Our shadow’s are those aspects of ourselves that we hide from ourselves and the world. They are sitting in our subconsious, affecting our lives, our choices and our relationships.
Carl Jung, a Swiss psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, was known for his theories about the unconscious mind, including the concept of the “shadow,” which he defined as the unconscious parts of the psyche that contain all of the personal traits, thoughts, and feelings that an individual tends to repress or deny.
“Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves.”
This quote suggests that our reactions to others and their behavior can often reveal something about ourselves, particularly the parts of ourselves that we may not be fully aware of or that we try to hide or deny. By examining our reactions and understanding the root cause of them, we can gain insight into our own unconscious motivations and tendencies, and work to integrate these aspects of ourselves, known as the “shadow,” into our conscious self.
These shadow aspects live inside is in our body, in our cells and in our nervous system. It is what triggers us about people and things. By understanding that the shadow is stored energy within us that we can access, we gain a power to actually change. It cannot happen through the mind alone. We need to access the body, specifically through the felt sense of sensations. These sensations include pressure, pain, tingling, heaviness, etc.. By staying with the sensations, we can gain a better relationship with our shadow and allow all the stuckness, pain, frustration and shame to be free and allow us to find freedom in life.