are you wanting someone to hold your hand while you face these patterns? No. There's a part of your psyche that you haven't yet understood. There's a part of your shadow that you clearly haven't yet unlocked. And that's why you're not able to make real, substantial change within your life, within your relationship, and within your health. And so we need to remain open to the possibility of seeing something new, of discovering new connections and levels of understanding and depths of truth that previously were unavailable to us. Much like a free diver trains himself to go deeper and deeper, so too can you train yourself to create more depth of awareness by remaining open and free from gripping tight the belief that that's just the way That I am or, all right, I already know why I do that. So we can see here that step number one is remaining open to the possibility of something new within yourself. Step number two is cultivating a deeper sense of awareness. Now, this is an introspective action. This is being able to look within yourself, see your thoughts, hear your thoughts, feel your emotions, and understand why those things are there. Because for every one emotion, we might have hundreds of thoughts. When you're angry, you feel the anger. There's one emotion, but you might have hundreds of thoughts around that anger about the conflict that you're having with your partner or something that's happened with your boss. And you might think 100 different things about what to do or how to handle it or why they are being unjust in some way, shape, or form. So we need to be able to cultivate a deeper awareness. And how we practice that awareness is. This is step number three. We become intimately aware of our reactivity. And we start to become more and more aware of where we get reactive. Because the reactivity within us, the things that cause us to get angry, to get frustrated, to shut down in our partnership, these are the things that we need to understand why they are happening. Because they usually bubble up the service and then they take over of our conscious mind. And all of a sudden we're acting in these ways that we don't necessarily want to act, but we feel a little bit out of control. I hear this all the time with people that drink or smoke too much weed. It's like, I don't know really why I'm doing it. I just revert to it. It allows me to avoid feeling a certain way. It allows me to numb out or not have to deal with something. We want to turn towards the things that. That are causing us that discomfort. And we need to see it through the lens of reactivity. So what makes you reactive? And you might want to just ask yourself that question, like, I get reactive to my partner when, Or I get reactive at work when, or I get reactive within my own health when? And to start to understand yourself better, not just from a conceptual level, but from. From an origin story level. The next thing in terms of seeking the shadow is to be able to move into a space of awareness. Now that you've cultivated this awareness of being able to better understand and building a relationship with the unhealthy parts of yourself. So how do you build a relationship with your inner critic? And why haven't you built a relationship with the victim within you or the part of you that sabotages. You see, most of us sabotage and then turn away from it or get disgusted by ourselves or we shame ourself or we guilt ourself. And that actually fuels the sabotage. That is food for the shadow. And so our work is not to shame ourselves in this moment. Our work is, is to better understand, okay, what was I feeling when I decided to sabotage? What was I experience when I went and numbed out? Was I overwhelmed? Was I stressed out? Was I dealing with anxiety? And in which case, and this is the next step, turn towards that experience, turn towards the inner critic and have a dialogue with it. Turn towards the victim and have a dialogue with it and practice appreciation, acceptance and compassion. You see, so often what happens within us is that the inner critic or the sabotage of the victim will come up and it'll kind of act like a petulant child, you know, it'll start yelling and screaming within us and causing havoc. And instead of listening to it and having a conversation with it and understanding it, we try and just shut it down and we try and push it away and we avoid it and we avoid it through throughout the day. The inner critic will come up in the morning because he didn't go to the gym. And then the inner critic will come up when you're five minutes late for work. And the inner critic will come up when you give the presentation at work and it's not the way that you wanted it to be. And then the inner critic will come up when you come home and your wife or your husband or your partner criticizes you about something and you immediately start self deprecating. And so it builds throughout the day, throughout the day, throughout the day, until finally it just sort of takes over. And we, because we don't want to experience it, because we do not want to listen to it, we need an escape from it. And so we turn on Netflix for two hours, or we smoke some weed or we drink or whatever it is, but we try and avoid it rather than sitting and hearing what it has to say and understanding why it's there so that it will dissipate, it will actually start to diffuse itself, it'll become less powerful because it will be understood and you'll understand why it's there. And from there you might actually be able to understand what action you need to take. So if your inner critic is saying, hey, I'm going to be really harsh on you because you haven't been eating properly and you haven't been going to the gym, you can have a bit of an inner dialogue with that inner critic and understand it and say, you know what, you're actually right. You're right. I've been eating like garbage. I haven't been going to the gym. You are 100% right. I can see how that's true. And rather than shaming yourself, which is what some people would do when they go into this interaction, you say, you know what? You're right. Thank you for helping me understand that. And I am going to go eat something healthy right now, or I'm going to go and do something about it right now, in this moment to counteract that unhealthy habit. So these are some of the subtle ways that we can start to seek the shadow where we can start to see how it's showing up in our life. Many of us are very familiar with the inner critic or the victim or the sabotage mechanism within us. But very few of us have actually taken the time to cultivate somewhat of a relationship with it. So I'd encourage you this week on your journey, when you hear the inner critic come up, you. You hear the victim or the sabotage come up, bring your awareness to it more fully. What is it trying to say? What does it want you to understand? How can you meet that voice and that narrative with compassionate understanding, with an ability to better understand? Much like if you had a five year old child that was throwing a bit of a tantrum, right? You wouldn't start yelling back at it, you wouldn't tell it to shut the hell up. You wouldn't smoke weed to avoid it, or get drunk or turn on Netflix for two hours. Just that you didn't have to listen to it, even though it was still sitting in the room throwing attention. You would sit with it and try and understand, why are you hurting right now? What's going on for you right now? And so we need to create a little bit of separation between our awareness, or I think, as some people would call it, the transcendent self, the version of ourself that's just our consciousness that's unencumbered by the inner critic, that sort of has some separation between these other parts of ourself. And we need to be able to move into that space and say, okay, I'm going to move into this transcended self. I'm going to move into the part of my consciousness that can hear from a loving, compassionate, understanding place what the inner critic has to say. And when we do this often enough, we actually start to see our behavior shift and our ability to take action on the things that we really want to take action for. Because we have heard ourselves properly and we're ending the cycle of shame and guilt and doubting and victimhood. Because we are listening to those parts, we are in dialogue with them and we've brought our awareness to them in such a way that we've built a relationship with them. And when that happens, they start to transform. Much like if you have a coworker that you have a bad relationship with and all you two do is argue, but you start to shift the conversation and sit down with them instead and say, tell me what's happening in your life and you bring some appreciation and understanding and compassion to that person, suddenly your relationship with them starts to change. There's less conflict, there's less hostility, there's less animosity and resentment and there's much more ability to work together on a common goal or task. And this is what self leadership is really about. This is what seeking the shadow is all about. We are actually cultivating a much deeper strength, a much deeper resiliency and ability within ourselves to lead ourselves into the lives that we want to build into the relationships that we want to have with our partner, the type of sex that we want to have with them, and intimacy and communication and boundaries that we want to have with them, but also within our health and our work, our life purpose. So thank you so much for tuning in today. Don't forget to leave a rating and review online. It goes a long way. I appreciate everyone that has done that. Please go on there if you haven't done so if you've been listening for a while and leave a rating or review and don't forget to share. If you know someone that would love to dive into this topic and understand it better, please do share it with them. So until next week, this is Connor Beadon signing off.