the whole concept of spiritual bypassing is really the concept of you know staying only in the light ay quote unquote spiritual Realms and denying the parts of us that are very powerful and very deep in the underworld in our subconscious you know in our root chakra and bringing those up and literally bringing them into the light taking them out of the shadows and into the light uh is an incredibly healthy way to live welcome to the embodied relationship Experience Podcast my name is John weinland I am your host today it’s time to meet your Shadow that’s going to be the subject of today’s podcast we’re going to get into what the shadow is um how we can work with it why it’s important for us to work with it and then how to integrate our shadow into our psyche and uh doing so we are able to embody it and we are able to integrate it into our you know normal nice personas now the first thing I want to say is that you know Shadow work has been going on collectively for Millennia right wisdom cultures throughout the ages have had ceremony and ritual that honor our darker Natures that give our darker Natures chances to be expressed I mean everything you know uh there are masks that are made there are specific kind of dances that are made there are honoring of um you know the darker Tendencies uh that we carry as human beings and so wisdom cultures have known for a long time whether it’s um graveyard Tantra in India or um certain shamanic practices in the Amazon the indigenous peoples have known that shadow work is a a crucial part of of a healthy Collective and what we’ve experienced over the last let’s say 5 600 years mainly at the hands of the church is that our um baser Natures our darker Natures have been proclaimed as evil and they have been stuffed and so what we have is you know centuries now of puritanical Society kind of stuffing down our darker Natures the parts of us that are violent the parts of us that are Primal the parts of us that are sexually deviant the parts of us that are um you know for lack of a better term evil and what this does when our shadows are not um recognized and integrated is they become this kind of snag is what Yung called it I’m going to read a quote from yung in just a second but they become this snag that literally weights us down it takes a lot of energy to repress our darker Natures our anger our um uh you know sexual lust all of the darker parts of our personalities um have value and carry with them a lot of energy so when we repress our shadows not only are we um repressing and denying a source of energy and vitality in our lives but we are also expending a lot of energy in order to keep people from seeing these parts of ourselves so here’s what Yung wrote about the shadow he wrote a lot about the shadow but this is one quote that really sticks out to me unfortunately there can be no doubt that man is on the whole less good than he imagines himself or wants to be everyone carries a shadow and the less it is embodied in the individual’s conscious life the blacker and denser it is at all counts it forms an unconscious snag thoring our most well- me intentions so our shadow Natures are calling to be expressed are are basically you know tapping on the door pounding on the door in some cases to be expressed and what I’m going to take you through today is my process of identifying Shadows of getting into right relationship with our shadows and then a a practice that I teach uh around embodying our shadows and then finally what it means to then integrate our shadows and when we do this and I’ve seen this now over 15 years and th taking thousands of people through this process when we do this what happens is that uh a a beautiful source of energy and integration happens in our body minds and we’re able to take these sort of darker parts of ourselves and we can integrate them into how we relate in the world before we get into this let me just get some business out of the way if you’re watching on YouTube please like this video uh like And subscribe really helps us get the content out if you’re listening on uh some podcast format Spotify or apple please give us a rate and review it also helps to get the content out and then finally uh many of the practices that I talk about on this podcast are part of the embodied relationship ship experience platform which is a really easy access lowcost there’s a free trial if you want to try it uh Global Community where we uh practice the things that I’m talking about here there are thousands of hours of content there are hundreds of practices including the practice I’m going to take you through here today on the platform and it’s a really easy way if you want to get deeper into the work there’s a link below and you can go ahead and subscribe to the embodied relationship experience community we’ve built this over the last8 years we’re incredibly proud of it there’s a just an absolute wealth of practice and material on there and of course we’d love to see there okay so what is the Shadow the shadow in all of us is the part of us that we repress deny and avoid these are the parts of us that at a young age uh we learned were dangerous or unattractive or just plain bad and so what do we do we learn to stuff them we learn to hide them we learn to put them in the closet and inevitably because they are Primal forces you know they find their way into our lives on the sexual side our sexual Shadows can start to come out as um addictions to porn or um or darker sexual practices or basically unease and ill health around sex in the relational realm and in the emotional realm our shadows can come out as rage uh you know kind of people who snap are often a really good example of people with unowned and unintegrated shadows so if you you know we’re going to get into exactly how to identify your Shadow but just know that most of your reactivity most of your shame most of the ill feelings you have about yourself can be found in your shadows and so getting into Shadow practice and making Shadow practice a crucial and consistent part of your psycho emotional and embodiment work is incredibly helpful and Incredibly powerful Shadow work as I like to describe it falls under the second pillar of sacred intimacy which is Devotion to love and in that pillar there is this concept of doing your own deep inner work right so for for us to be uh fully present and whole in and of ourselves so that we bring the best parts of ourselves to our relationship there are certain practices that we have to do and the practices that many people like to avoid are the practices of really getting into their deep dark chewy gooey places and so it’s a it’s an incredibly potent form of devotion not only to your own um psychological and emotional well-being but also to your relationship right I mean I’m sure that you could probably Identify some of the Shadows that your partner is carrying I’m not so sure you can identify your own but maybe they can and so these Shadows find their way into our relationships they find uh their way into our lives and they literally become like Yung was talking about snags I would describe them sort of as weights right that we have these weights that sort of Hold Us Down from being fully alive from being fully present from being fully integrated in all of our aspects not just the light fluffy spiritually you know um attractive assets but also the um the aspects of us that you know that are you know darker and a little more um intense another way to consider Shadow work is to consider it as part of our underworld right so we have the Transcendent spiritual realm we have the realm of life and living in the world but we also have this underworld and in the Underworld as Bill Plotkin talked about that is where our soul gets fed right when we take a dive into the underworld to find the parts of ourselves that are either filled with self-hatred or rage or shame or uh deep repressed feelings then we are actually feeding our soul according to Plotkin and I happen to agree with him now having seen this over many many years so if we you know the whole concept of spiritual bypassing is really the concept of you know staying only in the light Airy um you know quote unquote spiritual Realms and denying the parts of us that are very powerful and very deep in the underworld in our subconscious you know in our root chakra and bringing those up and literally bringing them into the light taking them out of the shadows and into the light uh is an incredibly healthy way to live so I’ll give a little bit of a personal history with Shadow work it was 2009 and I had just ended a relationship it was fairly painful ending and I decided to take some of you have heard me talk about the feminine or masculine cleanse I decided to take a cleanse from all relationship for nine months so there was no flirting there was no dating there was no practice there was no sex there was no possibility of relationship in my life and I was just left to be with me after this relationship ended and so I I stumbled upon the work of Ken Wilbur who came up with this process called the 321 Shadow process and I started to work with it in the way that felt right to me it’s a little different than how he lays it out I’ve I’ve since over the years um you know added my own special sauce I’ve innovated on it I’ve made it more of a an in less of an intellectual process and more of an embodied process but my work with the shadow began in my garage office where for months I would identify the parts of myself that were that were triggered right that would get triggered in relationship or get triggered by the world or would just kind of get triggered in my own thinking and I would start to pull the thread on these triggers and at the bottom of that thread I found the shadows and so I spent months you know kind of cultivating this practice on myself I was my you know my first client and and I would be in my garage taking myself through the process I’m going to share with you here um you know going deep into my Shadows uh playing loud music wailing screaming stomping crying you know contorting my body into these weird shapes and what I started to notice was that I began to find parts of myself I began to discover who I really was and who I really was wasn’t just this you know kind of nice guy um you know good guy uh pillar of my community leader in my community but it also was this parts of these parts of me that were bitter these parts of me that carried shame these parts of me that were you know dominant these parts of me that were violent these parts of me that were rageful and I started to discover who I really was and who I really was was all of it was all of it and so as I continued to do the shadow work in my garage you know in the afternoons um before my daughter came home from school I I I met these parts of myself and these Shadows became went from becoming these kind of you know redheaded stepchildren that I hid in the closet to allies that I could bring into my world that I could bring into my relationships and I’ll give a really good example of one so one of the first Shadows that I discovered was my own killer right the part of me that was ruthless and violent and of course you know I don’t want to bring that into the world right but in in discovering that in giving it a voice and creating a relationship with it I was able to discover an unowned gift right that I had repressed my ruthlessness I’d repressed my you know kind of sharp I’d repress the part of me that wouldn’t take any I’d repress the part of me that would not you know stand up with Force when needed and you know I see this especially in a lot of men right they they will repress their violent nature because men’s violence has been abusive for so long but that does not mean that your violent nature cannot become an ally when properly integrated and used and it doesn’t even require violence it requires there be an integration of the part of you that will not take the part of you that will not back down the part of you that will stand and fight the part of you that is sharp the part of you that is ruthless in your um attempt to um liberate Consciousness your attempt especially in men’s work your attempt to sharply polish another right and so in finding my killer and finding this ruthless part of myself I was able to hone the part of me that became very potent in men’s circles you know the part of me that could look at another man and give him a sharp truth right give him with ruthless compassion of the truth of what I was seeing and so these Shadows you know when we start to integrate them and when we get to know them and when we get in I’ll use the term right relationship with them meaning we we have agency over them we have control over them we have you know capacity to understand that they’re there to you know give them space to express themselves when they need to but mainly we get to integrate them into our wise adult selves and bring them as allies out in the world in a sense Shadow work is Warrior practice because Shadow work is is facing your own demons it is facing death in some ways and when we are courageous enough and bold enough and willing enough to look at our demons to look into our shadows to face them to in this process I’m going to lay out to literally embody them we are practicing very deep Warrior practice we are willing to go into the underworld like orus and face Hades um and then come out the other side based on faith so at its core I want you to know that the practice I lay out here is Warrior practice it’s not for everybody and it’s definitely not something that you want to attempt if you’re dealing with mental health issues or you’re dealing with you know psychological stress that is overwhelming but if you are here to unwind parts of your character that have been stuck in your subconscious and then come up to bite you in the ass without uh any uh warning then this will be the work for you not only that but it does deepen you it does something happens for those of us who are willing to face our own demons and to go in to look at our trauma to look at the parts of us that you know we’ve repressed denied and avoided for years and years something happens there’s a sense of Pride there’s a sense of of accomplishment there’s a sense of worthiness that we were able to face our darkness and then un unlike orus come out the other side so how do we find our shadows this is often a question that I get and the process I’m going to lay out has four parts the first part is to identify the Shadow and how do we do that well we look at the things that trigger us most we look at the things that cause us to have that sort of whoosh of real activity and we hone in to the parts of the body that get triggered by that reactivity so the first piece of Finding Your Shadow is to look at the two or three places where you get most triggered for some people it is you know their romantic partner looking at them a certain way or criticizing them a certain way or denying them a certain way for others it is you know um getting a a really large in the mail or it’s um you know not getting the promotion or the acknowledgement that you had hoped for or it’s a friend or a Community member saying or doing something unconsciously hurtful but whatever the trigger is it really doesn’t matter and we most of us have multiple Shadows but identifying the trigger that is most active in your life is the first way to find your Shadow so I’m going to suggest that you take a moment here and you you write one or two triggers consistent and hopefully recent triggers that you’ve experienced where you felt that sort of whoosh of reactivity you felt either you know rage bubble up or you know and you wanted to lash out or you felt shame come to the surface and you wanted to retreat so identify the trigger who did what what did they say what did they do um uh or was it something you thought about yourself or was it something that happened in the world that caused you to have this Rush of reactivity so you identify this Rush of reactivity and then you identify in the body where you feel it does your heart get tight does your belly get tight do you get a lump in your throat do you like want to retract inward do you want to explode outward right and you get a very clear sense of what’s happening in your body in that moment of trigger you then take a moment to really connect to that experience the sensations that you feel when you think about that trigger you connect to the the tightness in your chest you begin to really uh become aware of how your body closes tightens or wants to explode you know when it gets triggered in a very specific way then next you’re going to close your eyes so you’ll turn your your mind’s eye inward to the part of your body that is holding the sensation the the heightened sensation the tightness the heat uh whatever it is identify it is it cold is it is it closed is it open is it hot um is it like a block of energy is it a um is it a collapsing Inward and you’re going to turn your Minds Eye into the part of your body where you feel the greatest sensation when you think about this trigger and you’re going to look for an image or a character or a creature or some kind of anthropomorphic sometimes it’s not anthropomorphic but often times it’s an anthropomorphic version of yourself that is the actual Shadow I remember the very first shadow that I found was this very interesting version of Gollum and Anakin Skywalker with his head burnt off and it was this kind of teenage part of me that was very young and you know half naked kind of dressed like Gollum and very wiry and very um kind of erratic and even violent and this this image came to me so clearly when I turned my mind’s eye into my body and felt the trigger and I was able to identify like oo this is a shadow creature this is a shadow figure stay with me right and so you turn your attention to this shadow figure and the first step is you look at it Ken Wilbur talked about a 321 Shadow uh practice the three part is you are in the third person with your Shadow you are you are watching it like something that’s five or six feet away from you how is it moving is it saying anything is it making noises is it collap ing is it tense what are its eyes like like my eyes my Shadow’s eyes were sort of bloodshot right and is it on the ground crawling around is it you know in a fetal position is it you know ready to explode with fire coming out of its ears you know what is happening as you watch this this part of you this creature part of you this Shadow part of you what does it look like and so the first step is a third person relationship with that shadow where you are literally looking at that shadow and just identifying it right mine was thin and very wiry moved very fast and very erratic had bloodshot eyes was saying certain things I won’t repeat here but it was saying certain things and it was making this gesture like like this gesture for some reason it was making this gesture and um and so this particular Shadow had a very specific sort of person personality and I was able to just sit with it with my eyes closed as if it was just right in front of me and take a really good assessment of this Shadow okay the second step is to get into relationship with the shadow this is second person right so you’re in relationship to the Shadow and what that entails is you’re going to ask the shadow questions you’re going to with your eyes closed you’re going to ask the shadow what are you here for and then you just listen right what are you trying to tell me and then you just listen you know what do you need from me and then you just listen so you are literally giving the shadow a voice you’re giving it an opportunity to say what it wants from you you’re giving it an opportunity to declare itself to declare what it needs to declare what it’s what the gift it has for you is right and each Shadow will have a gift right they’re not just evil things to be cut out of our psyche they are are gifts and they are carrying gifts I mentioned before about how the gift of my killer was that it helped me bring my sharpness in men’s circles right or help me bring my truth ruthlessly and clearly right like a sword so each Shadow has a gift and as you ask this these questions and you uh listen for answers you may be fully surprised when I asked my shadow where did you come from which is another question I like to ask it its answer was and it surprised me at the time I come from your mother’s darkness and and it really kind of struck me you know the shadow that I was working with it really struck me as just like an immediate truth so our psyches are so powerful and so wide and so filled with wisdom when we can you know go inward and down into the underworld of our subconscious and of our psyche so whatever creature um your psyche kicks up and it might not be a creature sometimes I’ve worked with people and and their Shadows are just these this kind of black blob right or sometimes it’s an exploding light or sometimes it’s a version a younger version of themselves right I’ve also worked with shadows that are um you know very young versions of myself one Shadow was me as sort of a four-year-old kid in a crib you know in one of those sort of enclosed cribs you know wanting to be picked up you know this it was this kind of gesture that the shadow was making like pick me up pick me up I need you I need you and so you know whatever your psyche spits out trust it trust it trust it sometimes it’s just it’s very um unclear but there’s a feeling around it and then often times and this is what I see most of the time a very clear uh image comes to mind so the first step is a third person relationship with the shadow describe it get to know it look at it uh really just witness it basically the second step is a second person relationship with your shadow where you are asking it questions and listening listening for the wisdom that it’s trying to give you and then this is the third piece which is really where the rubber meets the road and the third piece is you allow yourself for a minute or two to fully embody it okay right about now you’re probably saying what the does that mean well it’s literally you shapeshift into the shadow into the creature so I had to literally become this sort of Gollum like creature that was you know kind of like saying love me love me love me and I literally had to allow myself for I put on some music and I just kind of surrendered Ed looking a certain way or being weird and I gave myself permission to go into this practice fully and I I don’t know must have been a minute or so I went into it I literally I felt it I gave it full voice and full expression uh I I let it out there was so much anger and so much rage at um withdraw right at my mother’s withdrawal when I was a kid at my partner’s withdrawal there was so much anger and so so much rage um and so much anguish in it and I let it all come out through this shadow creature through this Shadow practice and I became it I became it for a minute or two I can’t remember exactly how long I put on some very intense music I think it was I think it was Angel by Massive Attack and I went into it right and then I came out of it I let myself ground I let myself feel the room I was in I let myself you know get back into the present moment I let everything settle right I really stayed with what was happening and my immediate uh sensation was one of Freedom one of having sort of Uncorked this this geyser of grief and rage and and energy that I had been stuffing down for so long and the way that it showed up in my relationship is when my partner would withdraw I would have this anger like down here in my belly but I wouldn’t show it because I didn’t want to be that guy I didn’t want to be the guy that was you know that was angry you know when he wasn’t getting what he wanted from his partner right and I stuffed this part of me that was legitimately angry at uh at the way that I grown up with emotional withdrawal so first person I became the shadow I gave all of that energy up I moved it through that experience and through that shadow creature and I felt this immediate sense of freedom of lightness of course of sadness there was just so much emotion felt and then I did it again I went in one more time I went in for another minute and I went in as deep as I could I let go of thought and I let myself surrender to what the shadow was wanting to do was wanting to say and it was even deeper than the first time I went in and even deeper I touched the anger I touched the rage I touched the anguish I let it all come through I was no longer John the adult man right you know the owner of a business and the F and a father I was this rageful um creature filled with anguish and loneliness and I let myself have that for another minute I gave myself permission for another minute to just really let it rip and leave it all on the the floor of my garage office I then came out of it in the same way and it’s very important that you do this when you come out of this practice that you feel your feet on the floor you move your body and you move any sensation that’s in your body you become aware of the room that you’re in you know you feel the texture of the room that you’re in you feel the present moment you feel yourself being held by the Earth you feel yourself safe you look at the room you’re in the plants or the lights streaming through the window you really land and ground in the present moment moment as you come out of this practice so as I landed and grounded in the present moment having moved this energy feeling even more freedom especially in my heart and in my belly and in my Center column I just had this spaciousness right I had this this feeling of lightness this feeling of Liberation and ultimately Shadow practice and again I teach this in my programs and I take people through this all the time the shadow practice was really about liberation liberating my true self liberating a part of myself that I’d repressed but but mainly liberating energy and then integrating it so the fourth step in this process is the step of integration and in the integration practice you are standing up your eyes are closed and you go ahead and you imagine the shadow right in front of you almost like a practice partner arms length in front of you and you look into its eyes and you breathe with it and you feel its heart and you see sort of deeper into this Shadow version of yourself you really get present very present with this Shadow version of of yourself and then you go ahead and with a big deep breath you pull that shadow into your own heart into your body mind into your nervous system and you take some breaths and you literally feel it integrate into your nervous system integrate into your body integrate into your internal psyche and you choose it you say things to it silently like I choose you I love you I appreciate you thank you for sharing this with me thank you for showing yourself to me thank you for your wisdom thank you for your gifts I choose you I love you you are literally taking a part of yourself that you have disowned a part of yourself that you’ve denied a part of yourself that you’ve stuffed into the closet and you are now bringing it into your heart consciously and with love it is a very deep Act of self-acceptance and self-love to meet your Shadow and then pull it in and use your breath to literally let it settle in your body and let it settle in your mind what you will experience likely and what I’ve seen people experience is a real sense of Peace sometimes people break down and cry sometimes people you know just have this very deep sense of Peace but you will literally feel the shadow take its place in your body mind and as you do that there will be an integration right the integration is incredibly important the integration is incredibly important because that is the step where you bring this unknown part of your psyche back into yourself and you can now create a right relationship with it by saying things like I choose you I love you I will hear you when you need to share when you need to speak and you allow it to integrate back into your body mind so with some Shadows you may have to repeat that process some Shadows may need a couple sessions of you working with them some Shadows are so deep and so strong in us that we need to really work with them in this way and you know a couple words of caution that I just want to lay here right again if you are dealing with mental illness if you are dealing with some very intense emotions then doing this on your own is probably not recommended you want to do it under the watchful eye of a therapist or you want to have some guidance or you want to do it as part of a men’s group or a woman’s group if you’re feeling incredibly tender and fragile then you know make sure you extend yourself the care of being watched and loved as you do this what we tend to do in workshops and what I’ve done in a number of men’s groups is that people men and women will do this Shadow practice while they’re being witnessed by others which is like doing Shadow work on steroids so this is a really good thing to do with a couple of trusted friends or one trusted friend where you both work shadows and witness each other because in the witnessing what’s happening is you are your body mind and your neural pathways are now recognizing that this part of you that you thought was so shameful and so ugly and so needing to be hidden you’re actually being loved by another while you’re expressing it while you’re embodying it while you’re letting yourself fully uh be seen as it and what I’ve noticed in you know in these practices with groups and having people work oneon-one with shadows is that they are often surprised by how beautifully I know this is a strange word to use for this attractive how real their Shadows are and how much their Partners love actually seeing this part of them expressed in this way cuz let’s face it your partner knows your sh your partner’s probably the one that’s getting the brunt of your unknown Shadow so it’s an incredibly relaxing experience for your partner to feel you own this part of yourself and then integrate it into your body mind another important thing to keep in mind is that you likely have more than one Shadow uh triggered by more than one uh stimulus and it’s important that once you learn this process once you get good at it that you um you know keep using it as you get triggered in the world and as you get triggered in your relationship you know I had one shadow that was my inner critic I had one shadow that was the part of me that didn’t trust people I had one shadow that was the part of me that you know got angry when people withdrew from me I had one shadow shadow that was needy I had one shadow that was violent right like I had a lot of different shadows that I had to work with and integrate throughout my practice and it’s the same process and again of course you can do this on your own if you feel strong enough to do that but it’s often really beautiful to do with your partner with your romantic partner I mean this is my idea of a fun date it’s like to to do your Shadow work with each other it’s so beautiful it’s so deep when when Partners can do this with each other it’s so intimate it’s so intimate so these are all different ways that you can do this practice and um you know and I suggest you you know listen to this you know to these steps you know two or three times or if you’re on the embodied relationship experience you can actually get you know have me lead you through it and you guys can both do it together at the same time or one of you can do it and then the other one can do it but make sure that you have the process down and that you’ve you know CU each piece of the process is very important and uh and then meet your Shadow and see what happens what I’ve seen happen is that these parts of ourselves that would normally get triggered right all of a sudden have more access to the same stimulus so for example one that I thought was really uh important for me and very potent was you know the the part of me that felt needy right that needed attention or needed love or needed care and I would repress that part of me and not let it be seen in my relationships after I did the shadow work on that particular part of me I remember the moment where I said to my partner I’m just feeling so needy I just need I just need your attention I would have never said that before but that was an example of my integrated shadow showing itself in a moment that it would previously hide and cause all of this sort of Shame and closure and collapse so don’t be surprised if these integrated Shadows make their way into your life in these unexpected ways and spontaneous ways because you’ve now integrated them and you’ve now created a right relationship with them so that’s the shadow practice and you know as you’ve heard if you’ve been listening to this podcast for a little while I am very big into doing your own deep inner work and Shadow work is one of the most potent and most important pieces of your own deep inner work that you can do uh either solo as you’re preparing to enter a partnership maybe you’re in a period of a pause like I’ve talked about and you’re doing your own deep inner work before you go back into relationship or if you’re in relationship to do it with your partner right or to do it and then you know do it on your own and then see how you may or may not not relate differently to your partner however you choose to use this I really hope that you bring boldness you bring compassion you bring self-love and you bring a fearlessness to this because if you do you will be able to integrate this and bring online very potent and very powerful parts of yourself if you’re watching on YouTube please like this video uh like And subscribe really helps us get the content out if if you’re listening on uh some podcast format Spotify or apple please give us a rate and review it also helps to get the content out and then finally uh many of the practices that I talk about on this podcast are part of the embodied relationship experience platform which is a really easy access lowcost there’s a free trial if you want to try it uh Global Community where we uh practice the things that I’m talking about here there are thousands of hours of content there are hundreds of practices including the practice I’m going to take you through here today on the platform and it’s a really easy way if you want to get deeper into the work there’s a link below and you can go ahead and subscribe to the embodied relationship experience Community we’ve built this over the last eight years we’re incredibly proud of it there’s a just an absolute wealth of practice and material on there and of course we’d love to see you there thank you for joining us on the embodied relationship Experience Podcast I hope that this was helpful please leave any questions or comments below it’s always really great to hear from you guys and hear you know what I have said how it lands uh you know after you’ve maybe done this practice come back and you know share a little bit on it I’d love to hear how this goes and we’ll see you next time on the embodied relationship experience