What is Shadow?

shadow is negative beliefs & repressed emotion

Shadow is fundamentally all the negative belief systems we hold and the emotions we’re not willing to feel about what caused us to have those belief systems in the first place. When we have a negative belief we’re usually not thinking about it directly day to day - for example if someone has the belief “I’m unworthy of love” they typically don’t go around announcing it, or truly believing it consciously, they just act on it (whether that’s to manipulate people into showing them what they believe love looks like, or whether they isolate themselves as a social loner - these belief systems can manifest behaviourally in a multitude of ways but still come down to the same core belief). The parts in their psyche that create that belief are either too painful or too scary to look at.. so they don’t. That’s why Shadow is essentially what creates unconsciousness within us, it ‘forces’ us to consciously only operate on the surface of physical reality because when we start to venture deeper within we get confronted by that pain or fear.

When we do inevitably venture within (either voluntarily or by the unconscious choices we make that lead us there anyway), we actually find that all of our negative beliefs are unfounded - they’re created by events in our childhood that left a mark on our psyches. These wounds (negative beliefs) create behavioural patterns that paradoxically manifest the energetic repeat of that same wounding event again and again. I look at it like a mechanic of the universe that is technically helpful - it allows us to look at and finally undo that pattern consciously, because when we do we gain a little more of ourselves back. All Shadow is just a part of you that wants to come back home and be loved consciously; when we reject it we reject a part of ourselves.

Another way to look at this is that we will always generate our outside world from within; if you contain a frequency (whether positive or negative) it will come up to be seen eventually. So when it does, the best choice we can make is to investigate it and address it - to transmute it from negative belief into positive so that our physical reflection generates more and more positive events, or at least that we see events that we used to think of as negative in a more neutral or even positive light. An example is the saying “rejection is protection”. To someone with an abandonment or rejection wound, rejection is felt as very negative and painful, and they will attempt to circumvent it through codependency, manipulation, domination etc. - but to the person who has healed that wound, or didn’t have it to begin with, being rejected is seen either neutrally (“okay, that’s their choice; I’ll be fine regardless”) or even positive (“I know that since this person rejected me it’s showing me that we’re incompatible & that the Universe has better things in mind for me anyway, so really this is a blessing because it leaves room for the right person for me to come in, yay!”).

shadow is the wounded inner child

Another perspective on Shadow is that it’s the wounded inner child trying to get your needs met - the coping mechanisms we develop in childhood. When we receive these wounds/negative beliefs from our caretakers or environment, it understandably causes a huge emotional reaction within us - if we receive the emotional support to express and be held in that reaction then it never really turns into a pattern of avoidance/survival. Trauma is more about what happens after the event. We can be shocked, hurt, scared, but if our parents meet us in that and validate our emotions, if they help us to regulate our nervous system in that moment, it doesn’t necessarily become a negative belief system within us. Unfortunately, most of us didn’t have that grounded & emotionally mature parental support. So we put all those hurt parts into a box for later because when we’re small it’s all too overwhelming to feel it all alone, especially if our parents are also negatively reacting to those emotions with ridicule, frustration, or punishment too. So our Shadow can be looked at as an aspect of our child selves, they’re coming around in the ether, tugging at our side, asking for the love & attention we needed way back when. When we reject a trigger and repress that emotion, we’re rejecting a child version of ourselves trying to be seen & freed.

More on this aspect in the module “Soul Retrieval & The Inner Child”.

shadow is our repressed dreams & passions

Our Shadow can also be looked at as twisted parts of us. As kids, we come in tending to allow ourselves to be fully authentic to who we are. When we get told or shown those parts of us are unacceptable, we try to disown them so that we’re still ‘worthy’ of love and support from our caretakers. But those aspects never go away, they just get repressed - and whenever we repress something it just expresses itself in more negative ways than before. Let’s say you’re a kid that’s here to express in a performative way - you love dressing up, putting on plays, and embodying characters with gusto. The child who is supported and encouraged might go on to be an actor or another kind of performer, having practiced this art their entire childhood, they might find quick success because of their enthusiasm & acquired skill. However, the same child who is instead treated as attention seeking, loud, and a nuisance might start to give up and numb out this aspect of themselves, going on to become an accountant because that’s what Dad thinks is a “good” career. They judge anyone who is self expressive, whether through fashion, singing, or otherwise, complaining loudly and dramatically to anyone who will listen about those “young yahoos” and then at age fifty-five, after five years of therapy, break down and realise they have been repressing their lifelong dream of being an actor for five decades. But this person has been garnering attention their entire lives, just negatively, through berating and judging people who do self express. In the process they might have hurt & discouraged many people from embracing their own self expression, while simultaneously having their needs for performance, dramaticism, and being seen unsatisfyingly fulfilled through the ceaseless complaining to their poor wife Margret hearing their tirades every time this trigger pops up.

Every single Shadow contains a little piece of gold, another aspect of your authentic self that you’ll gain back when you alchemise it, allowing you to finally reap the satisfaction, success, and rewards of who you were meant to be when you can untwist these “forgotten” aspects.

More on this aspect in the module “The Shadow’s Gold”.

shadow is our neg behaviour

Shadow also acts through us. Our behaviour comes from our thoughts, which comes through our emotional body, and before that thought was an emotion it was a belief (either positive, neutral, or negative in nature - but we’re focusing on negative here). The thing is though, especially when we have a negative belief, we’re not really paying any attention to the mechanisms that create the behaviour that it manifests as, or really seeing that behaviour as something negative that’s creating the circumstances in our lives that we don’t prefer, rather than the other way around. But suffice to say, I also think of Shadow as negative behaviour as well. To me, all of these facets of Shadow are intrinsically connected and inseparable. It’s the same reason why I don’t consider an observed negative behaviour, wound, or belief to be technically “not Shadow” after it’s been observed & acknowledged. Just because we consciously glance it once or even multiple times doesn’t mean that we’ve integrated it or transmuted it. Even if we look at it, it often doesn’t resolve until we’ve emotionally expressed the origin of it. I’ve known many people who can recite their traumas, acknowledge their negative behavioural tendencies, even label themselves things like “narcissistic” - and yet they still behave through those Shadows, creating more of the negative patterns in their lives, disrupting their relationships, and generally creating discord along their path & having them self repress. This is why integration is absolutely key to doing Shadow Work.

shadow is negative entities

Collectively, we all tend to have similar Shadow beliefs, even when they express very differently behaviourally. It usually comes down to beliefs around worthiness, lovability, support, fear of pain, or rejection, shame, and so on. At the core of these beliefs is a frequency, and when you and three billion other people on this Earth all have the belief “I am powerless” it tends to create a very potent collection of that frequency. Looked at through the lens of consciousness and Occultism, this is what we’d call an Egregore; a collection of frequencies amassing in one sentient etheric entity (they can be positive, neutral, or negative beliefs that create a correspondently charged & themed entity). When enough people are believing and acting on the fear of their own powerlessness, that is that specific consciousness .. let’s call this one Satan.. having it’s way with & through both that entire collective as a whole, and those individuals. Some of the individuals will behave in a way that falsely convinces them that they in fact do have power, like by dominating other folks. They’re not actually empowered, because they’re actually displaying how they don’t have conscious control over their own realities - but the act of domination has them believing so from the ego perspective, forcing the other people in their reality to help them believe they have power (usually it only fixes the fear for a short time before they have to satiate it again). Other people with the same belief will be playing the folks who are believing they’re powerless to these villains. Same belief, opposite poles.

More on this aspect in the module “Negative Entities”.

shadow is our original protector & eventual jailer

When our younger self (now our Inner Child) is hurt and we don’t have the bandwidth or emotional support for the pain, and we push these wounded aspects of us into our unconscious, really what we’re trying to do is protect ourselves from that pain & further instances of pain. Sometimes it works for us for a while in childhood, because it’s strategically trying to appease the people who are hurting us by dimming our shine or having us act inauthentically to the moment or our mood, but as soon as we’re unleashed upon more of the world it usually has us triggered over and over, reliving the same pains until we really feel them fully. But either way, our Shadow is trying to protect us - or us trying to protect ourselves. Take the example from above: the dominating villain was likely dominated in childhood in a lot of ways - they learned to replicate that behaviour in order to feel power again. They’re avoiding facing the pain of being dominated when they were young. Likewise, the victim to that villain was likely dominated too, but their strategy was to become complacent or submissive, because it (in this case) is less painful now to give their power away than to have it taken by force - they too are avoiding facing the pain of their domination. The former, if they felt their pain, would swing more into the center of the pole, and find their true power through healthier actions, no longer dominating others for finally seeing and empathising with their child selves. The latter, if they felt their pain, would swing more into their true power by standing up for themselves, by exiting the situation by whichever means they could, and so on.

While it tended to protect us when were young, it tends to trick us into thinking it’s protecting us when we’re older - really it’s protecting us from the emotional pain - but it’s truly keeping us trapped in these old cycles, restricting us from growing out of our cage.

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I will cover all of the extra nooks & crannies further along in the course, but for now I just want to give the broad & basic strokes of the general & negative aspects of shadow. This material is what you will use to transmute 90% of your Shadow where all the extra nuance later on covers the extra 10%.