The biggest misconception of shadow work.
Shadow work is one of the foundational pieces of creating a container for our joy to thrive — but it can also be our joy's biggest threat.
It's important to unravel our parasitic stories, habits, and wounds that infect us otherwise they’ll continue to fester and blindside us contaminating our joyous nature. This is the heart of shadow work — looking at what’s beneath the surface causing our suffering.
The dark side of shadow work is letting the process itself swallow us whole. It’s allowing our pursuit of healing to blind us from our already healed state. It's being oblivious to the abundance in front of us, the potential at our fingertips, and all the love that is waiting for us to wake up, open, and receive it. The dark side of shadow work is believing that we need to be fixed. It's becoming attached to the story of our survivorship, or what is wrong, lacking, or not serving us. It’s allowing our drive to become dependent upon our fires of rage, bitterness, and injustice — because this then binds us to a wounded identity.
When we are constantly trying to grow, and heal while unsatisfied with where we are and how far we’ve come our belief that we and our lives aren't enough eventually consumes our whole consciousness. When we are relentlessly processing, we miss the moment satiated in beauty right in front of us. When we are so focused on living intentionally and spiritually, righteously serious about everything, our joy is what suffers even when we think our great work is in service of it.
It’s not that we should curse this great work of transmutation, it's that we need to allow fluidity between healing and being so that we don’t become disassociated from our present reality, lost in the gravity of the underbelly. It’s not that we should never walk the land of the underworld, or pursue betterment, it’s that we also have to bask in play, our divinity, pleasure, and our joyous innocence as well. We have to simmer in optimism and faith, dream grandly, create madly, and love wildly as much if not more, as we have to shed the wounds and stories that have pained and infected us.
Shadow work is holy work — but the biggest misconception is that we need to pursue it.
We don’t — when the time is ripe, the work arises, our illusions blare, our gunk bubbles to the surface, our insecurities rear their heads, and life tests us. We will experience waves of anxiety, anger, or depression cueing us something is at play. Our job is to muster acceptance for the discomfort while keeping our eyes and ears wide open so that we can gain clarity and let go.
Shadow work is not the work of the warrior, it’s the work of setting our armor and sword down and sinking into present awareness. It’s listening, and awakening to what's at play in our subconscious. It’s allowing the divine to work through us, and trusting the dark mother in her process of revelation. It’s tracking the resistance, and blocks we face and feeling their roots. Shadow work more than anything is about surrendering, and breathing into the waves when they arrive.
Our sacred work is being able to understand the vast tendrils of darkness that infect us because we turn our cheek and attempt to deny the messages bombarding us, and it's being able to understand the vast tendrils of darkness that grip deeper because we continually give them our attention. Joy asks us to surrender to the waves of cleansing, and lessons as they arise, but to not chase, or be devoured by them either.
There is always more work to do. The horizon is limitless. Do not stop seeking, but don't get so lost in seeking that you lose yourself either.
Protecting our joy means awakening to the light and reaching for it like the tendrils of a vine in a dark jungle. It means claiming a sanctuary of positivity. Gratitude is holy. Counting our blessings, and being acutely aware of the beauty in the simple things has the power to completely change our lives. Our experience is dependent on how we vow to view the world. Our joy is dependent upon our ability to see the light through the darkness that has been cast upon us — and there is no escaping the dark.
There is no escaping the darkness, but we can sharpen our focus to be acutely aware of the light that glows amidst it. This is the gateway to joy.
When we are stuck in what seems to be a whirlpool of demise we have to be able to realize when we can stand up and walk away. Sometimes what haunts us is an engrained loop of the past paving the way, and it's time for us to forge ahead with a new story. We may not choose what lands in our lap, but we choose what we do with it. If we see ourselves as the victim, we anchor our identity into the shadows instead of the light. When we view life’s inevitable shadows and struggles as part of the human experience, allowing ourselves to properly grieve as needed, but can witness our experience objectively and not personally — this protects our joy.
There are times when life invokes despair and joy is not meant to be forced. You cannot force joy, and you cannot bypass the shadows when they arise either, but you can protect your joy by tending a relationship with both the dark and light like lovers. Be with the light when it's there, and surrender to the dark when it comes to take you under.
In some ways, we have way less, and way more control than we’d ever give ourselves credit for, and often, we waste away trying to control the things we can’t and pass off the things we can. At some point, we are forced to acknowledge the excuses we knew were never really true, and our graspings that were always fatal. Instead, may we surrender to the cosmic current, take the reigns where we can, and be graced with knowing the difference.
Only we have the power to shapeshift our entire experience, only we have the power to choose the lens through which we view the world, and only we have the power to marvel over all of it.
Until we stop chasing happiness and wake up to the perfection right in front of us, and within us, we will never find peace. Until we burn the stories of struggle, strife, and lack to dust and let them rise like a pheonix from the ashes will we find our power. Until we surrender to the sweet arms of the darkness when it shows itself at our doorstep, will we see the light that glows amidst it. And until we adore the beauty all around us, the curiosity flickering within us, and the mystery beckoning us forward will our joy blossom.
With marigold love,
Abby
