Monday Musings ~ A Process For Healing Your Shadow

Hello Beautiful Beam Of Light!

Lets talk shadow healing 🙂

In the spirituality/self help/personal development/personal growth worlds, there has been a lot of talk lately about the 'shadow side.' About healing this 'shadow side' and becoming more integrated.

I believe that this 'shadow work' is incredibly important for all people to do.

If you do not ever face your shadows, then your life will most likely be run by them. You will spend you whole life trying to fight your shadows, or you will spend your whole life running from them. Does this fighting or fleeing sound familiar?

Today I want to share with you one of my favourite and most potent processes for getting into your shadow and healing it. This is a process that bypasses the 'fight or flee' of the fear response, and sends you into the healing depths of love. This is a process that, while at first glimpse may seem overly simplistic, in practice will create some profound shifts in the way you relate to yourself, and the way you express yourself in this world. It is simplistic for a reason - basically all the best things in life are 😉

But before we get too deep into the process, lets cover some basics first.

1. What Is The Shadow?

Your shadow is any aspect of your true, Divine, perfect, whole nature that you have rejected. Generally speaking your shadows are aspects of your personality that you have decided are 'wrong' or 'bad' for some reason. From the point you made that decision onward, you have worked to 'get rid of' these aspects of yourself either through straight up repression or through some other self help/self improvement/spirituality modality.

2. Where Did The Shadow Come From?

Your shadow most likely started developing when you were a child, and then continued to develop through your early and late teen age years. Most people find that the origins of their shadow started in very early childhood, when either a parent, caretaker, teacher or prominent adult/authority figure rejected a part of them.

rejection

 

When this rejection happens in early childhood, you do not know any better than to assume this adult/authority figure is right about your unacceptable attributes. You did not have the emotional intelligence to be able to understand that this person may have their own shadows, their own unhealed wounds that were most likely being projected onto you. All you know is that rejection at this age means death - if your parents or caretakers do not accept you, they may stop feeding, clothing and housing you. So their rejection of this portion of you causes a survival mechanism in you to actiave that says you must change lest you be left to fend for yourself.

For example, if your mother really hated it when you threw temper tantrums, if she scolded you or emotionally or physically withdrew from you when you expressed a negative emotion, you learned that this kind of expression of your feelings was not safe. Thus you would have started to repress and suppress the expression of any negative emotion from then on, for the fear that expressing these things would lead to your losing the loving care of your mother.

From there, you will alter your personality at large to try to avoid this kind of rejection. This may have caused you to become a kind of 'people pleaser' that tried your best to hide any kind of need or desire for fear of making those around you uncomfortable. This would cause you to hate the parts of you that need attention, that cry out for love and that have opinions about things because you associate those parts of yourself with getting rejected.

Now you have a shadow that causes you to feel bad or wrong any time you do not go along with the status quo, or any time you do anything that causes anyone around you any form of discomfort - including being open and honest about how you are feeling. OR this would have caused you to start expressing your negative emotions and your need for love and attention in a more self destructive way, such as through addiction, eating disorders, abusive relationships and so on.

3. What Is The Point Of The Shadow?

If you follow that your shadow developed as a way of defending you from rejection, you can now see that the whole purpose of the shadow is to protect you. So right away here we can see that the shadow is not actually 'bad' as so many people think it is. It is really a delicate, innocent, beautiful portion of yourself that has been flipped to express itself as something it never needed to be.

protection

Your shadow, now, is there as a constant reminder, a constant pull to remember who you really are. The shadow aspects of you pop their head up over and over again in the hopes that one day you will see them for what they really are, and accept them back into the light of your love.

Unfortunately for most, we simply go round and round rejecting and hating our shadows, trying to 'fix' and 'get rid' of them, because we are still caught in the illusion that there could be something wrong with us.

4. What Happens If I Never Heal My Shadow?

If you never heal your shadow, you will live the rest of your life believing there is something wrong with you.

You will suffer from self destructive behaviours, you will deal with out of alignment relationships, and you will feel like there is always some part of you that is at war with another part of you. You will either try to suppress portions of your personality - which can and generally will lead to things like depression and generalized anxiety issues - or you will be in a constant place of trying to fix/improve/transcend these aspects of yourself that you deem unacceptable.

fix

To but it simply, you will spend the rest of your life in some form of fight or flight against yourself.

Now that you are armed with all of that information, we can get to the good part 🙂

The Process For Healing/Reintegrating Your Shadows:

This is a meditative and introspective process. It may feel a little overwhelming or scary at times, and there may be portions of the instructions that you resist doing. Know that all of that is fully and completely ok. You are allowed to feel scared and you are allowed to be resistant. All I ask is that you be gentle with yourself, and make space for yourself to feel whatever you feel, to experience whatever you experience and to refrain from making any of it 'wrong' or 'bad.' You are awesome, and this is your process.

1. Find a calm space. This process is best practiced in the comfort of a private place where you will not be interrupted. Find an area where you can be alone with yourself for several moments.

2. Once you have found your safe place, take a few moments to connect with your breath. If you are feeling your negative emotion in this time, slow your breathing as much as possible. Centre yourself in the moment.

3. Connect with a negative emotion that you feel in your life often, or the emotion that drew you to try this process out. This may be deep fear, deep self loathing, deep shame, deep anxiety - whatever comes to your mind when I say a 'negative emotion you feel often' connect with that. This process can be especially potent when you are feeling triggered into your negative emotion by something that happened in your daily life.

4. From here, put yourself into that negative emotional state. Feel all that is involved in being in that emotional space. How does your body feel? What kind of thoughts are you thinking? How are you wanting to react? How are you wanting to run from this feeling or fight this feeling? See if you can simply notice.

5. Locate where you feel this negative feeling in your body. Deeply connect with the physical sensations of this negative emotion. Rather than running from the discomfort, get curious about it. Feel into it. Where is the feeling located? What does it feel like exactly? Is it a static feeling or is there motion? Is there a colour or an image associated with the feeling?

6. Recall the very first time you felt this way. Allow your mind to draw you back to a memory from your childhood/teenage years where you experienced this feeling.

7. Once you have the memory, allow yourself to relive it, only do so through your current adult eyes as a bystander who is standing on the side watching the scene happen. Allow the traumatic event to play out just as you remember it, but watch your younger self go through it. Feel the emotions, but do so from a relaxed distance. This may feel overwhelming at times, and that is ok.

8. After reliving the experience as it happened, walk over to your younger self, and look deeply into their eyes. See the pain, the trauma, the fear, the anger - whatever it is that you were feeling at the time of the event. Look deeply, and acknowledge what you see. Validate the feelings and emotions that are arising. Validate the thoughts. Tell your younger self that they have every right to feel what they are feeling.

9. Now ask your younger self what they need to feel better in this situation. This may be that they need to situation to play out in a totally different way, or they need you as your adult self to step in and defend them, or they need an apology form the offending person/persons. Whatever they need, play out that new scenario in your mind. Again, watching it happen to your younger self.

10. Once you have played out the new situation, go again and look into your younger self's eyes. Again feel what they are feeling now. Acknowledge them and what they are feeling. Then ask again if there is anything else they need to make this situation feel better. If they need something else, play that out. Do this until you feel a lifting of the sensation you started with.

11. Once your younger self feels better, again look them in the eye. From there, wrap your younger self in a big hug. Hold them close and say to them out-loud "I promise never to abandon you again, I promise never to take my love away from you, I promise never to take my approval away from you again. You are allowed to feel whatever you feel, to think whatever you think and to do whatever you do and I will always love you. I promise never to leave you again."

12. From here, watch as your younger self becomes a glowing ball of white light. Observe as this glowing orb makes its way into your chest, resting in your heart. Place your hands over your heart and allow yourself to feel the re-integration of this portion of yourself back into your being. Rest for a few moments and allow this to integrate.

13. After this process as you return to life, any time you feel the emotion you felt that triggered this memory, I invite you to pause, take a deep breath and tell yourself the following: "It is OK that I am feeling what I am feeling. I validate and acknowledge myself in this moment. Now, what do I need to feel safe? What do I need to feel loved?" Then do whatever it is that you have requested of yourself.

Repeat this process with any other strong negative emotions. Then continue to show up for yourself and validate you inside your negative emotions after you have completed this process. This is how you heal your shadow 🙂 This is how you learn to embrace who you are, rather than reject and repress who you are.

Let me know if you want me to make a video out of this process!

<3

perceptiontrainers

Author perceptiontrainers

More posts by perceptiontrainers

Join the discussion 2 Comments

  • Julia says:

    Hi Ali,

    I tried the process this morning and it worked very well for me. So thank you very much. I am in a kind of strange state at the moment. I feel so much and I don’t know where it is coming from and I do not really know how to handle it and while I am feeling so much, I still feel a certain distance between me and my emotions, between me and me.

    I tried your meditation on negative emotions several times last week and it worked for me to a certain point. I could call my emotion into my heart room and I could tell so because at the moment my tears were running without wanting to stop. And at the same time I could feel save and supported. But than I could not really go into a communication with my emotion.

    I was willing to be patient but than, the last days, I am really in pain, just like all the time, thinking two things that made my pain worse: I thought that I somehow caused that pain myself by calling it in the meditation and than on the other hand, everytime I did something to releaf my pain, I thought „No, you shell not run away from your pain, you have to feel it, that is for your own good.“

    But actually I know that I would never have tried the meditation if I would not already have been in pain and wanted to understand why. And than I know that it is ok and even wonderful to give myself all the releaf that I can.

    So I think, I will let go of the negative emotion meditation for a while because even if it feels alright during the process I do not want to run around the other part of the day with those crazy thoughts that my pain is a punishment either for „calling“ my negative emotions or for wanting to get rid of them.

    Please excuse my English as I am no native speaker and thank you again for your great work!

    Julia.

    • perceptiontrainers says:

      Hello beautiful Julia! Just being willing to be with yourself is all that is required. You do not have to do anything that is overwhelming for you in this time, know that it will all unfold perfectly <3 Sending lots of love! <3