Transcription
In this video, we're diving deep into one of the most important aspects that you have: your shadow. It's the most dramatic shadow effect I can get. Maybe most people think that there are three parts of you: the mind, the body, and the spirit. But if you really think about it, why don't most people get the changes that they want?
People focus on their mindset. You watch videos like this, you read books, you meditate. People focus on their body. You follow health and wellness, you go to the gym, maybe you eat clean. I don't think it's three things. I actually think it's four things: mind, body, spirit, shadow.
Once I started working on some shadow work and some inside stuff that I didn't really want to look at, I noticed that my life started to change. And here's why. Let me turn you around for this. Nice. We still have it from the other video. I explained this in our recent video and we'll cover it briefly, and then I'll give you at the end of this how to actually start doing shadow work so you can see the benefits for yourself.
Okay, we don't always become our highest goals, the highest vision we can envision of ourselves. We kind of get sucked down to baseline right here of our lowest standards and the lowest version that we can accept. This is what we're talking about today because a lot of you are like, "All right, I'm pretty good on this. I know what to do, but how do I remove some of the blocks down here?"
If you don't do this, if you don't do what we're talking about in this video, what's going to happen is you're going to set some goals, you're going to make some money, and then your shadow side's gonna kick on. It's gonna suck you down. And so that's why most people have pretty much the same income their whole life, for the same savings. You know, I read that 75% of Americans are like, two paychecks away from bankruptcy. Probably even more now since the pandemic.
What is the shadow? Let me actually take you over to the library for this. This book right here, The Red Book. It's not a bible. It's actually C.G. Jung. And I've read all of five pages in it, probably. I don't know. This thing is so dense. Jung, if I'm correct, studied under Freud. Sigmund Freud, who's like, you know, the most well-known psychologist of all time. They said that the parts that don't get resolved in us, you had a bad experience, you had a bad relationship, you had things from childhood, they still affect you until you resolve them.
Think about it. If you had parents growing up that fought a lot about money, maybe they even got divorced, you're going to have security issues moving forward. Or if you had even recently, like a bad relationship, a bad breakup, you got cheated on, well, you're going to have abandonment issues moving forward if you don't resolve it. So my point is that normally it's at it as a child, but it can be recent, as a young adult, or even as recent as like last week. These things that we don't deal with, we suppress down. And just like you're doing a trash compactor, right? When you put trash in there or trash can, those things don't go away. By shoving that trash down, if it's getting full, it just pushes it down deeper and it still affects it, right? And so that's what shadow work is. It's looking at some of the stuff that we don't even realize we have, that we've shoved down deep, and that we're still carrying around, and by definition, we're still affected by it.
It's important to also say that every intention that we have, okay? And you might be saying like, "Oh, shadow, that sounds kind of negative." Well, every shadow side has a positive intent. Okay? Just like if you weren't included, so you have abandonment issues. The positive intent of the abandonment issue is so that that doesn't happen again, so that you are part of the group, so that you are included, right? So behind every negative action, there is a positive intent. And the goal of the shadow work is to look for that positive intent, reframe it to yourself as an adult, really heal it, acknowledge it, so you can move forward.
It is amazing how well this stuff works. I just completed a six-week coaching program where I was teaching a small group of like 10 people, and in week three, we did all these shadow work processes. And I hired a coach to bring in who's really skilled, almost like a therapist, and had them do shadow work. And the results people were getting at the end of it is just astounding stuff. Okay? People are getting new jobs, people are getting new relationships, people are doubling their income. I'm not even kidding.
Now, we're getting into the "how" of this video. This is kind of the gold standard, and this is more of a play on Ken Wilber's 3-2-1 shadow technique. Again, you can do this out loud, right? Just talking to yourself if you're in a place where you feel comfortable doing that, or you can do this in your journal as well. You can do it in written form, okay?
Now, there are five steps to this technique that I want you to try to deal with that shadow side. The first step is: think of something you want to work with. This could be very obvious to you, like pain of a past relationship, a feeling of unworthiness that comes up, a feeling of that you need validation from others, a feeling of like a lack of confidence, okay? Or it could take a day of just sitting on what you want to work with. There's no rush here. The point is, choose something that you want to work with that you know is kind of holding you back. Once you have that, you're ready for step number two.
We're gonna get kind of metaphysical here, all right? But if you're willing to play ball, this stuff is really powerful. So stay with me. I want you to think of that thing or that former version of you, right? And invite it in to have a conversation. Okay? So you're gonna invite that need for validation in to have a conversation with you. Again, written form, speaking out loud, you can even envision like an imaginary chair that it takes a seat in, okay?
Step number three is: you're going to begin a dialogue with it. You're literally just gonna start talking to it. Have questions like, "Why are you doing this? What do you want from me? What is the positive intent you're trying to keep me from?" It's important to note here that there's no real script to it, and you're gonna be surprised on how much is in there.
So pause on step three right there, and let's briefly talk about this inner child. A lot of people refer to the shadow self as the inner child. Basically, the person you, your version of you as a kid, whose needs didn't get met. Even if you had the best parents in the world, or you had terrible parents, right? We all lack some needs. Maybe you're at school, maybe you're in a friend group, and all your needs aren't getting met. And so you kind of have these scars, again, that you push down, you suppress, and it affects you as an adult. It never gets resolved.
So if you ever hear the terminology "inner child," right, "inner child healing," that's a form of shadow work in a nutshell. But I like to think of it as your former self. Okay? The inner child lingo doesn't always resonate with me because I don't believe that every single thing to this day is because of your childhood. Like some extreme psychology people think they're like, "Everything you are today is an effect of your childhood." And I'm like, "I don't know if I necessarily buy that." Because there's very recent things that you can pick up along the way, say, pain from relationships, pain from jobs, all this stuff that can affect you just as much, I think.
So I like to call it your former self. Okay? We all have different versions of ourself. And right now, the version that you're in is very different. And that's the point here of what we're doing is recognizing that you're not even the same person you were seven years ago, right? Pretty much every organ in your body, every cell in your body, if you look at it from a molecular level, regenerates in about seven years. But my point there is that we're always transforming into different versions. Okay? And so I kind of like that idea that you are different today than you were seven years ago. And so that's just a version of your former self.
Now, step number four is to really acknowledge it. Now, here's the thing. You don't judge it. When you're talking to this former version of yourself, okay? You're not judging it. You're not trying to explain it rationally, like, "Oh, well, you're wrong. Can't you see it? You're weak." All this stuff like, "Suck it up." That is not what you do, okay? That can make it way worse because now you feel even worse about this thing that you have, this guilt around relationships, this guilt around not feeling good enough, and you're judging yourself. And so you push it down deeper, and it feels like it's not even safe to come out even more, okay? So you're just hearing it out, okay? And acknowledging it.
To recap: you chose something to work with, you invite it in to have a conversation, you picture it, and you talk to it, you acknowledge it. Now, the next step is to integrate it. When we talk about integration with the shadow, okay, one thing that I found very powerful is to almost picture yourself going back in timelines. Okay? And this again is very powerful, dense stuff, right? That time is really an illusion because when you experience it, when you experience the present, future, and the now, it's all in the now, right? So if you look at it dimensionally, instead of it being this like 2D where it's like past over here, present, future, and you go this way, it's more like stacked like this, right? And you can kind of jump from here to here to here to here because this is all in the now, right? That's a very, very brief explanation of the timeline right there.
And so knowing that it's like this, it's not like this, what you can do is imagine yourself in your present state going back through to that event, okay? Or to the thing that you want to resolve, and resolving it and seeing it go the way you want. Let's just say it was a time where you got cheated on and broken up with, right? Well, can you see yourself going back to that event and all the pain that you had when that happened, the conversation you had, and really comforting yourself and giving you the validation, giving yourself the support that you need that maybe your friends didn't give you at the time, that maybe you didn't have any coping skills to deal with at the time, and literally giving yourself all the resources that you have now to deal with that and heal and walk yourself from that past self to the current self and basically say, "It's okay."
Not easier said than done, I know. But if you're willing to sit with yourself and do the inner work, right? And not just make this another video where you see it, you're like, "Oh, that's good. I intellectually understand it." No. If you're ready to get off the sidelines and into the game, pick up the journal, write down those steps, and really try this.
And a couple more points here that are very important. There's no right or wrong way to do this, okay? There's more efficient ways to do it and there's faster ways to do it, I guess. But even if you don't know all the steps, you don't have to go through like 15 YouTube videos and read like 20 books to understand this stuff to make it work, okay? You just don't. If you want to, that's fine. But I find that people who intellectualize things to a certain level, it kind of overwhelms them to even take any action because they have all these rules now. So if this is your first time doing it, get excited because you have the benefit of not having all these different rules that you got to follow to make it work and make it this big complex process so you don't do it right. So congrats. Now you're ready to do some shadow work.
Let's recap again. You don't become the highest standards. You become the lowest habits that you fall to. And if you don't resolve this, most people just stay at a baseline. There's the shadow side of us, which is pretty much all the stuff that we throw in the trash, that we repress down, and we shove it down deeper and deeper, but it doesn't get rid of it. So it comes up, we project it onto others, or we don't deal with it, and we need to escape, or we carry it around with us, and it weighs us down, it lowers our vibration.
So shadow work, although it sounds kind of heavy and, you know, in a sense negative, why would I look at the negative aspects of me? It frees you up to go higher, okay? Makes you take the weights off so you can lift up. That's the power of it. That, in a nutshell, is what we covered. And thank you so much. Let me know if you want some more videos on shadow work or any other topics. Post it in the comments down below, and I'll see you in the next video. Till then, stop settling, start living. See ya.