One of the most powerful things you can do to raise your frequency, is get stuck into some good old shadow work.
Shadow work – contrary to what it sounds like – does not mean anything spooky, dark or sinister. Quite the opposite. Shadow work is the sacred work of dissolving low frequency programs and beliefs that block you from accessing higher states of consciousness.
It’s like doing a spring clean in your energetic world, and chucking out all the junk that is cluttering your house. It’s removing everything that’s going mouldy, stagnating, or just polluting your beautiful home and preventing it from being the clear, high frequency space you know it can be.
It's called 'shadow work', because many of the things we want to be clearing out, are hidden in the shadows of the subconscious mind.
Because they often exist outside our conscious awareness, you probably won't even know that they're there.
But they’ll certainly affect you. Your unintegrated shadows will trigger you like there’s no tomorrow, and they’re often the root of our self-sabotaging behaviours.
The more you put in the work to clear your shadows, the higher you will naturally rise into expanded states of consciousness.
Shadow work is the highest form of healing. It’s the most powerful lightwork you can do.
If you want to raise your frequency, get brave, get curious and explore the shadows of your own consciousness. Find these lost parts of you, transmute your shadows back into love, and bring them home – back into your wholeness.
Shadow work is deeply sacred, extremely rewarding work.
What are shadows? Do we all have them?
We all have layers of shadows imprinted upon us from the day we were born (yes even you who thinks you don’t have any).
They are created from experiences attached to fear, shame, anger, regret, pain and trauma – as well as desires – that have been pushed away and repressed because we could not sit with them, acknowledge them and work through them at the time.
Many of them are created during our upbringing, some are passed down from generation through generation and inherited. Some may be cultural and some are religious.
When emotions and feelings are not ‘seen’ and worked through, but instead stuffed away and repressed, they don’t go away – they create imprints. Even if an imprint was made and you were too young to recall, the subconscious mind never forgets. They leak out of the vault to affect you later in life. And they can suck really bad.
Often it’s not our parents fault, because no one taught them how to do any of this either. They don’t know what shadow work is, why it’s important or how to prevent shadows from forming in children in the first place. Our culture generally does what the generation before did, and handballs dysfunctional patterns down the line.
I lost count of the number of incidences in my childhood that were emotionally distressing to me (being highly sensitive didn’t help here). I didn’t know how to sit with my emotions and none were resolved. Instead I got really good at repressing the things that were painful to me.
Like many kids, I wasn’t allowed to talk about how I was feeling, because I was the ‘bad’ one – the rebellious, disobedient black sheep, and ‘children should be seen and not heard’ (seriously – who invented this crap?). So I pushed it away. I repressed it. Denied it. I shoved my pain as far away from me as I could.
And every time this happened, these parts of me got stuffed away into the big black bag – away from my conscious mind.
Behind every unhealthy coping skill is a young version of you that was doing their best to survive.
We can also keep collecting shadows well into our adult life. When I lost my dad to suicide at age 39, I still didn’t know how to sit with emotion, so I repressed the big guy called grief and I stuffed THIS into my big black bag. For two years it triggered me, and my addictions grew into monsters in an attempt to cope.
It turned out that this was the shadow that broke the seams of the whole black bag, and plummeted me to rock bottom.
Parts of me were lost each time I repressed my feelings. I disassociated and ‘split off’ these aspects of me, so I did not have to sit with them. These wounded parts get pushed away, and they remain unacknowledged and unseen. But they do not go away. They are stored away from your conscious awareness – relegated into the shadows of your powerful subconscious mind.
I didn’t know this at the time, of course – kids generally don’t. And neither do adults.
This ‘survival technique’ actually bites you in the ass later on in life.
So how do your shadows affect you as an adult?
Our shadows express themselves in many different ways – through our triggers, or avoidance of our feelings through distraction or addiction (to anything – social media, food, alcohol, drugs, TV, gaming, gambling, sex, beauty treatments, etc). They are often the reason we keep ourselves busy doing meaningless things (distraction again), or procrastination (because of a false belief that we’re not good enough, or can’t do it), and they express through what we project onto other people.
When I grew up, I’d accumulated so many shadows, my shadow side was a monster. Bigger than Godzilla. I had all my wounded inner-child parts stuffed away in big black bags, and I just lugged them around. They never aged. They never went away. They affected everything I did.
I stayed busy all the time, I had music on constantly to avoid silence and my thoughts. I used drugs, booze and had epic meltdowns aimed at my partners on a regular basis because random shit would trigger me. I took everything personally, I always felt unworthy and life was just constantly sprinkling salt and vinegar in my unhealed emotional wounds.
Even though my shadows kept pinching me and triggering me, I didn’t know what it was – I’d just gulp more red wine out of a mug in an urgent race to FEEL IT LESS, hoping no one would notice. My partners probably noticed the most (sorry about that guys…).
Now, I was more fucked up than the average person. Most people will have FAR less shadows, and far less dysfunction than I did, but if you’re a human living on earth? You’ve got them too. We all have them.
Your triggers reveal what you need to heal
Yes, we all have shadows and we react to our triggers, but many of us actually think this is normal – like sure we’re a little hot-blooded, or just a tad neurotic or Friday night psychotic – or we think that our addictions are okay because this is just who we are. But it’s NOT. It’s pointing to a wound.
These painful triggers, are actually medicine.
It is showing us what needs to be healed. But until we know what we’re looking for, we can’t see it.
You can begin healing as soon as you are ready.
If we take the time to learn what shadow work is, and why it’s so important, then we begin to see these reactions and triggers in a new light. They are leading us to something. And now it’s up to you if you want to do the great work, and clear them.
This work takes dedication and commitment – and it’s worth every second of your time and energy.
This is what the shadow work process looks like:
Observation. Notice when you’re avoiding something, or when you’re triggered.
Take time out (so you can respond rather than react). If you can, teach your partner, family, household or community to understand this process, so they can hold safe, non-judgemental space for you. This step right here can be the difference between a massive destructive fight (that makes everything worse), or a powerful place where healing is possible. Old me escalated my triggers into a full-blown war each time, because I didn’t know how to do any of this.
Get curious and use self-enquiry. Check in and ask yourself:
What am I feeling in my body right now? What am I afraid of? What am I avoiding? What am I learning? What is my soul yearning for?
What can I give away and release? What am I grateful for?
Self-enquiry takes bravery, vulnerability and radical honesty.
Use whatever method of self-reflection works for you: Sitting in quiet meditation, journaling to write out what you’re feeling. Perhaps you prefer breathwork, mirror work, mindful drawing or getting out into nature.
Sit with whatever comes up. See it. Feel it. Acknowledge the parts of you that want to be seen. Talk to someone who can hold safe space for you if you need.
Witness it.
Surrender it.
Release it.
Integrate the shift.
What does not help is blame. Or judgement (from others or yourself). Or reacting (without creating space). Or staying unconscious and getting busy, and not taking time to explore what this is showing you. These are missed opportunities to heal – but they will keep coming up until you do the work.
A word of caution: Shadow work can be intense work for those of us with big traumas which are suppressed. If this applies to you, you may want or need the support of a professional who is trained in trauma release to guide you through the process. Or you may comfortable to begin on your own.
I found mindful drawing very effective to clear my traumas – because I could focus on the drawing as my background programs were gradually being cleared.
And shadow work never ends – but once you get used to it gets far easier. And it becomes really beautiful and exciting, because you know that when shadows come up, you’re being invited to access the next level in expansion.
Find your shadows. Sit with them and honour them. Bring them home. When you consistently take these heavy, low frequency weights off, you will naturally rise.
Feature Image: Aldous Massie