Let’s go over how to do shadow work today. Here are five habits that will make it easier to approach your shadow’s dark side. If you have never tried shadow work in a way to heal from your past, heal your inner childhood trauma or current behaviors that are secretly connected to your old or younger self, then these habits we are about to share with you will get you on the path to a completely new self-discovery journey. Even if you are a beginner or expert shadow worker, these 5 habits will keep you on track. Are you ready?
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How to do Shadow Work
Centering and Grounding
This is the most important thing to do before you get into shadow work. Yet, it’s never mentioned in any literature or texts about working with the shadow within. If you are trying to get to know your shadow self when you are not centered on yourself, you won’t get the effective results that you are looking for.
The shadow represents various parts hidden within yourself first and foremost.
Only from your center, will you get to know these parts. If not done correctly, you’ll be judgemental, critical, self-centered, or just completely confused. This will disable your ability to integrate your shadow.
Before you start to begin working with your shadow side, you want to be in a calm clear, and neutral space.
You want to be in your innermost center self. Completely stable and in control. A great way to practice being stable and in control is by doing a quick 5-minute meditation. Focus on your breathing and clear your mind. Once that is completed then you can shoot for asking yourself some challenging questions about you and/or your past.
Nourishing Self-Compassion Weekly
Before you get to know your dark side, it is helpful to develop a sense of unconditional friendliness with yourself. In Buddhism, it’s called Maitri.
Without some friendliness and self-compassion, it is hard to look at our darker sides that hate us.
If you’re hard on yourself, especially when you make mistakes, it is challenging to confront your shadow. If you’re accustomed to feeling shame or guilt, or even defeat, you need to transmute these kinds of emotions with friendliness, self-acceptance, self-compassion, self-love, and overjoyed.
You can do that by first starting to accept your own humanness. Remember that we all have a shadow and dark side—everyone is in the sauce together.
I personally, find it helpful to connect to my heart: place my attention on my heart. I breathe in and acknowledge my heart. I then breathe out and say to my heart, “Thank you.” “I Love You”, ” You Are Amazing”. It’s a simple Buddhist practice offered by Thich Nhat Hanh. You should check it out sometime.
Cultivating Self-Awareness
Seeing the shadow and dark side requires a self-reflective mindset—the ability to self-reflect and observe your behaviors, thoughts, emotions, and feelings.
Mindfulness meditation helps with that. I call it, nonjudgmental awareness—which is the ability to stay aware of the present moment without involving the inner critic or other types of judgment.
Self-awareness and self-reflection are prerequisites to doing shadow work because they help observe and evaluate your feelings as well as your emotions tied to them without doing much judgment or criticism. It does most of the heavy lifting for you. Start doing a little more self-reflecting at the end of your day and watch how easy it will be when you decide to do a session of shadow work.
Honesty is Key
Start Being Inhumanely Honest With Yourself
Self-honesty and integrity are very much mandatory for shadow work. Otherwise, it will not work.
Total self-honesty means being willing and able to see unpleasant attributes in your behavior and personality. Now of course it is uncomfortable to come to terms with your abandoned parts of yourself, but it’s possible. This is why the ego invests so much time and energy in suppressing them.
Noticing and accepting your insecure selfishness as well as your tyrannical nasty parts can be extremely difficult.
To take a thorough look at your bold attitudes, secret behaviors, dark thoughts, as well as your emotions, requires an abundance of tough courage.
The rewards however are worth the discomfort as these thorough confrontations with your shadow side will help heal the different areas of your mind that bring you stress, depression,n and sadness that are tied to your past.
However, these heroic acts unlock more of your creativity, thus opening up a whole new world of possibilities for your psychological and personal development.
Recording Your Discoveries Daily
I find it fascinating how some of our abandoned and disconnected parts want to remain at a distance. Similar to how a dream sneaks away from your mind soon after you awaken, our disowned parts can elude us. A writing journal or even notebook should be where you record your new discoveries about yourself when those dreams happen.
Writing down your thoughts and reviewing them later helps discover hidden parts of you and your deepest desires and also takes you deep into your awareness. It is a trip to the self-discovery lane.
In order, to peek into your bold attitudes, hidden behaviors, dark thoughts, and secret emotions, first requires strong courage. This technique is also great, particularly when doing shadow work.
Essentially all that shadow work is; is asking yourself questions about why you do the things you do that you don’t like or notice about yourself that take away from your happiness.
As there are many other habits that you should implement to effectively do a shadow work session, this is indeed a start. Just start with baby steps and write down things that you wish you knew why you do the things you do. Go down a rabbit hole, and you’ll be amazed at what you find.
Final thoughts on How to do Shadow Work Consistently and Healthily
Shadow work is a tough course to take especially if you are just getting into it. You can go dark, and you can go really dark to find the truth of life.
However, it is all up to you and how you envision shadow work to be. Of course, there are tried and true methods to practice healthy shadow work sessions however what is most important is that you take your time, practice self-care and self-love as well as know what you are doing if you wish to attain the best results possible.
If you believe you are ready to go to an advanced version of shadow work or even take it up a notch I encourage you to check out our most popular book Peace Be Shadow Work and flip through the pages. See if it’s something you are willing to challenge yourself with to heal and be set free of any lingering pain or trauma of your past.
Do us a favor, share this post on Pinterest so that others can reap the benefits of healthy, proper shadow work. Everyone deserves to heal and be set free, you agree?
Also, check out some credible resources that I like to lean on and bounce ideas off of if you want more info on shadow work.
Until Next Time,
C.J. Perry
Love & Light