Check-in: Say Hi to Your Shadow
All you need is a little compassion
This is your shadow.
Should I do a weekly check-in song? I kind of like it.
Anyway, this song reminds me of shadow. Your shadow just wants to receive the love that you didn’t feel you did as a child.
Shadow reminder
There are four major Jungian archetypes:
The Anima/Animus: the feminine or masculine aspect or the “true self”
The Self: the unified unconciousness and consciousness of an individual (the ego and the personality)
The Persona: how we present ourselves to the world
The Shadow: the unconscious mind consisting of repressed ideas, weaknesses, and desires.
Essentially, these archetypes bleed into one another. Jung identified four major archetypes, but also believed that there is no limit to the number of archetypes that exist.
So when we look at the shadow, we look at the aspects we denied in ourselves to match cultural norms. Shadow is a very influenced archetype, meaning we create a shadow depending on social norms and what we reject through our own personal morals.
What you feel guilt for, ashamed of or disgusted by in yourself, is shadow.
What you judge others for, feel envy towards, or may even hate, is also shadow.
I like to think of shadow as an inward and outward projection.
We tend to project the opposite to the world.
Let’s take my favorite example through this:
You grew up being told you were lazy. Your caretakers often yelled at you and told you that you never did enough, were always relaxing, had no motivation. Maybe some kids at school made fun of someone for being bad at school, while you overheard the teacher telling a child that they were lazy, making them a bad student.
So now you associate laziness with being a bad student, being unloved, that relaxation is bad.
You will then take on a pattern that projects this shadow. You will most likely become an over-achiever, while also feeling like you are never doing enough. You might judge others for how much they achieve. You hate seeing lazy people and want nothing to do with someone you identify as “lazy.” You push yourself so hard that eventually you burn out and have to take the rest that you hate so much, causing you to feel guilt the whole time you are “resting,” which causes you even more stress and you end up getting more tired than before. But, you quickly go back to your achievements and push through the burn out because you never want to be seen as lazy.
We tend to project the opposite of our shadow, through our persona.
Move Through
The thing about shadow is it is a projection. It isn’t a law. You don’t have to hold onto it.
How do you release a shadow?
You embody it.
You turn towards that dark part of your psyche, meet shadow where it stands, with compassion, and you open yourself up to loving that aspect while forgiving the experiences in your life that made you believe it was unloveable.
We need the whole you. The darkness, the light, the hidden parts, the ego. All of it matters. And all of it is worthy of love.
Here’s a Ted Talk I like to watch to remind me that even with all the Myers-Briggs tests out there, there is still deeper parts of you that no amount of research will be able to quantify.
We’re also malleable. You don’t have to hold onto any aspect if it doesn’t serve us. But, we can’t release until we open ourselves up to loving an aspect.
As a writer, I enjoy writing out short stories for my shadow to help me identify and move through what aspects may be sticking to my ego, but you can also create a visual of your shadow, or create an audio recording. However you best open yourself up.
Linked is a download I did for a client to assist them in uncovering their shadow. It’s four days of journal prompts and activities all geared towards shadow. Give it a try and see how you feel.
P.S.
I enjoy keeping check-ins really short and to the point with an activity. But, if you have any feedback on how you’d like the newsletters to look, what is working, what isn’t, I would love to receive your suggestions :)
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