I am not, nor have I ever claimed to be, a medical professional of any sorts. The statements and methods in this book have not been evaluated by any governing board.
I believe, however, and have seen in my clients that the statements made in this book are all intuitively obvious… once they are said. They make immediate sense to a mind that is ready to receive them. The tools, wisdom and methods in this book are derived from a lifetime’s worth of introspection and analysis into the human condition and from my own personal experience and research.
My academic background is in Philosophy and World Religions. I have spent a lifetime searching for answers through various lenses, and - after an awakening of my own - I learned and pieced together the comprehensive guide to self-love that you are about to learn.
I recommend that you read this book with an attitude of “take what resonates and leave what doesn’t”. This book will absolutely give you a whole new perspective on your life, your emotions, and your subconscious cycles that have been keeping you stuck, but my goal is not to ‘convince’ you of anything, it is merely to shine light on what you have never managed to see for yourself.
“The unexamined life is not worth living.”
— SOCRATES—
“... and the unlived life is not worth examining.”
— ME—
About Benjy
There is a fine line between emotional awareness and spiritual awakening, and that is where Benjy thrives as a mentor and teacher. Guiding people to emotional mastery, Benjy bridges the gaps between spirituality, psychology and philosophy. Those 3 realms are all intrinsically connected in Benjy’s completely unique - and yet intuitively and compellingly simple - approach to self-love and emotional mastery.
Growing up with a deep existential need for answers, Benjy’s academic background was in Philosophy and World Religions, but that academic search left him pessimistic at the soul level about our ultimate role in this universe and the purpose of life. It wasn’t until after a dark night of the soul and a spiritual awakening of his own that he was forced to dive more deeply into his own inner healing, in order to rediscover his true purpose and learn the skills, tools, and techniques that he teaches to clients today.
His overall approach is about “Feelings First”, referring to the notion that we can master our emotions directly, without the need for deep intellectual analysis, ultra-spiritual practices, or pharmaceutical medications. He teaches people how to connect directly with the emotions and sensations of their body - without fear, guilt or shame - and to allow these feelings to run through them so that they can be truly released. It’s about building emotional muscle, not seeking rational answers.
As he says, emotional healing is NOT an intellectual activity.
The fear of feeling our uncomfortable emotions and unresolved trauma is at the very core of everything that has gone wrong on this Earth over thousands of years. A common phrase that floats around the spiritual and emotional healing communities is, ‘hurt people, hurt people’. In other words, people who are in pain cause pain to others. This is a fundamental truth of humanity that we all need to recognize and accept in order to help us move into the next stage of our evolution. If you could begin to understand that everyone who is being cruel to you is actually in a lot of pain themselves and that this pain has been passed down from generation to generation for millennia, you’d be able to start being a little less defensive and judgmental and we could all start opening ourselves up again.
The cycles of pain and trauma that we’re experiencing today started so long ago that most people can’t even fathom how deeply these cycles are embedded into human society. By bottling up the pain that we don’t know how to deal with in moments of trauma we develop defense mechanisms that protect us, but that also keep us going in circles, continually projecting our pain onto the outside world and causing more pain and trauma to ourselves and others, thereby perpetuating this cycle over and over.
If we don’t heal these things within ourselves in time, then we pass them down to our children through our behavior, and even through genetic memory. Only now are enough people starting to ‘wake up’ and free themselves from these trauma loops that the Earth is ready to make a real shift forward.
Here’s the main secret that more people need to discover so that we can collectively evolve to the next stage of humanity:
In order to be truly at peace and happy we need to fully love ourselves, and people who love themselves are kind to others, because being unkind to others causes us pain - even when we don’t realize it. We are naturally empathic at our cores. The more connected we are to our own emotions, the more connected we are to the emotions of others. So, someone who is truly connected to their own emotions and who fully loves themselves would never knowingly cause harm to another, because they would feel that pain themselves and/or be aware of the self-harm involved in harming someone else. They are aware of the stain that this leaves on their souls.
When you knowingly cause someone pain, you shoot neurons down certain pathways in your brain and create certain emotional frequencies within yourself that - their existence inside of you - programs your own brain for fear and anger and other corrosive and harmful emotions that reinforce negative behavior patterns.
When we cause pain to someone else, we cause ourselves pain as well. When we ignore someone else’s pain, we are also ignoring our own pain. Most of us are just too disconnected from our own emotions to notice. We’ve done such a great job of putting up walls around our pain that we can’t recognize that it’s there. Finally reconnecting to our emotions is what the collective awakening is all about. Bit by bit, we are reincorporating lost parts of ourselves that we shut down to help us survive, so that we can remember who we truly are and start moving towards a brighter future.
Welcome to that journey. The world, the universe and all of humanity thanks you.
Why Do Shadow Work?
Ok… so… before we really get into anything else, let’s do a quick “what is shadow work and why am I bothering to do this?”
I’ll be explaining Shadow Work in more depth as we go, but for now - to put it as simply as possible - I would say that it is the process of learning how to reconnect with our emotions by breaking the barriers we have put up against our pain. It is the method of learning how to finally observe, confront, heal and release all the unresolved emotional trauma inside of us so that we can live in a more heart centered way. It is the collection of tools, techniques, and intellectual wisdom that we need to keep with us, practice and maintain so that we can live a life free from fear, fully expressing our true selves, and engaging in healthy, mutually beneficial relationships with everything and everyone around us.
everyone on this planet is in a lot of pain… and none of them know how to deal with it, so they project that pain outwards onto others, taking out their unresolved issues on the people closest to them without realizing it, and thereby perpetuating trauma cycles over and over.
there are no truly cruel and hateful people in the world… only wounded and tortured souls. You will see how those who act the worst are actually in the most pain - though they generally don’t recognize it. They are so disconnected from their emotions that emotional pain doesn’t truly register to them. They are numbed out. They are asleep. They are living in a hazy fog of auto-pilot, fear-based defense mechanisms. Their souls have been beaten into submission by the outside world.
It all has to do with states of consciousness and levels of self-awareness.
As humanity moved forward in evolution, it wasn’t the physical changes to our bodies that were most important in distinguishing our species as unique. Perspective. Insight. Thought. Self-awareness. These are the things that gave us the unique characteristics it took to push us from Neanderthals to our modern selves. We gained enough awareness to investigate ourselves and the universe in new ways. We advanced science, we made inventions, we came to understand our place in the universe a little better, etc… This is how we got to where we are.
But now… it’s time to evolve again.
How aware and conscious are you REALLY???
Have you been noticing how your emotions have been controlling your life? Have you noticed all the little ways that you are getting triggered each and every day into being defensive, judgmental, angry, frustrated, and a whole slew of other uncomfortable, unpleasant, and unhelpful emotions that make you act in ways that don’t actually serve your best interests and that you generally regret later on? Do you recognize the shame cycles that this puts you into and how shame exacerbates the problem? Do you recognize how those triggers that sparked this negative cycle to begin with were never really about the thing that triggered you at all, but actually just about deep-seated insecurities in yourself that you never dealt with?
Do you notice and observe all the ways that you act in response to these things that trigger you, and how it is actually your response to these situations that is making your life worse most of the time… NOT the actual thing that happened that triggered you? Do you notice the role that you are playing in perpetuating all the cycles that keep you from progressing in your life? Do you notice that the things that you are running from inside of you couldn’t actually hurt you if you were to stop running from them, and that you running from them is actually what’s causing all of your problems?
Do you recognize how causing someone else pain actually leaves a stain on your subconscious mind that creates subconscious distress that you then need to spend your lifetime bottling up, justifying and rationalizing, and how this cycle leads to you hurting yourself and hurting others even more, thereby reinforcing this cycle, over and over and over and over?
Have you been truly aware of the relationship between your head, your heart, and your gut? Do you TRULY know who you are, and understand the forces driving your decision making?
Have you been observing that YOU… and fear… are at the center of all of your suffering, and that you have had the ability to take control of this cycle the whole time?
Probably not.
Even if you’re thinking ‘yes’ right now… Ehhhh… probably not. It goes deeper than you probably think or are ready to realize just yet. Your subconscious programming goes so deep that you have only glimpsed the tip of the iceberg. The more that you come to understand how everything is energy and how the brain programs itself in response to unresolved emotions, the more you’ll realize how you’ve actually been running on auto-pilot your whole life. Your entire life has just been programmed responses to trauma that you never dealt with, but it’s time to wake up, Neo.
If you haven’t truly come to see and understand all the little cycles that drive you to make your decisions, then how conscious and aware have you truly been? You’ve been asleep in your own body your whole life, letting unconscious emotional cycles guide all of your decisions while you deluded yourself into thinking that you were actually in charge and acting according to strict rationality and logic the whole time.
Recognizing these cycles and becoming more self-aware so that we can take conscious control over our lives and not let unresolved emotions rule our behavior is the next necessary stage of the collective evolution of our species. We need to recognize these subconscious patterns and bring them to the surface so that we can end these self-harming cycles before we destroy ourselves.
You will come to see this era of your life and of humanity (before our awakening and healing) in the same way that you look at the middle ages… We were such fools to do so much harm to ourselves and others in such brutal and barbaric ways.
But… we just didn’t know any better! And that’s the point. Neither do you. Not yet. You’ve never been taught a better way to deal with all the emotions that are trapped inside of you that are at the root of all of your suffering.
This is why we do shadow work. To uncover the core of who you are again and to help you rediscover all the lost parts of yourself that you left behind somewhere in the past because people made you feel bad about yourself for having them. To be able to learn to live in alignment with who we are at our cores instead of putting on a mask and pretending to be someone we’re not. To be able to live with inner peace and a true sense of self-actualization. To put aside fear of judgment and criticism, and to be unapologetically ourselves in the face of dissent. To stand up for love - for ourselves and others - in all situations. To evolve ourselves to a higher state of self-awareness so that we can attain the next stage of what human intellect is capable of - when it is not restricted by the self-harming patterns and limiting beliefs of our emotional defense mechanisms.
We do shadow work to be able to overcome the primitive cycles of our pseudo self-aware selves that we have been in for millennia. We do it to overcome the need to resort to judgment and anger, and to instead find the strength and courage and inner knowing to treat anyone who mistreats us with compassion - both for our benefit and theirs, because the very concepts of anger and judgment just don’t feel good anymore.
We do shadow work to finally and fully escape the self-perpetuating emotional pain cycles that we’ve been in our whole lives. Anxiety, overwhelm, stress, fear, doubt, guilt, shame, jealousy, etc… All of these are actually just your emotional body’s way of telling you that something is wrong… and you never learned to listen! Shadow work will teach you how to listen, so that those uncomfortable emotions can finally lead you back to the true you.
Shadow work is the key to your new life.
Or… for those that resonate with the following terminology - it is your ticket to 5D.
It is all that you need to do in order to find your true path, purpose, and bliss on this earth.
Don’t take that the wrong way. That doesn’t mean that as soon as you complete some level of your inner healing a genie comes down and grants you all the things you’ve been waiting for in your life. No… it doesn’t work that way… no matter how much you believe in manifesting and law of attraction. Instead, by doing the shadow work you will learn to enjoy and appreciate exactly where you are 1,000 times more while you continue to do the work towards a better future, and this gratitude, ease and inner peace will help you take better actions, and notice and follow opportunities that you wouldn’t have before, creating an upwards cycle in your life where things just start getting better and better.
The more that you master yourself and your emotions, the more immune you are to life’s little challenges, and so the better you handle them and the more success you see. Inner improvement perpetuates itself in this way. The more that you raise your inner frequency, the more that you stay calm and confident and take actions that will improve your life. The more that you improve your life, the more that you raise your inner frequency, leading you to take better actions, etc…
See how that works? Improving your inner world helps you naturally improve your outer world, which in turn improves your inner world, and around and around we go.
Here’s the thing though… the opposite of that is true as well and THAT is where you have been living.
Because of your fear, trauma and limiting beliefs you have been living in a negative spiral where you would make decisions from fear which then in turn had negative consequences on your life, which then made you feel a certain way, which then made you act a certain way, which then had certain consequences, etc… Do you see the cycle that’s going on here? Emotions lead to actions. Actions lead to consequences. Those consequences create more emotions and around and around and around we go.
Most people have been trying to solve this problematic cycle in a backwards way. Most people try to end this cycle by changing their actions, thinking that if they change their actions that it will change their external worlds, and that will change how they feel so that they can start acting in an even better way. Basically, they try to solve their external problems first, hoping that when their lives get better externally, they will feel better internally and the cycle will change.
Well… let me ask you… how has that been working out for you so far? Has chasing external gratification helped you master your emotions, or do you find yourself constantly chasing something that seems just out of reach?
What I am proposing is that you change your approach to breaking this cycle and choose a different starting point.
Change your emotions! Learn to master your emotions FIRST! Make THAT your primary goal in every moment of your life. That is the only way to truly end this cycle because no amount of external change is going to be able to truly change how you feel. You know… money can’t buy happiness and love. Success and safety in the external world will never make you feel successful and secure if you don’t already feel that way inside, but feeling that way inside FIRST will lead you to make choices that will get you there externally. You’ve spent your life trying to solve things the wrong way around. You’ve focused on the outer world (which you can’t control), as opposed to your inner world (that you actually have more direct access to and can control). When you change just one element of this cycle, the whole pattern changes… so let’s start by changing the one element that we have the MOST control over, then watch our lives change as a result of that.
Like I said.... You haven’t yet realized the full depth of how you have been betraying and sabotaging yourself all this time because you were not yet at a state of consciousness where you could observe the subconscious emotional cycles that were keeping you trapped. EVERY SINGLE AREA of your life has been dominated by your unconscious programming that you developed as defense mechanisms against trauma.
If you want to know why we do shadow work, I’ll let one of my clients tell you herself. Kristy had been struggling with depression and suicidal tendencies for 10+ years before finding me, and after being in my course for only 8 weeks she posted the following in my Facebook group:
“Here’s what I accomplished after having an awakening and doing some conscious shadow work:
- Freedom from my past
- Waking up happy
- A sense of well-being
- A stronger connection with my higher self
- A better relationship with my partner
I sound like a walking infomercial!” (Kristy D).
So, if you want to learn the safest and easiest methods to dive into your shadow and claim back the true you that you left behind a long time ago; to start living without fear, guilt, or shame about who you are so that you can evolve into your best self and live the life you were actually meant to live on this planet, then read on. I am going to show you how simple it can be. It’s not usually easy… but it IS simple, and it doesn’t have to take half as long or be half as painful as you think it does.
We will dive into a whole bunch of explanations, exercises and crucial nuggets of paradigm altering wisdom, and then we will get to the 21-day journaling journey, but FIRST…
I do NOT believe journaling to be a supremely effective way of doing shadow work or of really and truly healing your wounds! No amount of journaling is going to get you over your issues.
3 obvious questions then come to mind…
- Why isn’t journaling effective?
- What IS the most effective way of healing?
- Why on Earth are you giving me journal prompts if it’s NOT going to help?!?!?!
Allow me to deal with that last question first.
Why will we use journaling?
Firstly, despite believing that journaling is not supremely effective, I didn’t say that it is NOT AT ALL effective… It’s not that it can’t help at all. It’s just that - in my opinion - it’s a ‘level 1’ version of doing your shadow work. It can only deal with the most superficial levels of our healing when done in the way that most people do it. It can only truly get you so far. Nonetheless, journaling is still helpful for beginners to get started and I know that many of you are searching for shadow work journals, so I’m happy to oblige.
I’m giving you this disclaimer not to dissuade you from doing any journaling, but rather to make sure that you temper your expectations about what journaling alone can do and to prepare you for the need to go deeper. It is unlikely that you will see the kinds of massive changes in your life through journaling that true shadow work can do for you.
Improved self-esteem, improved relationships, increased confidence, elimination of anxiety, overcoming depression and suicidal thoughts, leaving toxic relationships, improved relationship with money, increased career motivation, increased courage and confidence, and SO SO MUCH more…. These are all things that clients of mine have experienced by doing the real shadow work with me and reconnecting to their emotions. You will likely see some progress in these areas by journaling if you do it properly, but really, you’ll just be skimming the surface of what’s possible.
The second reason I’m giving this disclaimer is so that I can help you understand how to best use journaling to get more out of it than you would have otherwise. Once you understand why journaling is not usually effective, you’ll be able to use journaling in a way that actually can be more effective.
HOW we use the method is of more consequence than the logistics of the method itself. So, understanding the limitations will help you avoid falling into those traps. We are going to use journaling as a way to help you reconnect with your emotions and to start building the muscles that you will use when you do the real inner healing. We will use it to prepare you for what comes next.
Why is journaling NOT effective?
Not only do I believe that journaling is ineffective, but I believe it can actually stall your progress on this inner healing journey because it promotes a grand misconception about inner healing that will keep you going in circles forever. Namely, the misconception that shadow work and inner healing is ultimately an intellectual activity.
The real problem that you are trying to solve in your life is NOT in the past. It’s NOT your memories. It’s NOT the traumas that you experienced. None of those things matter right now. None of those are why you are suffering in the present moment. Yes… your cycles of suffering originated in those past traumatic moments, but the past is gone. It’s not why you’re suffering now.
The REAL problem that you are dealing with is merely the unresolved emotional energy that is still trapped inside of you. The emotions that never had an opportunity to be expressed and released during a moment of trauma. It is these emotions that you still carry right now, not the past events that caused them, that are at the core of your suffering. Our mission isn’t to focus on what caused your suffering in the past, but rather to focus on what’s causing your suffering right now. From there, we can slowly work our way down to the more deeply buried unresolved emotions naturally.
Let me try and express it like this...
Imagine that when you were 6 years old you were taught that sweating is impolite or maybe even dangerous. Imagine that you were made to believe that sweating would lead you to be judged, mocked, rejected, or hurt. As a result of this belief, you did everything you could not to sweat, and let’s just say that you managed to train yourself not to sweat… ever.
So, every time your body started heating up, instead of releasing sweat through the pores of your skin like it needed to in order to stay healthy and function properly, this sweat got rerouted, trapped and stored inside of you. Every ounce of sweat that needed to get released got stored up inside of you instead, and you started building up this reservoir of unreleased sweat inside of yourself, storing it wherever you could find space and cluttering up your organs and blood stream with this stored up, toxic sweat. There were moments when this normal, natural bodily function of sweating needed to happen, but you prevented it from happening, holding the sweat inside instead.
Well… this is what we have been doing with our emotions our whole lives.
When we experienced undesirable or uncomfortable emotions that we weren’t safe to - and didn’t know how to - deal with in the moment, we stuffed them down. We chose not to express and release them because doing so in the moment would have led to more pain and trauma. We learned over our lifetimes that crying was undesirable, that expressing ourselves would have us judged or mocked, that being vulnerable would lead to rejection and abandonment, and therefore we trained ourselves NOT to cry, NOT to express ourselves, NOT to be vulnerable… and so much more.
We developed all kinds of defense mechanisms to keep us from having to feel our emotions in the moment and to help us avoid running into similar scenarios that would bring up the same emotion in the future. We trained ourselves not to release any of that sweat that was coming up inside of us, and we trained ourselves to avoid doing anything that might lead us to having to sweat in the future.
Thing is though… if you were actually to work out and not sweat… YOU… WOULD… DIE!
Literally. You would basically boil alive from the inside out.
There’s actually a medical condition called Anhidrosis (the inability to sweat) and it is often fatal because the body can’t cool itself. Sufferers of anhidrosis often die from heat stroke.
Well, the same has been happening with your emotional body. You’ve been keeping this stuff inside for so long that your emotional body has been slowly rotting away from the inside out. The brain shut down your connection to your heart as a defense mechanism to help you avoid feeling the uncomfortable emotions that you didn’t know how to deal with, and you’ve held this stuff in for so long that your body has actually reprogrammed itself to be completely unable to release them. It’s like your body has forgotten how to sweat. Your brain shut down that function and has semi-permanently rerouted all sweating functions to another part of your body. The connection between your sweat glands and your pores has been shut off and reprogrammed.
Your brain did this because it thought it was protecting you, and in the moment... it was (because you actually weren’t safe in that moment of initial trauma to express and release those emotions), but we never realized before how this was affecting us in the long term. We kept on telling our emotional bodies “store this away, and I’ll deal with it later when I’m safe”, but we never came back to deal with it later. So, we completely forgot where our pain was coming from, and we never realized how our past pain is still affecting us today.
The point of bringing up this metaphor of sweating was to help express that in order to heal now, we do NOT need to think about every push up, every sit up, every mile you ever ran, etc... We don’t need to focus on the things that should have made you sweat in the first place. We are NOT AT ALL concerned with those past events specifically or directly. They are irrelevant to the pain your body is in at this moment.
Instead, we are ONLY concerned with the fact that there is a reservoir of harmful, toxic sweat inside of you that needs to be released. We need to get rid of this toxic stuff, and logic and rationality about what created that toxicity to begin with has nothing to do with it. We only need to learn how to reconnect your pores to this pool of trapped sweat inside of you so that we can FINALLY start letting it go, and when we are free and clear of all that old sweat inside of us, we can fill up that space (that used to be filled with this toxic sludge), with clean and healthy cells that will make us stronger, happier and healthier.
In other words, our goal is not to focus on the past, but only to release that which we still carry within us right now, and the easiest way to do that is by focusing on what we are experiencing RIGHT NOW! Your present emotions are connecting you to your past subconsciously, so you don’t need to analyze it further. You only need to allow your emotions to guide you.
THAT is the goal of Feelings First Shadow Work. To learn how to reconnect our conscious minds and our experience of ourselves and our worlds with our emotional bodies that we have spent a lifetime running from. It is actually about BYPASSING the brain and connecting to the heart and to our emotions directly, allowing unresolved emotions to release themselves naturally. We are trying to reconnect our sweat glands to our pores so that all the stuff that we never expressed can finally be dealt with. We can slowly start draining that pool of trapped sweat that we’ve been carrying with us our whole lives.
As we do this, any revelations or memories that we need will come up on their own, but that will be a natural byproduct of doing the emotional healing. It is not our primary goal. Your subconscious brain is already fully aware of all these intellectual revelations that you think you need to know, and as you learn to relax and stop resisting your emotions, your brain will be able to open up to these insights and revelations. You will become aware of them consciously in a natural way when you stop running from the emotions that are connected to them. You don’t need to seek them out. You don’t need ‘answers’. You only need relief.
The great news here is that - contrary to popular belief - in order for you to overcome your past traumas, triggers and fears, you do NOT need to spend your days focusing on those traumas and fears! This healing journey can be SO MUCH more painless, quick, and simple than you think it can.
We have reached the limits of where reason alone can take us. We don’t need to rationalize and understand all the horrible things that happened to us, because - collectively - we have all come to understand that stuff already. It’s NOT the 50s anymore, and we all basically understand - at the intellectual level - how the ways in which the world was cruel or unloving towards us hurt us and created patterns that we are still running from. An intellectual understanding of basic human psychology was essential in the evolution of our consciousness, but most of us have graduated to the next step now.
No amount of further understanding and analysis is going to help you truly release that reservoir of unresolved emotions. This is NOT an intellectual activity. Or… well… perhaps to be a little more fair and accurate, the intellectual part of this was just the beginning. It was the surface layer of healing meant to lead us towards a deeper journey. First, we needed to understand how disconnected to our emotions we were so that we could begin to move forward, but the next steps of this process must be done from within the heart. The pain exists in your heart, not your head, and we are going to need to shift our attention there. Learning how to speak the language of the heart so that we can release the pain of the past is what this shadow work journey is all about.
What is Shadow Work?
What is it that we mean when we say ‘Shadow Work’?
Well, it is certainly an unclear term that is tossed around a lot and that has been interpreted in various ways, and - I suppose - there are actually various conceptions of what shadow work is and how to do it.
Shadow work was initially conceived of by Carl Jung (founder of modern Analytical Psychology) and it relates to his concept of the ‘shadow’ as being the unconscious aspects of the personality that the conscious ego no longer identifies itself with. Jung conceived of ‘the shadow’ as representing all the undesirable parts of ourselves that we had put away over the years and don’t want to look at because they cause us emotional distress.
In Carl Jung’s language then; shadow work is the process of reintegrating the undesirable shadow self back into the conscious ego self.
Now… I don’t really like that definition for 2 main reasons.
Firstly, I feel like it’s over-intellectualizing the fairly simple nature of the pain that we are trying to deal with at the core of shadow work. The phrase ‘unconscious aspect of the personality’ makes it seem like there is something that we need to consciously and intellectually rediscover about ourselves. It makes it sound as if there are logical answers that need to be found in order for us to be whole again, even though - as I have been trying to say - the real issue is just that we have blocked ourselves off from our emotions. The true problem is much simpler than this definition makes it seem.
It is true that there are unconscious elements of ourselves that need to be brought to light, but I find that this just confuses most people. It’s much simpler to just talk about mastering our emotions. Both interpretations lead to the same place, but one makes sense to people immediately and the other makes the process seem more intellectual than it is. It’s just over-complicated when it doesn’t need to be.
Remember, Jung was operating during that time of our collective evolution where people needed to begin to understand the psyche at all. He had to approach things in a very academic way because people weren’t ready to talk about their feelings so directly – as things in and of themselves. We have moved past that, though, and I find that this kind of definition is really dragging people backwards by now. The unconscious things that need to be revealed are simply our old patterns - the subconscious behaviors that we didn’t used to notice. That’s all. No further ‘analysis’ needs to happen. Only observation.
Secondly, I don’t like the flowery and overly fancy language used because this simply pushes people further away from the truth. I think that overly-academic language is unhelpful for most people. To force people to overthink and over-intellectualize the process of reconnecting to our emotions is humorously ironic in my mind. It just pushes people to try even more to use their brains to solve this problem of the heart. It would be like me giving you a mathematical equation of how to cure anger. Even if the equation is correct, it’s activating the wrong part of your brain for this kind of healing. The analytical side of you is not the part of you that’s going to get you out of this emotional hole. It’s only going to confuse you even more and prolong the true healing and release. It makes you think that you need to look right, even though the solution to your problem is only 2 steps to the left.
I especially hate the way the word ‘ego’ is thrown around by people who are starting to do this work, because no-one actually has any idea what they think they mean when they say that word. They’ve built up the ‘ego’ into this kind of boogie-man in their own heads. They believe that the ‘ego’ is some nasty part of themselves that itself is the villain of their story, which really just makes them believe that there are MORE undesirable parts of themselves that need to be put away. Our goal is to re-integrate all parts of ourselves, so when you tell yourself that your ego is an undesirable part of yourself, you’re just causing more problems.
I just find that the overly-academic interpretation and approach is not helpful to people who are actually looking to do the healing. It’s nice for a classroom discussion about why these methods work, but it is very distracting and confusing for those that are looking to learn how to heal right now.
I believe that what we are doing with shadow work is actually incredibly intuitive and very simple for absolutely anyone to understand when explained properly. In fact, I believe that what we are learning here is the most natural stuff in the world. I believe that these concepts will make immediate sense to a 7-year-old and can be expressed in language that a 7-year-old can grasp. You’ll hopefully notice that this book is designed to be as easy to read as possible, because there is no-one who shouldn’t be able to understand what we’re talking about.
I wonder sometimes if I should really have a different term for my approach. I have wondered if perhaps my method of doing this inner healing varies enough from traditional Shadow Work methods that I should be using a term other than ‘Shadow Work’, but… in the meantime… I’m sticking with this term, and my interpretation of shadow work is as follows:
Shadow work is the process of learning how to observe, confront, heal, and release all of the uncomfortable emotions that we experience in any given moment - in a safe and healthy way - to allow us to finally release the unresolved emotions from the past that need to be released to keep us emotionally healthy and strong.
Or, to phrase it for the 7-year-old - Shadow work is about learning what to do with bad feelings when you have them so that they don’t get stuck inside of you, and learning how to get rid of the bad feelings that were already stuck inside of you from the past. That’s it!
We do this because as long as those feelings are stuck inside of us, we’ll continue to be in pain and we’ll continue to hurt ourselves and others. You can’t run from something that’s inside of you, so you have to face it and learn not to be afraid. There really is no reason to be afraid in the first place, anyway.