To understand how to facilitate the shadow work process, we first need to understand what shadow work is, and why we need to undertake it. Shadow work is a description of the process we go through when we are self healing, whether it is inner child healing, shadow integration, adult trauma processing, concurrent or ancestral trauma healing, these are all aspects of the unseen facets of the person and their life experience (frequently several lives experiences), therefore it is in their shadow. The unseen to the self is the shadow. The process (shadow work) can take days, years, lifetimes (dependant upon the work you are here to do). Healing and integrating fragmented aspects of self is a journey, and once we have healed the surfacing inner child wounds, accepting and integrating our shadow self can help us feel tremendously better, happier with a sense of wholeness. It has a dramatic effect on not only the person but their entire life. This doesn’t mean that you will never have to undertake shadow work again however, new traumas come along and sometimes it can take years for a trigger to alert us of a hidden wounding, your ability to heal more deeply and profoundly increases (as does your confidence in and commitment to the process), with your expanding consciousness.

Shadow work is a commitment to the self (it is an act of self love) and to the collective consciousness (humanity as a whole and the universe). It is actually a powerful and healthy process to dedicate some time to shadow work at least annually. In the same way that people fast to cleanse the physical body, shadow work to discover any unhealed newly surfaced (or even recently aquired) wounds, to process and integrate those aspects on a regular basis would be a perfect way to care for the whole being, not just the accepted and surface parts.

This work is not to demonise or purify the shadow aspects of self, those fragmented parts require love and acceptance to heal fully, the pursuit is one of unity, of integration, toward peace and acceptance within the self. Each of us are light and dark, to become a powerful and liberated human requires a balance and harmony of the light and dark.