Week 5 Discovering Shadow

Do not fear your shadow.  It is there you hide your truth 

From you. 

Do not fear the darkness. It is there you find strength, courage to fight 

The weight of its truth. 

Do not fear sharing this weight. 

Connection, like thread, sews up your wounds 

That cut to the marrow 

To be seen 

In this truth 

Heals not only you 

Hold space for your own wounded heart 

Lift it up to the heavens and wail 

That they gave such a heart 

As this 

That feels so deep 

Into inky depths 

It threatens to pull you down 

Down 

And further still 

Into your pain 

Do not fear your pain 

Welcome it home 

(Rejecting it fragments your truth) 

And feel 

Your heart has this strength 

For though it was made but tiny flesh

Its fibers weave tapestry 

Over scars 

A shimmering armor 

Not calloused 

But shining ready 

With light to balance this dark 

We are not singular beings. 

We dance between light and dark both 

When in the depths of despair 

It is this shining, armored heart that 

Leads us back to peace 

Darkness is the terrain 

Love is the compass 

Light is the way shower 

To the truth of you 

Oh, that you knew the strength 

Of your own heart. 

Do not fear your shadow 

Show it what it is to dance 

With a being of light— 

That being is you.

Shadow By Angel Marie Russell 

“Knowing your shadow self is vital if you wish to bring harmony into your life.” 

“As far as we can discern, the sole purpose of human existence is to kindle a light in the darkness of mere being.” 

“People will do anything, no matter how absurd, in order to avoid facing their own souls.” 

― Carl Jung

Perspective 

What was the stretch that you crafted in week 4? If you don’t know, ask someone from the group or check your notes to remind yourself.

Week 5 is about uncovering bits of what lies hidden in our shadows by realizing what happens and comes up when we dance with our stretches.

As Jung said, “Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life, and you will call it fate.” Practicing embodied Leadership is an integrated and active form of shadow work. 

For example, when you learn to target focus areas in your life and to see trailhead moments where your protective parts are hijacking your experience, as you did in the purpose phase, you are finding the edge of your shadow. Then, this month, during the power phase, you are learning to craft embodied stretches that you’ll perform in order to find new and creative ways to respond to your parts; this is when you uncover shadow. What stops you in there? What is it? What gets in the way? What comes up for you? How do you act? How do you distract yourself?

But remember, you can’t see your shadow. Your shadow holds what you don’t know. This means if you know something or there is a repetitive thought or experience, this is not in your shadow; what’s in the shadow is behind or through or comes from learning to respond to all that differently than you have before.

When I say that this work is “integrated,” I mean that, by its nature, it is connected to your life by a trailhead. This is important because sometimes the work we do on ourselves can disintegrate us, like an island that we run to escape our life circumstances. 

I say “active” because, by its nature, you are creating a new behavior, movement, breath, and pattern to respond to the environment in your own nervous system and your physical life. 

All you have to do this week is turn on your noticing and observation muscles to log and respond (consciously, befriend, attend, shape) to what happens when it comes time for your stretch to occur. 

The Self knows what to do. It’s our protective parts that get in the way. We are learning to allow the Self to lead. 

Since we’ve intentionally designed our stretches from a state of dropping into our embodied Self, meaning we did something to drop out of our protective state while in our group or 1:1 coaching together, you shouldn’t need to try too hard, push yourself, or rely on aggression to force yourself to uncover your shadow or to do your stretches.

In fact, all that force stuff getting in the way is likely protective parts of you standing at the threshold of your shadow. What does that part of you that wants to push hard or throw a fit need or want?

If you are like most people, you think your shadow is only dark and unknown and therefore scary or even terrifying or creepy. But the shadow holds the key to your golden shadow gifts. These are your unique talents, creative abilities, and hidden skills you are unaware of.

Now, I want you to imagine this week that as you set out to allow your stretch to happen, you are opening up to discover these gifts. What will you discover when it comes time to allow your stretch to happen?

The Shadow is what you are unconscious of. Meaning you are not aware of it. 

You are becoming aware of it. By learning to design embodied stretches like tiny recipes that fit into anchor events, automatic trigger moments, trailheads, or protective parts that will come up again on their own, you are priming your Self to respond in a more empowering way. 

Dig Deeper: 

Check out the Free 5-Day Tiny Habit Course by BJ Fogg, Ph.D. - Director of the Human Behavior Design Lab at Stanford University. Or read and listen to his book Tiny Habits. 

Everything we do here aligns with his research on designing habit recipes that will grow into behaviors. 

This is the act of making the unconscious conscious and doing embodied shadow work/parts work. What unconsciously came up? What did you discover when the moment arose to perform your stretch? 

This is where our noticing and observation muscles turn on. 

Questions to ask to uncover shadows or to review your embodied stretch experience: 

• What is my stretch?

• What will be the automatic trigger for my stretch to happen?

• How will I know I did my stretch?

• What are the three stages of my stretch?

• How will I close or celebrate my stretch when it is done?

• DID I CELEBRATE? How did you celebrate? (describe the entire process) What protective parts came up? 

• What did I end up doing? 

• What avoidant, addictive, anxious, or angry parts did I notice?

• What inner child, firefighter, saboteur, king, or loyal soldier parts did I notice? 

• How did I respond with BASIC? (Befriend, Attend, Shape, Integrate, Connect)

Can you take it to the next step…what did my parts want or need from my Self? What memories, associations, or responses/reactions did I have to this stretch?

You’ll have the opportunity to witness other people doing this in a group, which will help you learn how to do it. 

Experiment with letting go of emotions words and use - Do I feel open or closed?

Sometimes, we can get flooded and in our heads when we move through this work for the first or second time. A powerful way to get out of your head is to simply ask - do I feel open or closed?

You can use this in the vicinity of your stretch.

For example, If my stretch trailing edge was at the dinner table with my kids next week. My action was that every time I sat down at the dinner table, I wanted to look at my kids, ask them about their day, and actively allow myself to be present with each of them for 30 seconds. I might be doing this because I’ve been anxious about work or my relationship or whatever. But, during this stretch, you might get it in your head. Let go of trying to do this and ask: Am I open or closed? If you do this and you notice you are closed, go ahead and allow yourself to open. If you are open, allow yourself to appreciate being open. And then, as you finish, close your stretch with a smile to yourself to celebrate.

You notice your responses and reactions by noticing if your body feels “open” or “closed.” Usually, we notice it actively “closing” before we become attuned enough to notice when we are actively “reopening” or presently “open.” 

In general, judging “open” as good and “closed” as bad is not accurate. This is the skill of discernment, not judgment. For example, if you are working with your “Nice guy” tendencies with the person you are dating and the trailhead in your life has noticed yourself exploding after repeatedly and unknowingly allowing your boundaries to be crossed little by little. It might be incredibly uncomfortable for your “Nice guy or Good Girl” parts to hold small yet significant boundaries. 

In this way, the sensation of “Closing” might be uncomfortable to your “nice” parts. Still, your Self will know that this is from a place of Self preservation and that this “closed” sensation leads toward compassion, caring, confidence, and courage. Then, once your sense of safety and connection is reestablished, you will reopen into the boundary and your partner. 

One final thing to note about why we celebrate. At this point, you’ve likely already noticed us celebrating many times in this program. Embodied celebration sends a message up from the body to the brain. It triggers a tiny amount of dopamine to reward our developing behavior. Our protective parts have been trained by Shame, automatic negative thinking (ANT), and the fight, flight, freeze, and fawn response. The antidote to this is celebration. Fast, deep, embodied, weird, goofy celebration. The best part is - that you don’t have to believe me - do it, and it will work.

Why don’t you have to believe me? Because belief is top-down. Remember when we learned about neuroception? When the nervous system senses a sensation and then perceives it as a “celebration,” it automatically triggers a 

story in your head, rewiring your belief systems from the bottom up! Isn’t this stuff awesome? 

Let’s celebrate! Seriously… CELEBRATE. Let me know what your technique was just now.

Learning Objective: 

Learn to use your inner noticing and observation muscles to notice what gets in the way or what is brought UP by your stretch. Rather than reacting to it with a protective pattern, learn to use the BASIC method to respond to it, collect information, and bring it back to the group or our 1:1 session for exploration. 

Embodied Practice: 

Use the BASIC Method to discover your shadow and notice the managerial, protective, exiled, and firefighter parts that were inspired by your stretch. It is your job to get to know them.

Journal Questions: 

1. Describe each of the five stages of the B.A.S.I.C method and provide an example of each in a timeline.

2. What managerial, firefighter, or exiled parts were inspired by your embodied stretches? 

3. Did you discover your loyal soldier part, and when did it come out? Describe how your loyal soldier part is constructive and destructive.  

4. How did your escapist or addict take over? 

5. Where and when are you able to find your wounded inner child?

6. How did you rely on interception, shifting your state, co-regulation, or self-regulation in some other form of embodied practice to perform your stretch?

“Practicing mindfulness calms down the sympathetic nervous system, so that you are less likely to be thrown into fight-or-flight.11 Learning to observe and tolerate your physical reactions is a prerequisite for safely revisiting the past. If you cannot tolerate what you are feeling right now, opening up the past will only compound the misery and retraumatize you further.12 We can tolerate a great deal of discomfort as long as we stay conscious of the fact that the body’s commotions constantly shift. One moment your chest tightens, but after you take a deep breath and exhale, that feeling softens and you may observe something else, perhaps a tension in your shoulder. Now you can start exploring what happens when you take a deeper breath and notice how your rib cage expands.13 Once you feel calmer and more curious, you can go back to that sensation in your shoulder. You should not be surprised if a memory spontaneously arises in which that shoulder was somehow involved.” 

― Bessel A. van der Kolk, The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma

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