We’ve all been there, we’ve all had a part of us, a part of us tucked away deep within the reach of judgments from others, from forgiveness of ourselves. You know the ones that randomly creep back to your mind, to your heart, to your gut; the ones that wreck havoc on your soul, the ones we are too afraid to dismantle. Whether it be an experience, a trauma, a memory; these shadows are in our stories. So again you ask, what is shadow work? Well its when you dig deep down into your soul and not only notice this darkness within, this energetic void that houses everything that is not held in the field of love, its when you explore it. Ah yes, the field of love; explore that with me if you dare. If you believe like I do, you understand everything can be tied back to love or lack thereof, that it is the very foundation of all that we are and all that we do.
For simplicity sake, lets assume that everything in life is divided by knowledge or lack of knowledge. Knowledge is everything sourced by love and goodness; which love should be the core to who we are because love is varying degrees. Fear, anger, jealousy, resentment, insecurities is everything sourced from lack of knowledge; it’s our shadows. Think about it, if someone was insecure, if someone thought they did not live up to a certain expectation because “society” programmed us to believe otherwise and/or for validations rather than our own self thoughts and expectations. It would be fair to say that the power in overcoming insecurities is to look through a lens that is free of judgment, that is full of understanding while attaining the knowledge and belief in ourselves and for our own self. For if one had the knowledge, they would understand that the only person we can compare ourselves to is the person we were yesterday.
We cannot live up to these false pretenses “society” eludes us to attain. Stop and take a moment, and think about it, those things that you do, these goals that you aspire to have, are they truly what you want? And if so why? What led to your initial desire to have them? Or possibly are they sourced by influence of another? Is it because someone or something in the course of your life told you that you should do xyz? Think about it please, why do you do half the things you do? Is it because that is what you genuinely want to do? Or is it because it is what you’ve been told you are supposed to do? And humor me, maybe you do it, you do it for the satisfaction of appeasing another, or an entire group of people, even so, what is it that you are getting from all that work? Is it simply appeasing others? Or is it something more? Maybe its validation you are ultimately seeking, but until you learn to make the connections to ask the questions why, what does it even matter? Until you learn to recognize that there is a root cause and there is a symptom to all of our shadows within, we cannot truly learn to understand them, let alone work through them nor dismantle them.
Imagine for a moment the path of society is to make you live in boxes. By keeping people living within boxes, and thinking in boxes, and doing the same things everyone else is doing, all day, everyday. For boxes, patterns and status quos make humans very easy to control. The current state of society exists to make you forget that you are the creator of your own life by distracting you and keeping you to operate in survival mode. By making you a slave to the system, which sustains itself by stifling our life force and dumbing us down by pumping us up with sugar, jacking us up on caffeine, poisoning our bodies with pills, programming our consciousness with fear, lies, and gossip. Pushing us so far out of alignment that we do not even realize that our brain has ben hijacked by the darkness, that we as a society have become more concerned with following the herd, to be like everyone else, that we have forgotten how to think for ourselves, to create a life by our own ideas and desires.
Shadow work, isn’t meant to be easy, it’s meant to be painful; it’s meant to be exceedingly difficult. It is meant to awaken our minds, our souls, our very beings to be open to a vision that is pure to our own true self. It is meant to force you to take a step back to examine the light in which you are viewing your life through. It is meant to be all for the greater good of learning how to get to the root cause of one’s traumas, one’s woes. Life is a gift, a gift that is often taken for granted. It’s a course in which we are given the chance to learn, to grow, to evolve or to repeat. So when you examine yourself, your hardships, your hurts, don’t just look to the surface, continue to dig deeper. Continue to expose yourself to the truths that only you can find for yourself. Resist the temptation to compare yourself to others, to compare yourself to what you have been told to believe, told to feel and follow your own instincts, follow your own light. Continue to work against all that does not bring peace, solitude and grace to your life, for those are the shadows that will haunt you, those are the shadows you must learn to expose.
Just Janke 