There’s lots of talk about shadow work among spiritual circles these days. If you haven’t already heard about it, a quick explanation of shadow work, as I understand it, would be that it is a term originally coined by Carl Jung to describe the aspects of yourself that you have rejected and therefore pushed into your unconscious. There, they can be more easily ignored by our conscious selves, however, our shadows still tend to pop up and cause issues in our daily lives, despite our denials that they even exist. They may manifest as misplaced anger, judgmental attitudes or self-esteem issues that instead of being recognised for what they are, get blown out of proportion and consume us. Shadow work seeks to uncover those hidden pieces of ourselves that we deny and bring them out into the light where they can be readily understood. In doing this we can learn to love all aspects of ourselves and reintegrate them into our conscious lives in a more healthy, balanced way. Yes, that was the quick explanation, phew!

How do you actually go about doing it though? Since I’m still going through the process myself, I’m not going to try and instruct others. I will just share these two videos with you as a place to start. They have fantastic practical tips on how to go about confronting your shadow so, have at it.

Teal Swan’s video on shadow work (link opens to the video on her website)

I particularly took to Kelly-ann’s suggestion to personify your shadow self and talk to it. This technique has worked great for me:

Once you’ve done your preliminary work, make yourself two cups of rose tea. Hold the first cup in your hands and focus on a feeling of deep love for another. Hold onto that emotion and then send it out of yourself, into the tea. Now visualise or sense, in whatever way you prefer, your shadow self sitting in front of you. Pass them the second cup and have a good long chat about life, the universe and everything while you drink the first cup down.