Shadow is the parts of us that we hide, repress, and/or deny; repressed desires, emotions, and impulses we suppress from our conscious awareness.

    Shadow Work is when we bring those parts of ourselves from the unconscious/subconscious psyche into our conscious awareness. The thing is a Shadow is as much of a representation of black and white/duality as you can get. For me, part of my healing and unlearning is about seeing past the extremes of duality and seeing the full spectrum of experiences, all it's grey areas.

For this reason, I like to think of shadow work as working with a hologram. Something that can be seen and looked at from many different angles and if fractured each piece still contains the whole image.  This seems to be a more accurate and useful image when it comes to healing. This way we can reclaim these aspects of ourselves instead of projecting them into the world and on people around us.

This can greatly change the people and experiences we attract into our lives.

 According to most experts, our subconscious/unconscious drives 85% of our behavior, it is where our base programming lives. Our subconscious contains our deep-seated belief that really runs our conscious awareness, our lives, and what we attract as life experiences.

       Our base programming comes from our childhood, the first 7 years of life sets the groundwork for how we see and interact with the world and the people in it.

     As children, our minds did the best with the very limited information they had to make sense of things. We were at our most vulnerable and if we did not feel safe, seen, or supported, our subconscious looked at everything as a threat to our survival.

      This is why untangling the parts of ourselves and our trauma can be very difficult. Due to the connections made as a child, our programming may not even be rational. Our little kid mind could have taken some big leaps in rationale to make sense of what was happening to help us feel safe.

       Therefore all the information and programming our minds made during this time was based on what our limited child mind perceived more than what actually was.

       If a parent was depressed and couldn't meet our needs, our young minds may have turned that into the belief that having needs is wrong or even dangerous. Programing us to be overly self-sufficient to a fault, attracting people that are not able to fully meet our needs, creating a self-fulfilling pattern that reinforces and justifies our beliefs.

 As most of us focus on what is already within our conscious awareness, rather than the unconscious programs that are really driving our everyday actions, and attracting situations that keep these beliefs alive.

Our Higher self/Superconscious is not concerned with our survival for it/we are eternal. Unlike our mental and emotional parts that are only here to help us navigate this plain, these parts will perish when we leave here. The mental and emotional parts make up our ego and are usually unaware of the programming it is responding to over the actual situation at hand. 

These actions and reactions can keep us stuck in these patterns. Whatever we resist persists, and when it comes to our Shadow/hologram this couldn't be more true. Unaware and unhealed it can seep into our lives and our everyday behavior in unexpected ways at unexpected times.

    Even as defensive mechanisms and protectors meant to keep us safe, these protectors can take on a life of their own stuck in the past with outdated information. They keep attracting situation that reinforces our beliefs that we need them still to keep us safe. Sometimes even hiding our own power from ourselves and the world around us for our own protection. When in actuality accessing that power would set us free and on a completely different trajectory.

This is why it’s so important to bring our shadow self/hologram to the surface. So we can do the necessary inner work to create a dialogue between all of our parts conscious and unconscious. To create healing and positive change we will be able to see in the world around us.