In classical psychology, Shadows, or shadow aspects, refer to those personality traits that a person possesses but does not acknowledge as their own — feelings they are ashamed of, suppress, deny, and sometimes don’t even suspect exist.
Everyone has shadows, that’s a fact. They consist of everything considered “bad” and “wrong,” everything you want to disown and not see in yourself.
This is mainly because when you first encountered these feelings, you may have been confused, not knowing what to do with them.
That was once the cause of a psychological wound where pain settled, and from which you want to hide.
All of this is repressed from consciousness and lives in the unconscious part of the psyche, because it has already become a habitual protective strategy.
Even while living in the unconscious, Shadows still break out — through illness, breakdowns, guilt, through tantrums, whims, through what can be called inappropriate behavior.
Read on to learn what to do with your Shadows and what practice can help you accept them.
The shadow frequency is always based on the frequency of fear. Very often these fears don’t manifest at the conscious level; they are deep-seated and almost always unconscious.
Any frequency of fear activates a state of suffering and triggers a victim state. Each of us has ingrained victim patterns that influence our perception, thinking, worldview, our thoughts, and our actions.
Awareness and Acceptance of Shadows
Awareness and acceptance of your Shadows and their suppressed qualities leads to a huge release of energy that was previously spent on repressing your feelings and on constant control to “not give yourself away.”
When you no longer need to hide anything from yourself or others, when you no longer need to feel shame or guilt, your physical and mental strength significantly increases.
And this is the path to self-acceptance, to unfolding confidence. By removing distortions, you gradually lead yourself to healing.
Healing is not the complete disappearance of all your traumas and the pain you are running from. Healing is acknowledging that the pain may still exist, but it does not define you. Your pain is not you. Your Shadows are not you either.
Just remember, you don’t need to fight your Shadows, you don’t need to get rid of them. Simply know that they are always with you, they are inside you on a cellular level. They cannot be “overcome”; you can only befriend them.
Where there is energy of struggle and resistance, you will always lose to your Shadows. Don’t fight them, love them within yourself, accept yourself in them…
See also [Me and My Shadow] Signals your shadow speaks through
What to Do with Your Shadows
We often think we know everything about ourselves. But that’s not the case. The nature of the human psyche is so complex that it constantly manages to lead us astray. It “protects” us from ourselves in order to “keep us safe” and leave us in a state of ignorance.
Defense mechanisms begin to manifest from the moment of our birth, or even earlier, when the construction of our body and the formation of our nervous system are just beginning.
Over the years of our development, these psychological defense mechanisms become so virtuosic that learning the truth about ourselves and starting to change something within us and in our lives can sometimes become completely impossible.
That’s why it’s so difficult to see and acknowledge our own shadow aspects. But there are always tools that can help us with this.
One way to work with your Shadows can be distilled into an effective formula for communicating with yourself and the world, and it sounds like this: allow, accept, and embrace. When you allow yourself, it’s as if you expand your inner space. And that space then allows you to accept the energies of the Shadow.
Allow yourself this luxury — to create a space within yourself that is energetically filled with what will allow you to dismantle all your limiting beliefs and all your created defense mechanisms.
See also: Evaluating Yourself Through the Lens of Others’ Opinions, or How Healing Traumatized Parts Happens Through Other People
Shadow Aspects and Inner Demons
Healing is not about suppressing and hiding from your pain. Healing is about acknowledging the presence of your shadow components within yourself, but not reproaching yourself for them.
Accepting your Shadows is no easy task. Moreover, we are taught to fight them, to resist our “negative aspects.”
However, accepting “your demons” is a very courageous step that ultimately leads not only to finding your wholeness but also to unlocking the dormant creative potential inside you, which was hiding in the same place — in resistance and non-acceptance.
Life constantly throws challenges our way. We are used to being in a constant struggle with ourselves, with life. As within, so without, remember?
And so our hidden Shadows are constantly trying to break out, and we are forced to continually run into obstacles in the form of our own negative states and the events that happen to us.
And so we resent, resist, fight, judge, wall ourselves off, hide, and run away.
Look at how much energy and how many resources we have to bring to these processes. And the more we resist and fight our feelings, the more we fuel them, waste our energy, and essentially give them both our energy and power over us.
See also: An Ode to Pain, or Why You Need Pain
Pain is a signal, sometimes a hammer blow to the crown of the head, that something is wrong, something is broken. Wake up, pay attention to where it hurts…
The Space of Accepting Your Demons
Any Shadow is based on fear, no matter what kind. What matters is that fear is contraction.
When we contract internally under the influence of fear, we automatically fall under the influence of the Shadow, which, on the contrary, is energetically larger, it is expanded. And what happens? It overwhelms us, crushes us with its grandeur.
But when we create a space of acceptance within ourselves, we ourselves expand. The contraction goes away, and we can now build a dialogue with our Shadow-Demons on equal footing, without fear and without reproach.
By expanding, we include them within ourselves, and they no longer have the same power over us, and we are no longer so afraid.
If we don’t resist and don’t run from our shadow aspects, they can become our helpers; they can show us a direction of movement we never even considered. It sounds paradoxical, but our Shadow-Demons are capable of unlocking the creative potential sleeping within us.
Because we stop running from our pain, from our experiences, we allow ourselves to stay with ourselves. We don’t run from our experience, but remain with ourselves and begin to accept ourselves in a new way. By gradually accepting ourselves, opening up, we learn to value ourselves, our openness, and our depth, which we were once afraid to look into because that abyss was frightening…
Be kind to yourself, start taking care of yourself, learn to allow yourself to experience the entire range of feelings that are asking to be lived. Expand.
Instead of contracting under the pressure of fears, trust what you feel, even if these feelings seem “bad,” “wrong,” or “negative” to you. Try instead to understand — what are your feelings trying to tell you, where are they guiding you, what do they want to reveal in you?
Allow yourself to learn to create a space of expansion within yourself, a space for accepting all of your experiences.
We invite you to take the transformation seminar “Dance with the Shadow 3.0,” where you will get to know your shadow aspects and understand what gifts they hold within.
Traps of Perception
When we don’t understand the nature of what is happening to us, we become hostages of life itself; we walk in circles of constant suffering. Yes, sometimes we surface, but then we dive back into the abyss of dissatisfaction, anxiety, and frustration.
If you keep clinging to your usual worldview, you fall into the trap of one-dimensionality. But a human is a multidimensional being, the space we live in is multidimensional, which means we must learn a multidimensional worldview. Then this depressing and frightening state of hopelessness will not exist.
By working through yourself, getting to know your “embedded” shadow frequencies, you can recognize your victim patterns, get to know your Shadow-Demons, and learn to create a space of acceptance within yourself.
Dare to embark on this fascinating journey into the depths of yourself and the unpacking of your creative potential, get to know your Shadow-Demons, and don’t be afraid to know yourself. You will be amazed at how this will help you change the quality of your life.
See also: How to Gain Personal Wholeness
Check: perhaps many problems in your life are connected precisely to the fact that you have lost your wholeness and cannot seem to regain it…
Practice of Creating a Space of Acceptance
As soon as you feel anxiety and uncertainty awakening inside you, as soon as you want to give up and spit on everything, run away, hide, just stop. Wherever you are, give yourself a few minutes.
Remember that your Shadows are breaking through, and to avoid falling under their influence, begin to breathe calmly.
Breathe and find this energy of fear within yourself. It won’t be able to hide under your close attention. Fear is contraction. You can pull this lump of contracted energy over to your side.
Continuing to breathe calmly and evenly, begin to expand with each inhale. Inhale and feel how your energy begins to grow and envelop you in a cocoon. As you exhale, fix your attention on this cocoon. Inhale — expand, exhale — fix. Do this until you feel it’s enough.
Now look at the cocoon you have created. You are inside it. Make it so that you feel comfortable inside, so that it is light and safe there.
You have filled this sphere-cocoon with your energy. Now find that compressed lump of fear that was bothering you. Place it in front of you. Direct the energy from the created sphere-cocoon into it and observe what happens to it.
And of course, share in the comments. If questions arise, write, we’ll figure it out together!
But just remember, it is equally important to be aware of your shadow aspects, to understand WHAT exactly is happening. Without awareness, without analysis, and without a shift in your perception paradigm, any effect from any energy practices will be short-lived.
And this practice is only the initial stage of creating a space of acceptance. It is much wider, deeper, and is located not only inside you, it is also a part of your reality space.