Working with the Wisdom of the Shadow

Shadow work is not just the process of bringing awareness to the hidden, siloed parts of our identity that often trip us in our daily lives with their ill-timed, inconvenient and illogical demands for the salving of fears, or alternatively, their hidden desires and longing. Our work to recognize, accept and integrate is only the first part of the equation.

Then there is the exercising of the necessary discipline to keep building an alliance with these wilder, darker parts of ourselves. To listen to the wolfish, primitive wisdom that can signpost our way to greater wholeness and then initiate action to create change in our external conditions to move them into increasing alignment with our internal state of being.

It’s a commitment to put yourself first — as far as the whole damn internal committee is ‘yourself’— to consistently show up for you in hard and soft situations, taking the action that the shadows whisper at the back of your mind or kick into the pit of your stomach, the change needed to reflect your internal landscape more authentically.

Understanding is not enough when it comes to our shadow work. Action coupled with commitment to the primacy of our own instincts is essential to the process of materializing the treasures from our internal excavations into our outer world.