Weekly Training: Practical Steps For Shadow Work

People will do anything, no matter how absurd, in order to avoid facing their own souls. They will practice Indian yoga and all its exercises, observe a strict regiment of diet, learn the literature of the whole world, all because they cannot get on with themselves and have not the slightest faith that anything useful could ever come out of their own souls. Thus, the soul has gradually been turned into a Nazareth from which nothing good can come. Carl Jung. So today we're going to talk about some practical steps you can take to work with the shadow. And I read you this quote because in many ways it is a representation of how many people struggle to do shadow work. Because shadow work is a turning towards the darkness within us. It's a turning towards the unknown entering into the cave, mythologically and psychologically speaking. And for most of us, that is a terrifying idea. We like the idea of being light chasers. We live in a Western modernized culture where people have been indoctrinated into this idea that. That you're not doing it right if you're not in the light. Yes, that's a little play on words there by yours truly. That's as close as I get to creating rhymes. But you're not doing it right unless you're in the light. And this idea has permeated most people's conception of what self help and personal development looks like because they've gone to Tony Robbins seminars or Brennan Bouchard and they've been sold this bill of goods that tells them that they should feel great while doing personal development, that you should feel great while doing this. And sometimes the revelations that we have when doing deeper work, when doing depth work or shadow work, sometimes they're challenging. They bring us into contact with emotions that we've rejected. They bring us into contact with aspects of our past that we've rejected and tried to ignore. They bring us into contact with parts of ourself that we have maybe deemed unsavory. So in the words of Steve Wolf, beneath the social mask that we wear every day, we have a hidden shadow side, an impulsive, wounded, sad or isolated part that we generally try to ignore. The shadow can be a source of emotional richness and vitality, and acknowledging it can be a pathway to healing and an authentic life. For some people. They consider shadow work to be soul work. And that's a larger conversation about alchemy that I'm not going to get into today, but I certainly will on a future podcast. That's been something that I have really been enjoying lately, is diving deeper into that. So just as a quick reminder According to Jung, the shadow side, or the shadow self, includes all the elements of your unconscious personality, specifically the ones that you have tried to repress or reject or deny. And so today we're going to talk about some practical steps that you can take. And again, if you're wanting to go deeper into this work, if you want to be led through this work, I have an eight week shadow work program that is specifically designed to do exactly this, to bring you deep into leading you into your own shadow and starting to work with it. Because again, as Jung said, everyone carries a shadow and the less it is embodied, the less the individuals in the conscious life of the individual, the blacker and denser that it is. So the more that we have these rejected parts of ourself, the more that we will end up sabotaging from an unconscious place because we will want to reject or move away from these parts of ourselves. So how do we start to work with the shadow? And by the way, if you're wanting to do the shadow work course, you can go to Instagram mantalks. You'll find the course in the link in my bio, or you can just head on over to my website, connorbean.com and the Shadow work program will be in the Work with me section. Okay, so how do we start to work with this part? Well, first and foremost, we need to build contact with our shadow. Because for most of us when we start doing this work, it's like, okay, I know there's parts of me that I repress. I know there's parts of me that I hide from other people. I know there's aspects to my past or my current life that I avoid, like my taxes. But, but like, you know, how do I actually start to work with this part? So first what we need to do is we need to come into contact with, with what has built our shadow. So that in the, in the program that I developed, I've called it meeting the origin. So the origin story of your shadow. So what you'll want to do is start to explore things like where in my childhood did I have to avoid a truth? Where in my childhood did I feel rejected? Where in my childhood did I feel abandoned? And by asking some of these questions and we can even go closer to the present moment. We can look at past relationships and say, okay, in my past relationship, what did I hide? What did I reject? What did I avoid talking about, what did I avoid experiencing? What boundaries did I not set in place and why? And we can start to look at some of these aspects to how we show up in relationship and start to witness our shadow in action. So again, step one, we need to come into contact with some of these unconscious parts. So we need to look at where do I feel like I'm not good enough? Where do I feel like I am unlovable? So I'm just going to put these in questions for you so that you can write them down or you can just think about them off the top of your head right now. So I feel not good enough when I feel unlovable, when I believe I am flawed, when.

I think my feelings aren't valid, when or I don't want to express my feelings when.

I have to take care of everyone around me. Because.

So those are just some basic questions to start to get you to formulate and come into contact with your shadow. Because again, it lives in the unconscious. So we need to start to unearth some of this stuff. We need to start to unearth some of this pain or hurt or the aspects of our own identity that we've been avoiding or rejecting or denying. That's step number one. Step number two is to start to investigate and witness your feelings objectively and with compassion. Now, not just your feelings, but the things that you have been and are avoiding. Generally we have emotions about those things, though. So I'm just going to give you a little quote by Alan Watts here. He said Jung was the sort of man who could feel anxious and afraid and guilty without being ashamed of feeling this way. In other words, he understood that an integrated person is not a person who has simply eliminated the sense of guilt or the sense of anxiety from his life, who is fearless and wooden and kind of sage of stone. He is a person who feels all things but has no recriminations against himself for feeling them. So this is a really important concept by Alan Watts, who I really love and appreciate. Basically what it's saying is that we need to come into contact with how we are feeling about certain things. So when we feel resistance, why are we feeling that resistance? How can we be with that resistance? How can we investigate objectively not that that resistance is somehow other than than us, but that it's an integral, inherent and very important part of us to start to witness this part of us as it is a part of us, rather than it being a separate part. Because for most of us, what happens when we create the shadow is we have an experience and we shame a part of ourself or we reject a part of ourself and we make that part of ourselves other. So for Example, let's just say that you're in a conversation with your partner, and your partner asks you if you took out the garbage like you said you're going to do an hour before, and you find yourself lying about the fact that you did take out the garbage when you know full well that it's still sitting outside. Why would we do this? Okay, so we would want to objectively witness the part of ourself that doesn't want to be honest. Because there's a shame there, right? There's a shame that we're rejecting. There is a part of us that feels maybe childish or like you're going to get caught for being bad. So we want to investigate that feeling, that emotion. And as we sit with it, we can start to see that that feeling, that emotion might be tied to a past event. Maybe your parents loved to catch you not having done something, and then they would scold you, or they would shame you, or they would make you wrong, or they would criticize you for not having done what you said you were going to do rather than encourage you. So we need to learn how to embrace these parts of ourselves that we have generally rejected. An important part of this, as you're going through this, as you're doing all this work, is to stay connected to your breathing. I know that might sound trite and simple and basic, but when we are doing unconscious work, when we're coming into contact with parts of ourself that we maybe haven't witnessed or maybe haven't thought about, we oftentimes will start to. Our body will respond in a way where maybe it'll hold, it'll clench, it'll tighten up. And so as you do this work, whether you. Whether you are going through the free journal that I put out, the free shadow work journal, or you're going through some of the prompts that I've given you in this podcast, or you're going through the shadow work program, you will want to pay deep attention to your breath. You want to stay connected to your breath. All right, so those are the first two steps. The third step is to not only have awareness of where these things have come from, but how they are still showing up in your life today. So let's just say you come into contact with a piece of your shadow's origin story. For example, let's say that you were ostracized in school, you were made fun of, you were criticized, and you were criticized for your looks or your intelligence, and that stuck with you. That aspect of you is likely still A part of your shadow today. So there's probably some way in which you are playing small, you're hiding a part of yourself. You're not expressing yourself in your relationship to the fullest capacity. And you're doing that still today because you are protecting that older pain. So this is to say, number three, pay attention to the emotions that you are feeling. And this is required because our negative emotions are often the sort of door, doorway into the shadow. And I'm going to give you one specifically to look at, which is reactivity. What you become reactive to, especially in your relationship or with family and friends, is incredibly important. Reactivity is a sort of sign that says the shadow is active, that we are probably in sabotage mode, that we're acting from a place of fear, we're acting from a place of hurt or pain, we're acting from a place of resistance or protection. And when we are doing that, we're acting in an unconscious manner. So oftentimes our normal, calm, grounded self shuts off and our reactivity becomes present and we stop becoming conscious of how we're responding, what we're feeling. We sort of feel out of control. And so reactivity is a really, really, really integral part to doing shadow work. So you can ask yourself a few questions. Things like, what are some of my pet peeves in relationships? And why? Where do I get the most reactive with my partner? And again, if you aren't in a relationship, you can use a past relationship. So where did I get the most reactive or hostile or defensive in my past relationships? And then you can answer the question. I got reactive because I was what? What were you doing? Were you protecting yourself? Were you becoming defensive because you were trying to prove a point? Were you becoming defensive because you felt hurt and didn't know how to express it? So go a layer deeper. Don't try and project on the other person. Go a layer deeper into what your actual experience was. So for the next week, if you do nothing else, my task for you is to explore your own reactivity. Start to notice where are you getting reactive and why? Maybe keep like a little journal with you. I did this for a while where I kept a journal with me and I would write down when I got reactive and why I was getting reactive and what in my past was I trying to protect? Or what about myself was I protecting when I got reactive and I didn't want my partner or that other person to know? And generally, generally when we get reactive, it's because we are trying to avoid something. We're trying to Protect something. So tune into that for the next week. Really make it a mission for yourself to dial into when you are protecting, when you are avoiding, when you're rejecting, and when you're becoming reactive. And if you can, practice this real time by maybe taking a pause, pausing the conversation, pausing the conflict with your partner and reflecting on that afterwards to be able to say, okay, why did I get reactive? What was I actually feeling? Why was I feeling that? And how did it feel on my body? And when you do that, you can start to come into contact with unfelt, unexpressed emotions. Oftentimes, reactivity is the. This sort of vault door for our pain, for our hurt, for our sadness. So oftentimes when we're getting reactive in our relationship, it's not that we're really angry, it's not that we're really pissed off. It's actually that we're hurt in some capacity, or we're trying to protect ourselves from being hurt, or we're trying to protect ourselves from expressing or showing our hurt, because that might be construed as vulnerable. So. So start to come into contact with why you are protecting when you are reactive. And this will give you an incredible amount of insight into your shadow. And then when you do that, you'll be able to start to not set boundaries with it, but you'll be able to communicate your hurt more easily, more effectively with your partner, and you'll be able to communicate, this is the story that I'm telling, or this is how I'm actually feeling. I can feel myself getting reactive, but what I'm actually struggling with is X, Y and Z. I'm actually hurt that, you know, you didn't text me back or I'm actually upset that, you know, you would say something like that to me. That doesn't feel very good. Okay. All right. Thank you so much for diving into that with me. I hope that you enjoyed those three steps to taking action. Practical steps on working with the shadow. Again, if you're wanting to go deeper, I hope you check out the Shadow Work program. It's only live for the next week, and then we will dive in. There's two live calls with it, and I'll be working with people one on one. So I hope to see you inside the program. And until next week, this is Connor Beaton signing off.