Shadow Work is one of the fundamental keys to discovering our authenticity, as well as strengthening our connection to The Absolute. I used to believe that as long as I continued to move forward after facing something difficult, I could just keep on moving as I strove to live my best life. I thought, "Why should I look back and dwell on the past? I'm living my best life, I have moved beyond that. It would only hinder me to think back upon all my mistakes, and all the times I wish I'd done something different." And to be fair, I'd say that's human nature, and it's entirely logical from a human perspective to think such a thing. However, the downside is that by subscribing to such a belief, you innately have a ton of shadow aspects. Shadow aspects can be thought of as "baggage" that you're carrying around with you at all times. Ironically, you likely won't even consciously recognize that you're carrying such baggage. I often experienced dreams where I would be carrying so many bags that I couldn't fit through doorways or walk up stairs. I even had one dream where I couldn't get onto the airplane as I watched all my classmates from high school take off on a journey to a beautiful island destination (there's certainly some interesting symbolism there). I like to think that each time I encounter a shadow aspect, I take a treasured piece of myself and trade it away for a piece of trash that I now have to carry. At first, you might only be holding an empty bottle or wrapper of some kind. But sooner than later, you have so much trash that you're now having to carry it around in bags. Not trash bags though, luggage bags. You have been tricked into thinking that carrying this trash is beneficial to your ego because it means that you got rid of what you really considered as trash (your shadow aspect). Unfortunately, though, the trade of a piece of your soul for a piece of trash is a blatant mistake. After so many years, you're carrying so many bags of luggage filled with literal trash that you have no way to make room for new experiences. The irony is that you're carrying trash to keep a treasure of yourself away from you because you have convinced yourself that this part of you is no good. Your ego will create all types of stories and perceptions about itself to continue to flex its might and exert itself over your life. By subscribing to this belief of trading your lesser appreciated aspects for trash, you inherently give your power over to your ego, which has absolutely no idea what it's doing. It will single-handedly ruin your life for you while blaming everyone else around it and never taking responsibility for its mistakes. By reclaiming these lost fragments of yourself, you step back into your sovereignty and your power as a fractal of a truly omnipotent being. This shifts the power balance between your ego and soul, and you can see why your ego might not like the idea of such a shift in power balance.
The good thing about all this is that it's never too late to trade back your bags of trash for the pieces of your soul that you have traded and thrown away. By facing these aspects of ourselves and hearing them out from their perspectives, we can find the compassion and forgiveness within us to understand why these aspects felt the need to express themselves in the ways that they did. By doing this, we can get to the root of the issue, which is the self-limiting beliefs that lay behind the shadow aspect. In this sense, we can see the shadow aspect as a coping mechanism of sorts for our own false limiting beliefs that we had defined our perspective from. This starts the shift from blaming our shadow aspect to blaming our false limiting beliefs. At this point, through understanding and through acceptance that this aspect tried its best, and that it was still an important stepping stone along the way for the person we've become today. The next step once you've successfully integrated your shadow aspect is to redefine your self-limiting beliefs, which I will cover in another post. But this is the value of shadow work. Through each aspect we integrate, we not only release ourselves of baggage, but we balance the power distribution between our soul and our ego; as well as reclaim our authenticity, which allows the space for The Absolute to begin to dwell within us. The more we can step into our authenticity, the more we align with our soul and our higher self, which inadvertently allows more space for The Absolute to dwell within us once again.
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