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Whether you’re a brujx, espiritistx, conjurer, Celtic, eclectic or an otherwise magical ethereal creature--in all cases, it’s important to tackle the difficult and intrinsic process of shadow work. Let this article be a practical guide to shadow work that will take your spiritual practice to new reaches. Hedge beyond the veil. Shadow work is your key:
What is shadow work? Shadow work definition
Shadow work is the idea that the whole person benefits when they integrate subconscious and conscious ideas of self. It was conceptualized and popularized by Carl Jung, who took the Freudian idea of an id one step further.
While Freud believed the id contained only the negative aspects of shadow, our internal darkness, Jung explained that shadow has positive and negative aspects. For example, someone who often uses their conscious mind to reflect negatively on themselves or their personality may know subconsciously that they are a worthy person. Jung’s shadow carries all subconscious ideas and so the idea of self-worthiness might be a positive aspect of one person’s shadow.
Witches, brujxs, conjurers, espiritistxs, we know that there is no light and dark. There is only your intention and energy. Freud’s binary understanding of human behavior, while laying the groundwork for later breakthroughs, was clouded by confirmation of bias of his overarching philosophies.
I would like to propose a focus on Jung's theory, taking it one step further to include the superego. The id is subconscious, the positive and negative that makes up a vacuum of things we don’t know about ourselves at a conscious level. However, the superego, while a genuinely positive force, can also present shadow.
Take the taboo topic of sex is one example where the superego might mislead the brain. If your superego was formed on a set of values that sees sex as inherently shameful, it may drive you to have baggage around sex that is not productive or conducive to the kinds of relationships you want in life.
Our superego is calibrated by our moral compass and personal ethics and therefore, it too can lead to vices and biases that need to be examined. The act of examining the full set of unconscious behaviors, ideas, vices, biases, trauma, pain and fear that exists beneath the surface level of consciousness is what I mean when I refer to shadow work in the spiritual sense.
Why is shadow work important?
Shadow work is an important practice because it allows us to identify, critique, breakdown or integrate unconscious barriers that prevent us from reaching our full potential, gaining perspective and getting the most out of life.
In short, someone who has a lot of shadow work to do may be guided by subconscious forces like bias, prejudice, negative feelings of self, cognitive dissonance, a lack of self awareness, jealousy, resentment and other emotions that come with not having a good understanding of your own psyche.
By completing shadow work you begin to cleanse yourself spiritually. In doing this, you open up new doors for yourself both in the physical and spiritual world as you release the hold of self imposed limitations to live a better life.
How does shadow work… work?
There’s no one single way to do shadow work. It’s actually a large set of practices and guidelines that range from purely psychological, which can be done with the help of a therapist who understands the techniques associated with that kind of work, to magical integration of the various parts of self. Your shadow work journey may include both magical practice and therapy. Many people are already doing shadow work without fully realizing it.
Shadow work exercises to try at home
Below are a few exercises you can try at home. Before attempting to do any shadow work make sure your energy centers are clear, cast basic protection, and get yourself into a relaxed state.
Meditation and visualization
A good starting place to start shadow work is to hone in on your meditation skills. Half the time when I advise people to meditate, they are excited about it and the other half of the time people say something like “I can’t meditate, I’ve tried and it doesn’t work.” Certainly, meditation isn’t for everyone, but it’s a big part of my practice and I firmly believe that pretty much everyone can do it.
It’s not that I think people who say they can’t do it are making that up. I think the idea of meditation that they are subscribing to just isn’t one that works for them. When it comes to meditating you should do anything, within reason, that settles you, quiets you and makes you feel more centered, introspectively focused and in control.
When most people think of mediation, they don’t think of dancing or walking about in a circle or playing a drum as a form of meditation, although these things can definitely be meditative. Instead, they often think of sitting for long periods of time, trying to get comfortable, closing their eyes and trying to quiet all of their thoughts until they are frustrated and feeling stiff.
As someone with ADHD, focusing inward and calming the thoughts is not easy, however, when I meditate it doesn’t have to be. I think the idea that meditating means you turn your brain off and think of vast nothingness is misleading. The real test of meditation for me is how fast I can return to focusing on my breathing once another thought pops into my head.
We can never truly quiet our thoughts, can we? Often I’ll be in meditation and out of nowhere, I’ll remember a client who I need to print a shipping label for, or what I’m going to make for dinner, and it starts to derail my focus. Instead of allowing the thought to proceed, my version of meditation involves recognizing the distraction, then picturing it turning into a rubber ball and bouncing it out of my head before returning my thoughts to deep breathing and proceeding wherever I left off.
When meditating for shadow work, I find visualization is a powerful tool. I use my imagination to shape my shadow work journey. For instance, anything I know I need to work on can be a visual element that I interact with in spirit, an internal skeleton in my closet may present as a living, breathing skeleton that I invite into my astral residence to commune with me.
Mirror scrying
My typical shadow work combines meditation, visualization, card reading and mirrors. I start with meditating on my issue or meditating to commune with my guides to uncover issues, then following up by scrying into a mirror, in a dark room with a lit candle. The idea behind mirror scrying when you are doing shadow work is to look at your face until you are basically looking through it, until you don’t see you anymore, just a network of lines and shapes that make up the proportions of a face. It could be yours or someone else’s, and the more you look the more it changes. These changes bring to surface ideas about self and things you need to work on. Recording all of your shadow work findings is important, and in a later post, we’ll talk about building a shadow work journal.
Card Reading
Finally, I end my shadow work sessions with a card pull from a tarot or oracle deck. I use these tools to communicate with guide energy and receive divine guidance on what’s to come next. The card pulls confirm the work I’ve done, tell me what direction I need to move next in my personal development and which guides are supporting me in that journey.
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