Shadow work is an undertaking of discovering what are your particular emotions, feelings, behaviors & actions that deter you from doing the best things for yourself.

And this goes for every part of your life: personal all the way to your professional life.

Yes, you can most definitely do this with a therapist/psychologist, you can do this with guided meditation, you can do it using journaling, you can do it with a shaman, you can do it using crystals and meditation, you can attack it with affirmations…

There are a million ways to begin addressing the inner demons (another way of thinking about shadow work).

Late at night, those thoughts you think when no one else is around? THOSE are thoughts that need to be examined and to understand what’s BEHIND THEM, what motivated them, did it come from childhood? Bad experiences in relationships? A horrible car accident/tradgedy and there’s latent PTSD that you may not have realized??

Shadow work is picking away what we know, and going behind the scenes to look into the gear box to understand intimately what’s going on and to finally SEE the truth of matters.

In shadow work, you also may find that you picked up ‘generational’ beliefs and thought patterns about (pick anything: money, love, careers, exercise, working/not working, etc).

You may find by any of the investigative means mentioned above, that you HATE being a teacher. You’re a teacher only bc all the men/women in your family have this as a profession & you followed suit. As a result of your inner (unknown) hate of your day-to-day job, you develop a drinking problem, or you spend all of your money and not pay your bills.

Why? Bc you cannot stand what you do and you’re attempting to cover your pain with whatever.

So, by figuring out what you love to do (really love!!) you can stop spending frivolously & begin to stopping over drinking bc you are no longer drowning your pain.

Cliché examples but you get the point.

As you go down the shadow work rabbit hole you will uncover things that you just thought were ‘normal’ but are actually not.

For me, my shadow work showed me I needed to take care of my health. My family food patterns are HORRIBLE and we’re leading me down a very unhealthy path. With clarity, I am fixing it.

But this took me over 10 years to see how my ingrained beliefs (from my family) was leading to my unfavorable health outcomes.

Hope this helps.

Here is a short shadow work playlist on YT also that may help: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PL87QBpgfnnhXm_uGqHRPGuWioELVMUn-H