Shadow work is a journey into our souls to explore the depths of all that we are. We are all made up of both light and dark, and shadow work is the spiritual process by which we identify, acknowledge, and accept the parts of ourselves that we have been conditioned to reject and disassociate from. The concept of the shadow was first introduced to the western world by psychologist Carl Jung, who described the shadow as “the unconscious and disowned parts of our personalities that the ego fails to see, acknowledge, and accept”. Our shadow emerges in childhood, often when we are first told that some parts of us are bad. For some of us, we may have been told by an adult not to express emotion, ask questions, or be needy. As adults, this can lead to us being emotionally distant, people-pleasing, or too self-reliant.
Throughout our lives, we hide and suppress these parts of ourselves that make us feel shame - often until even we no longer know that they exist. But those unmet and unexpressed aspects of ourselves still exist below the surface outside of the realm of our conscious mind, and can rear their ugly heads in destructive ways. They can emerge as anxiety, despair, inability to form connections with others, and make us overly reactive to our environments. This suppression can even stifle our creative expression - we have talents, imagination, and resourcefulness sitting untouched in these bottled-up layers of self.
You may ask, “why should I do shadow work?”. And on the surface, it can sound difficult, painful, embarrassing, or even pointless to bring to the surface and accept the parts of ourselves that we believe we don’t like. But the truth is, we can never be a whole person without accepting and integrating the pieces of ourselves into one.