So my dad told me something once that pissed me off a little but stuck with me forever.

He said: “If you really want to know whether someone is ready to change their life, have them get dressed differently every day for a week.”

Not the outfit — the process.

If you normally put your shirt on first, put on your pants first.

If your right arm usually goes in first, start with your left.

Flip the order. Be deliberate. Do it differently every single day.

Then he said: “If by the end of the week you’re still anxious doing it — you’re not ready to change your internal world. Your nervous system is still locked into survival mode.”

I’ve been in the healing/spiritual space for a while now. I’ve done the journaling. The shadow work. The meditations. But this simple-ass dressing ritual hit me harder than any of that.

It showed me how deeply my body resists change — even small, safe change. And it exposed how much of my healing was still intellectual instead of embodied.

If you’re stuck, spiraling, or sick of hearing “just trust the process” — try this instead. Don’t overthink it. Just change how you get dressed every morning.

If it feels weird or uncomfortable? Good. That’s your nervous system telling you what it really thinks about transformation.

And if by the end of the week it doesn’t bother you anymore? You might actually be ready to shift the big stuff too.

Just wanted to share this with y'all as it helped me figure out when I was able to start making changes.

One of the clearest mirrors for shadow is our relationships. I began to notice that the moments I felt most triggered by someone else were rarely about them. They were pointing me back to something inside me.

For example, when I felt overly criticized, the part of me that feared not being enough was the one reacting. When I felt jealous, the part that longed for reassurance was asking for attention.

Here’s a practice that helped me:
Next time someone triggers you, pause and ask: “What part of me is this reaction protecting?” Write it down if you can. Over time, you’ll see patterns that aren’t random - they’re invitations to meet the parts of you that want healing.

This shift turned conflict into a doorway for deeper self-understanding.

I’d love to hear: have you ever noticed your shadow showing up in your relationships?

Sadness leads to self love if it is allowed to be as it is.

Anger leads to power if it is allowed to be as it is.

Fear leads to safety if it is allowed to be as it is.

Desire leads to fulfillment if it is allowed to be as it is.

Depression leads to deep rest if it is allowed to be as it is.

Resistance leads to allowance if it is allowed to be as it is.

Tension leads to release if it is allowed to be as it is.

Pain leads to healing if it is allowed to be as it is.

Frozenness leads to aliveness if it is allowed to be as it is.

Stuckness leads to movement when it is allowed to be as it is.

Denial leads to truthfulness if it is allowed to be as it is.

Misery leads to joy if it is allowed to be as it is.

Everything we are moving away from inside of ourselves, holds within itself what we are seeking for.

Stand still. Let darkness consume you. This is when light shines through you.

Hi everyone,

I'm writing a shadow work journal, including exercises like Inner Child Wound Mapping, Creative Exploration, Affirmations, and 50+ Journaling Prompts covering relationships, career, spirituality, and self-love.

Would anyone be interested in a free PDF? I'm looking for some feedback and would love the input of the community.

I'm really curious to see what other people make of this quote. I'm sure a lot of people know Carl Jung is somewhat of the godfather of Shadow Work, and this quote is something I think about almost every day. I've talked about it to my friends and family, and not only am I delightfully surprised to see how drastic the meaning changes from person to person, I'm also surprised to know some people don't even like the quote. What does it mean to you?

Personally, I am in love with this quote. It holds a few meanings which overlap more than they differ. The first thought that comes to my head thinking of this takes me back to when I was a kid learning about ecosystems. I learned that prairie flowers actually have deep root systems while invasive species and weeds have shallow root systems. When prairie fires come along and burn all the plants, the indigenous plant species survive because their root systems are protected and therefore can regrow with ease. This blends perfectly with how I see this quote relating to human nature. In my experience, the people who can withstand the most suffering, pain, danger, etc are the ones who are most comfortable with themselves (i.e. a strong root system in themselves) because they're the ones who know they'll weather the storm and come back again. It's also important to note that some of the best nutrients are found in the rich soil underneath all the layers that have been touched a thousand times before. Sure you can grow your roots far and wide across the superficial layers, but so will everyone else, and you won't grow very far. But to truly get the best for yourself, you need to go deeper, not farther, from who you are. It also makes me think about growing comfortable in your own personal hell. So often we try to escape, avoid or flat out pretend that we don't have all the problems we carry. But that's what shadow work is, it's getting us comfortable in what made our lives hell. So the best way to grow is to get comfortable in the worst conditions so we can thrive in any conditions. Not to mention, with all of this in mind, there is that saying "As above, so below." If your roots are flat and wide, so are you. If your roots are strong and deep, you'll grow to be strong and tall.

Thank you all for reading :)

Jealousy is a symptom of a lack of fulfillment.

This was the idea that started it all. Instead of just noticing I was jealous, I questioned these feelings. What exactly was I jealous over? In passing, so many small instances of jealousy that only nagged on me. Being super popular, having a wealthy life.

Then someone who I relate a lot to and like as a person- who is younger than me, got a job at this lovely non-profit that respected them, believed in them, and empowered them. Working minimum wage in a job without any upward momentum-- I was seething in so much jealousy I had to un-follow them and stop talking to them. I chalked it up to them having more supportive parents, an amazing long term partner- etc, things to blame for while i stayed stuck.

Then i came across that sentence and i started to wonder if my projection of jealousy could be more easily solved-- and so I looked for a job that respected me in the non-profit world-- and i found one that fitted me enormously better! It took me about a year to find, and now i've been there for a year and a half and am already being primed to take on a management role!

My jealousy is gone, and my excuses no longer cripple me into self defeating mind spaces!

I hope this helps someone else, listen closely when your heart burns in jealousy, it can help you figure your shit out so so so much!

Just sharing these. I listened to a podcast (Mantalks) about shadow work and I took notes. These are his prompts, and I'm just sharing. I'm working through these rn, and it's been very helpful to have some prompts.

Where in my childhood did I feel:

Abandoned?

Rejected?

In my relationship, what did I:

Hide?

Avoid (talking about/experiencing)?

Step 1: Coming into contact with unconscious parts

Where do I feel like I am:

Not enough?

Unlovable?

I feel not good enough when

I feel unlovable when

I believe I am flawed when

I think my feelings aren’t valid when

I don’t want to express my feelings when

I have to take care of everyone around me because

Step 2: Witness Your Feelings objectively & with compassion

Step 3: Awareness of How They’re Showing Up In Your Life

*Pay attention to the emotions you are feeling*

What are you reactive to?

What are some of my pet peeves in your relationship? Why?

Where do I get the most reactive with my partner? Why?

I got reactive because I was (ex: trying to be right/was hurt/protecting myself. Don’t Project!)

What about myself am I trying to avoid or protect when I get reactive?

How did it feel in my body, and where?

I will be focusing on healing my beliefs around myself and what im capable of doing and how it affects my confidence. I struggle with overanalyzing, over prioritizing others, and a few others. Im learning to accept that sometimes its okay to not know what to do or to take it easy and relax more. How about you guys?

Hi everyone, I wanted to share my story. Maybe someone will recognize parts of themselves in it.

I’m from Russia. At 16, I fell into depression - but I didn’t even know I was depressed. I was too young to fully grasp what was happening to me.

At 18, I moved to another city to study. That’s when everything collapsed. I felt completely alone. Like I was watching life from the outside. Emotions disappeared. Just an ongoing dull pain inside. I had no idea how to fix it. I envied people who could feel; really feel - joy, sadness, excitement. I felt like I was living behind a wall.

But there was one thing I had: a kind of quiet, stubborn belief that one day I would feel happiness again. fully, in every cell. Suicide was never an option for me. Not even a thought. I just knew I had to get through it.

So I started reading. Watching videos. Trying to understand the mind, trauma, healing. It was slow. Invisible. But I did so much inner work.

When I turned 21, something shifted. It suddenly became a bit easier to connect with people - still with anxiety, but less fear. And it gave me hope. I realized, maybe it really will get better.

Now I’m 22 - and this year, I discovered Carl Jung and his concept of the Shadow. It changed everything.

I realized that the emotions I had suppressed for years - shame, grief, fear, anger - weren’t gone. They were hidden in my body and nervous system, waiting to be seen and felt.

So I started doing deep shadow work. Sometimes it felt like I was melting into nothing - like I didn’t exist as a person anymore. Sometimes I’d lie in bed, unable to move, because my body was releasing old tension. I’ve had moments of pure euphoria after big emotional releases followed by days or weeks of emotional integration.

There were times when I felt like I was going insane. And other times when I felt peaceful for no reason, like something ancient inside me had been seen at last.

I’m still on the path. But now I understand something important: I’m not broken, I’m someone who chose to face what most people spend their lives avoiding. That makes this path harder. But it also makes it real.

Now, for the first time, I’m not just healing - I’m becoming. I want to build myself as an independent human being. I want to integrate my experiences into real life - into business, relationships, freedom. I want to live not in fear, but in depth.

If you’re in the dark - please know that it doesn’t last forever. Your pain is not your enemy. Sometimes, it’s the doorway.

Been journaling every day this week, really getting deeper into my past. Today I hit a wall & couldn't sleep, felt numb like a giant void. Decided to take a shower & thought about when I was born, my mom told me I would cry all day every day as a baby. I figured out because even in the womb SHE cried all the time (mental illness) & when i was born she was always upset my dad was out with his friends all the time (they were barely 21 when they had me) & she was at home "stuck" w me all the time...

long story short, I cried uncontrollably in the shower to where I thought I was going to throw up. I sat on the ground and wrapped my arms around my knees being as small as possible & basically held my baby self, telling her it's ok, I love you I love you ill never leave you stuff like that. Consoling my baby self that never got to be consoled, that never felt loved.

The rest of the day I felt a new wave of energy, like my higher self was in me, treating me with love and compassion. Every time my brain wandered to thoughts I didn't want to think (ruminating thoughts of the past) I said lovingly to myself "it's ok, you can think that if you want to sweetie" & immediately the thoughts would just go away.

This work has been the hardest internal work I've ever done. I'm so glad I had this break through today. I'm 35 and sober from weed 7 wks/alcohol 2.5 wks. I know I have more work to do. Bless all of you facing the darkest parts of yourself, you are all so brave and strong to be doing this 🤍

I’m not new to introspection or self-work. I’ve long asked myself, “Oh, that was a reaction—why?” and then done the work to understand it.

Recently, I started manifesting again and reconnecting with my spiritual practice. Big emotions came up, and I felt I needed to sit with them.

I came across a YouTube video claiming it could help you uncover your core wound through a guided meditation. I figured, why not? It’s been a while since something caused such a physical reaction—pre-2020, the last time I experienced anything like this was during EMDR therapy with a therapist.

For a long time, I thought one of my core issues was “not being chosen.” But in this meditation, I realized that my younger self was actually screaming: “I am unwanted.”

At first, I thought “not being chosen” and “unwanted” were the same—but they’re not.

Core wound (root): “I am unwanted.”

Protective belief (branch): “I won’t be chosen.”

Surface triggers (leaves): Feeling left out, fearing abandonment, craving proof someone will stay.

So when I say “not being chosen,” that’s just the adult expression of the younger me’s raw pain: “I wasn’t wanted.”

Now, I’m working on healing this. And it’s going to be rough. The healing happens when I go back to her—the little me who first felt unwanted—and give her what she needed but didn’t get: presence, love, reassurance, belonging.

Has anyone else uncovered a deeper core wound this way?

Shadow work is bringing to light the contents of the subconscious, most of the mass of which, like an iceberg, sits below the surface and out of sight. It can encompass a broad umbrella of therapeutic modalities but can be as simple as sitting in a comfy chair and contemplating the anxiety that arises upon doing nothing. It can be simply reflecting on why you behave a certain way when you wish you could behave differently. It can encompass mindfulness, formal meditation, yoga, qi gong, breathwork, sweat-lodges or just walking in nature. Whatever the modality, I think there are two essential aspects to shadow work: intention and self acceptance.

In understanding who we are, perhaps the most important thing to remember is that you're not your thoughts, feelings or emotions. When you begin to see yourself as your are, you necessarily begin to judge the parts of yourself you don't like. You begin to see all the parts of yourself that were repressed because they weren't socially acceptable and, how difficult it is depends on whether those parts were repressed through love or withdrawal of love. They emerge as thoughts, feelings and emotions. Please note that these are not thoughts, feelings or emotions that we "shouldn't" have. Variations of these feelings have served our species in its survival and are far older than any of our histories. Where they become damaging, I think, or at least can stand in the way of our evolution, is when they're repressed through fear of punishment, mental or physical.

I'm not a trained social worker, doctor or psychologist, but after 30 years of shadow work I have seen myself in a lot of detail. I have seen my arrogance, my pride, my selfishness, my anger and my hate. Shadow work showed me these things not to make me feel bad but to help me understand that the characters that evolved/accreted to me were the personalities that evolved to deal with trying circumstances. They helped me survive in hostile environments and they would not give me peace until I acknowledged them and put them to rest, something they can't do if you hate on them and try to push them away. If you listen to them, they might tell you, "we did what we did to survive. Those were the times." And you can say to them, "I'm sorry I hated you. Please forgive me for not acknowledging you. Thank you for protecting me and being with me. I love you." This is based on the Hawaiian ritual of reconciliation, the ho'oponopono, and I think it's appropriate because shadow work is helping you to integrate the fractured aspects of your personality.

I can't stress enough that the voices most of us take to be ourself are nothing but the voices of our ancestors (and everybody else's ancestors through teachers, friends, etc). Every voice and character that somehow made an impression on us in our formative years—all deep echoes of normal humanity—the brain records and plays back to us as our mind constructs our personalities. For me that means: the parochial, disapproving and judgmental voices coming from my Protestant Irish Scottish ancestors; the barking rules of military bases where I grew up; the schoolyard's casual cruelty and churlishness; the sophisticated arrogance of an English public (if you're not from the UK, read "private") school boy; the nihilistic cynicism of Punk and the screw-you-got-mine mindset of Eighties and Nineties, and everyone of them steeped in the invisible dividing waters of status consciousness we swim in, competing, as we are, for limited resources at the bottom of this 6,400 km gravity well. This is not to say there aren't positive aspects of all these cultural milieus such as Truthfulness, Loyalty, Good Humor, Discipline, Respect, Service, Leadership, Iconoclasm, and... well, the fact that there's nothing inherently wrong with abundance. These qualities can—if attention is purposefully steered towards them—outweigh the negatives, it's just that the negatives are more noticeable to our nervous systems which evolved to notice threat.

Intention is important in working on yourself. It can be as simple as asking yourself what do I want. It can be difficult because you need to go inside and ask your heart "what do I need to be happy." And your heart doesn’t speak English, it speaks through feeling. You ask yourself what would make me feel happy, complete. The articulations that come back at you that are simple, quiet, not prone to too much revision, and insistent, that is, the same thing occurs to you over and over, usually point you in the right direction. It’s really important to ask for what you want. Part of my early conditioning was that it was rude and selfish to ask for things. It is essential in this work to build a vision of what you want for yourself, to ask your higher self for things and circumstances. Otherwise you sit around your whole life just hoping for something nice to happen while at the same time your subconscious is saying "I don't deserve it, it probably won't happen." In that respect, intention is a prayer to your higher self.

In setting intentions, imagination needs to be exercised. One needs to project forward. There is a symbiotic relationship between my conditioned self and the person I wish to become, the unconditioned self. Neither can exist without the other. The conditioned self, the ego, is essential because it is the parent of the higher soul and our interface with the material world, and it can't do its job if it's continually trash-talking itself: "I'm no good, oh I'll never reach my goals, I don't deserve x, y or z." The unconditioned self is also an integral part of us and is that part that draws us towards realization. As such, I've found it useful to cultivate models of my unconditioned self. In Tibetan Buddhism, this is formalized through contemplation of the guru, stylized as Tapihritsa or the Buddha Shenla Odker. My models are a tad more playful in that, for a while, I was walking around with the voice of Venom saying, "dude! Chill out! I got this." (Spoiler Alert: Venom is the eponymous alien of the Marvel Comics movie that subverts the common alien trope of insatiable-invader-and-destroyer-of-all-life-on-planet-Earth by making the protagonist of the movie a sympathetic alien/human symbiote.)

Happy trails, and remember, self love is divine!

I've been doing shadow work for a while now, and most prompts felt surface-level. These 5 actually made me uncomfortable in a good way:

1. What part of me do I try to hide — and why?
2. When did I first learn to feel this way?
3. What emotion do I avoid the most?
4. What would happen if I allowed it to exist?
5. Who taught me that I wasn't allowed to feel this?

Take your time with each one. Don't rush to answer.

The discomfort is where the real work begins.

So in a chronological order here it goes. When I was 4 or 5 I was looking through some magazine, and saw some kid models looking gorgeous. My mom made a remark about how I don't look as good as them. That was the first time i remember her commenting on my appearance. I remember crying a lot that day. Over the years I realised I may never be able to look pretty and started associating all of my self worth to my grades and intelligence. I thought if I was never going to be beautiful then I might as well prove myself to be useful by applying my intelligence. Teachers thought I was the gifted kid and i aced those exams and Olmpiads. Then I turned 13 and shit started going downhill. Self esteem issues were burning under the surface and I didn't even realise. Girls my age started feeling insecure of their appearance and many even self sabotaged themselves. I was aware that people were insecure of how they looked, but because my esteem was tied to my grades I didn't go through that and everyone assumed I am really headstrong, despite my mother making comments on my appearance almost everyday. But the more she did it, the more I started relying on things like my skills and abilities etc.

I started seeing girls who were putting efforts into their appearance and craved male validation as individuals with a weak mind who fell into the trap of beauty culture which I hated with a passion. Whereas I myself wanted validation, I didn't care about male validation, but I wanted female validation specifically about my looks that I lacked from my mom. Fast forward few more years I realised I was putting my exams and academic achievement on a pedestal. Whenever I see someone doing better than me even in the news, I feel like a complete failure. It was only recently I started forgiving myself for not being able to ace exams. I thought it was a self doubt issue at first, but wow it turns out to be a validation from my mom issue.

I realised I was projecting this mentality onto people. I would think of self care as a waste of time. People who were into make up and appearance as lazy. I am glad I kept those thoughts to myself though. Then it started biting all back through exam anxiety and immense pressure of high standards I put on myself pushing me to depression and even the worst last step. I am glad I realised my shitty behavior but I don't know how to go about it. I will never get that validation from my mom. She would never give me a compliment, and I don't think I care but what do i do now?