How to embrace your shadow

We all have our reactive moments, and I’ve had my fair share with my parents, partner, friends, and colleagues. Learning to shine light on our shadows is an important part of becoming self-aware and understanding what is keeping us stuck. Our psyche can be unpredictable, but if we practice noticing our reactive tendencies, we can reverse engineer our emotional triggers to find our points of growth. It’s challenging, but very much worth the effort!

Shadows are our parts that we have rejected so much that we don’t allow ourselves to recognize them as us. We disconnect them from ourselves, projecting them onto others because it’s more palatable. The people we project onto may have similar traits, but our projection intensifies these traits by two-fold, causing us to feel reactive around them.

Shadow projections can be “allergies” (parts we wish to avoid) or “addictions” (parts we are fixated by). Addictions include the admiration or infatuation of others, usually pointing to a hidden desire to acknowledge those same traits within ourselves.

My illustrations are based on the 3-2-1 Shadow Process from the book Integral Life Practice by Ken Wilber, Terry Patten, Adam Leonard, and Marco Morelli. I’ve been practicing this for several years and have found it to be a useful tool for revealing suppressed parts of myself and re-integrating them. It’s been particularly helpful in healing my relationship with my mother, onto whom I’m projected many of my own insecurities for years. I’ve found that the more parts of myself that I re-integrate, the more calm and understanding I become towards myself and others.

If you give this process a try, let me know how it goes!

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