RELATING WITH SHADOWS

Within this consensual reality (waking life) we are collectively saying ‘yes’, at a deeply unconscious, karmic level. But which parts of us are saying yes, and why? How could we be saying ‘yes’ to all the pain and suffering we are watching and feeling in the world?

What about systemically oppressed bodies? What about bodies under colonial occupation, or genocide?

How much agency do we have here to affect collective issues, and how do we work with systemic or political layers?

What about what we ourselves personally experience? Does it have a function? How can we access the power within each instance?

What’s the real point of my grief? My rage or anger, humiliation, shame? Where could it guide me?

What belongs to me, and what doesn’t?

In mapping our own psyche with collective liberation as a goal, we need to hold a dual consciousness between the personal and the collective.

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We are all a part of co-manifesting a reality which oppresses, extracts, and tortures. Unconsciously, this is what is channeled through humans. Outside of the personal and outside of the human, in the Karmic realm, there is a greater rebalancing which we do not have the capacity to perceive. What we have the capacity to do - is act on what is within our own realm and start creating the world we want. Releasing shadow contracts and coming into right relationship with your shadows is vital.

GAZE, PERCEPTION, POSITION

For this conversation we need awareness of posititioning.

Positioning relates to personal identity, lineage, and our current state of our positioning with power, power to influence moving forces in the manifest, or material world.

Relating with shadows is about liberations of relation, and ways of seeing. For this process of relation with shadows, and shadow power, we need to develop inner distances in our own pyschic space. On the systemic level this has to do with mirrors of self recognition, accountability, surrender, ownership of our own somatising emotional power, forgiveness (release of old grids) and intentionalising our next move.

I attempt to write for an activist’s perspective of what shadows can bring us, especially inclusive of a BIPoC LGBTQIA+ body. The reason I centralise this body is that I beleive it includes all other bodies, from a perspective of empathic labour.

All identity bodies who are not centralised in the collective eye are adapting, contorting, contradicting themselves and working overtime in order to just ‘be present’ in a society where everything is designed for the centralised as ‘norm’.

THE SPIRIT OF MATTER & THE WORLD SOUL

But how is gaze, something so immaterial, related to the world around us?

This comes down to our understanding of what matter is. Everything is energy. Matter is very receptive energy - feminine - turned solid.

In the animist perspective we see each entity, even passing phenonema as having a Body and a Spirit, or Soul.

In syncronicity studies and Quantum Relations we see that matter holds ‘awarenesss’, or is altered, when in relation to awareness.

The negation of the Spirit of Matter is also a part of the split and abandonment of the divine femine spirituality practices, which are decentralised, rooted, embodied, and about holding, not transcending or elevating into ‘higher consciousness’, but instead a praxis about depth.

Matter is Spirited and within this, we find the World Soul, and the Body of Reality. (Abstract Materialism)

That means that when difficult things keep happening to us in our lives, accidents, lossed, there is Spirit always entwined, that you are energetically in relationship to.

Being in relationship with something means owning the connection about why and how you are connected.

We are not islands, disconnected from eachother and the world. We are ripples in pool, reverberating on and on and affecting eachother - intra-acting.

LEARNING BY DESTRUCTION AS OPPOSED TO LEARNING BY GRACE.

Inner and outer worlds are intertwined, and alive, in relationship with the way we are. Meeting Shadow is like meeting the growth edge of our unconscious, but “twisted”.

If we read it upside down, and inside out. It is a portal.

In the beginning if we are new to looking into shadow relations, experiences of the shadows will likely be coming through a ‘Path Way of Learning By Destruction’. Ths is due to the situation of this era. Not enough actionsin the last 100 years have been driven by conscious pure or open heart based intention, on a collective level. Levels of awareness, slipped into unconsciousness.

There is another Way. It is ‘The Path of Learning by Grace.’

We want to ultimately learn through grace. Through allowance, seed of desire, freedom, liberations, agency.

In order to get to there it takes some wading through  what is old and needs to be let go of. Karmic cycles that we are leaving behind, ancestral curses, the impacts of war, neglect or genocides in our ancestral lineages, the impacts of conflations of state & religion.
These are the curses we greet on the path of ‘learning through destruction’.

On the path of awakening through destruction, which is usualy the first path that starts to wake us up, The Shadow makes themselves known through any dynamic, dramatic, emotionally activating, painful events we have in our waking life, or nightmarish dreaming lives.

The Shadow is not always connected to anything 100% ill-willed that is not shakeable. It is part of us, a part of what we have inherited, a function of our gaze and relationship with energy. (yes, ‘curses’ are the same as binds or doublebinds and do not need to have been ‘put’ onto us from or by anyone).

Shadow is releated to how energy jumps in and out of inner spaces, body spaces and worldy spaces.

It is related to what we are holding, taking care of, as opposed to what we are not holding and thus, disowning from oursleves, self-abandoning, rejecting - in addition to all unknown beings and factors of our psyche.

All archetypes and spirits have a shadow side. Divine beings, like Boddhisatvas or Deities, also have shadow forms - for example in the Odu tradition, it is very regular for someone to be plagued by issues which directly relate to the Orisha (God-Force) they are to be initiated in.

What ailes you is very close to your Gift.

You can also find this in Chrion in your Birthchart. For example, in my chart Chiron is sitting directly by The Moon. My intuition is a very important centre of my capacity to see and facilitate healing in others.

Repetition shows you exactly who you are. Listen to your own triggers. Listen to which kind of messages are being called out from within you. (Yes, Shadows are also about allowing messages to be called out of us.)


Learning through the Path of Grace is about learning how to listen to your world as your oracle. Remembering your magnetism, knowing your vulnerabilities.

Receptivity to synchronicities is the route of your guidance.

Considering what we are waking up to in this era -in terms of new connectivity and growth of the emotional and relational bodies, the path as destruction is kind of a placeholder for an Initiation within a society that has lost it’s awareness about how important Initiation and Ceremony are, in respecting The Invisible.

RELATIONSHIPS

Relationships that struggle or hit a breaking point always give us a chance to develop who we are. Our actions in relationship to the world show us who we are.

When we are able to owning our own potential destructive power, this is part of a process of wholeness. We aim to reach neutrality, through paradox.

It is a constant process and your shadow area of the psyche does not stay fixed but evolves as you do. We learn how to care for the dynamics which are volatile, how to release judgements, and how to balance our inner energy.

With shadow in relation, we learn endless aspects of :
WHOLENESS, SELF-HOOD, KINSIHP and HUMILITY.

BLINDSPOTS

Shadow exposes our “blindspots”. Some of them are about having blindspots to accept who we really are, how powerful we really are.

Blindspots can be thought of as places were we have been left unprotected, extremely vulnerable to be wounded. And they are often a dynamic meeting places where a conjunction of intimate psychic intersections meet : protections, and weaponising layers of persona.

Blindspots are the important passageways because they are always connected to creative life force energy, especially if wrapped around a big archetypal relational psychic figure, image or association stonghold.

For example: Archetypal energy of ‘The Mother’ or ‘The Father’, ‘The Child’, ‘The Eternal Youth’, ‘The Senex/Old Man’, ‘The Witch/Crone’, ‘Creativity/Destruction’, ‘Religion’, ‘Morals & Ethics’, ‘Right Vs Wrong’, ‘Crazy Vs Sane’, etc. )


The more blindspots we have, the more we are unaware of the energy/entities passing through us. There can be an underlying belief system of lack on each blindspot. The blindspot is a cluster formed through trauma. Yes, trauma is a map.

Trauma is anything that happened too intensly and too fast for the psychic energy to integrate it properly, and so it becomes like a clot, and sits on the mirrors of perception.

New growth comes from dissolving the old belief systems which are stuck in the blindspots and by us scooping up, including inner parts of us who are the ones propelling us into rewoundings. We need to learn to see, listen and speak for what these inner parts need and desire.

Greeting our Shadows is a humbling practice, and what is not able to be integrated, we walk on with, as multiple.

Seeing our Shadow is an everyday every-moment thing.

We can go so deep in this that we become able to understand the natural limitations of our own Gaze - to accept these, due to our subject position.

Walking with our shadow might be possible in dreams, or we might be able to make ritual sessions toegther with shadows.

WHAT IS THE GOLDEN SHADOW?

The concept of the Golden Shadow operates on the same psychic function - the golden aspect is about reclaiming.

We reclaim all the wonderful, full of life aspects of ourselves that have been locked away behind trauma, extraction, or systemic oppression. We learn how to protect and bless our own divinity.

The Golden Shadow is important for Internalising & High Functioning Individuals who are ‘coping’ but beating themselves up on the inside. This is particularily for hyper empaths and the intuitional body.

If we have not been able to be trully authentic or feel validated in our emotional realities - The Golden Shadow grows, full of truth, vulnerability and vitality. We canot see our own goodness.

Especially for Women, Gender Non Conforming Identities, Non-White identies, or any Body who differs from the centralised idea of ‘I’ in our current society, there are elements of the Golden Shadow that will be relevant for you.

We know from Divine Feminine Archetypal Psychology/Psychoanalysis for example from Marion Woodman or Marie Louise Von Franz, that the female-identified psyche has already internalised the Shadow voices of the Patriachial Critic Inside her own head - this voice is self-policing her, as much as it is enabling her to be a ‘Girl Boss’.

This is also showing up in colonial bodies or subaltern bodies, where the chains of the oppressor’s wound, creep in.

In a punitive system watchedby panopticon, we all
need to integrate some of the Golden Shadow in order to not only survive but create an inner-buffer within psyche to thrive.

To get one’s original Soul Power Back.

THE COLLECTIVE SHADOW AS A PROCESS

Both Shadow and Golden Shadow are a process happening between Subjective and Objective Psyche.

Objective Psyche is totally transpersonal but can be reached towards only subjectively.

We are witnessing always from a subjective psyche, so it is always at a level of being tied to our perception and our positioning.

It is a mind-bending topic sometimes to understand the personal and collective shadows which touch our lives.

That’s why it so important to give time to the process of reflection and discernment.

There is so much power to be found in the shadows for all of us, especially collectively right now. Most of what is coming up is Collective or Transpersonal Shadow Material - from generations of not having the resources to support exchanges between conscious and unconscious realms.

Experience always has a personal element and a Transpersonal Element. We are accountable to the personal, and recognise, surrender and pivot on the systemic.

Working with psyche in this way is an investment into the colletive on every level!

IMPORTANT DISTINCTIONS & PROBLEMS WITH THE TERM ‘SHADOW WORK’ IN 2025

“Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.”
- C.G.JUNG

This quote from Jung has been popularised and unfortunately when something becomes popularised within a capital system, its meaning gets co-opted into a surface. Suddenly something like ‘Shadow Work’ can becomes instrumentalised as a weapon, as another form of policing or demonising others.

To flatten the concept of shadow work entirely into the individual without acknowlegding our systemic context, can become victim blaming - especially of the voices of the parts who have been oppressed or colonised over multi-generations.

Within the new age and spiritual communities of western thought, there is a danger of this - because we are so conditioned and educated into liberal separatism.

We have been sold an idea of freedom and liberty (especially through the U.S American Dream or Colonial or Migratory Dream of a ‘New World’) which does not understand ubuntu (empathy) or psychic architectures of conditionedd gaze: isms, embedded into how we see and how we relate with prescribed power dynamics.

The term ‘Shadow Work’ has also been popularised within a context of new age, neo-spiritual & pop-psychology curcuits, so it becomes a phrase which has so many different meanings. I would like to use different words to describe what we do here in this praxis.

In this moment at the start of the Age of Aquarius we need to be discerning about our lens and postion within the use of the phrase ‘Shadow Work’ and it’s implication, into who & what is doing ‘work’, and what that ‘work’ entails. The western lens loves to glorify ‘work’, and also load all of that ‘work’ onto the individual.

Within a white, cis, heteronormative, ethno-centric bias the individual who diverges from this bias is too easily exilled.

My personal experiences with ‘Shadow Work’, have led me out of this wording due to the context within which it is used and the gaze that it too readily situates, without disclaimers.

An ancestral practice is a practice with a very wide lens. The widest of lenses that keeps widening and widening. Within an ancestral practice shadow is all around us. It would be limiting to consider ‘Shadow Work’ an umbrella term for Relation. Shadow claimings and releasing power, is a part of a greater lense into ‘Relation’, infinite and pluriversal.

I continue my practice with mainly working with Golden Shadow Relations, not ‘Shadow Work’.

I leave the word ‘work’ behind, because we are evolving away from extractive labour, centralising the empathy body, free from slavery.

DISMANTLING UNIVERSAL IMAGES

Shadow is everywhere there is light and dark. Shadow is everywhere there is being and non being. Shadow is wound up with Relation. Yet, shadow gets fixed within what becomes ‘Universal Images’.

Most of what we think are totally ‘universal images’ - are only dominant images.

What we actually have access to all around us are pluriversal images.

The universal image via dominance exposes a cognitive limit of the centralised-psyche and a power-hoarding which shadow relation would seek to dismantle.

We can see the impact of Universal Images through the ‘universalities’ that occur through the dominance of the western thought, or colonlial forms of retelling of history. Where I grew up, in Australia, for example - the history we were taught in school was specifically one sided favouring the British empire and demonising all First Nation People, who of course had actually owned and tended to the land for some 80,000 years prior.

That meant the ‘universal image’ of the countries origins was a product of heirachical power relations and erasures of violence, with the continued aim of control and to strip indigenous cultures from their power. This ‘universal image’ does not only attempt to strip indigenous culture from their power, but it strips all of us from our power.

‘Shadow Work’ made out of context to supremacy cultures can easily reinforce the same supremacy culture. As usual, context, positon and perspective, is everything. We must know yourself imtimately and also be self relfecting over a long period of time, in oder to be on the shadow pathway.

Ultimatley, the shadow pathways lead us always, to contradiction. Holding contradiction is known as ‘the grey way’.

HIGHLY SENSING, NUERODIVERSE SOULS: YOU ARE ALLOWED TRUE SUBJECTIVITY

If our emotional realities are not acknowledged, we perhaps are just picking up on nuances that others miss Perhaps we have special affinities to detail. Perhaps we care very deeply and can feel within our bodies certain things about our world?

Often this means we can be unconsciously “gaslit” by others, into getting the impression we are ‘wrong’. The Golden Shadow is important to lead you back to your own truth in this instance.

You were not put on this earth to totally dissolve your Healthy Ego, we need you as you. Golden Shadow Work helps us Self Define.

We alone have ownership over our own truth and subjectively.

Golden Shadow Work is about becoming a Steward of
The Identity (External Layer) & Essential Soul Identity (Internal Layers) in context to any bias’ of The World & Society in which we live and it relates to Re-Routing Energy.

NOODLE SOUPS & BEING TURNED INSIDE OUT BY SHADOWS (ESPECIALLY FOR COLONISED; OR RACIALISED BODIES)

Shadow Realms are called ‘Noodle Soup’ as there is always an element of confusion around boundaries : where does one thing ends and another begin?

Shadow relation does have the capacity to turn a psyche 'inside out' and there is an element of loosing the potency that is our own life force, if the turning inside-out becomes too extreme. I felt this when I was in psychoanalysis and pushing myself too hard in the direction of ‘Shadow Work’ - when I needed to reclaim my golden shadows. I was beating myself up, for years and years.

This is why I say shadow relation is about self acceptance and knowing who and what you are.

We need the healthy ego as a container to differentiate ourselves from the world and to be able to move through it.

Remember that you are the only one who decides who you are.

We want this to be coming from a neutral ballanced place, and not jump in and out with either arrogance & inflation (outside) or shame & self flagulation (inside). Our aim is neutrality.

The complexity of how complex shadows are is something outside of what our brains can even imagine in dimensions.

I feel that practices of holding entire dynamics and becoming aware of when they are activated within us and around us, is a key.

This takes going in slow life circles, experiencing these same conjunctions of energy within us, over time, again and again.
And with tools and resources, and with companionship we can look at the repeating dynamics within us, through the eyes of the intution.

We start to understand their personal meaning in the cycles they take for us. Which narratives and stories are being re-affirmed inside of us.

OLD PROGRAMS : SHADOW CONTRACTS

We can fall easily out of connection and into shadow contacts ie: attachments, competition, survival, lack matrix - based on old programming - which is coming from whole eras of conditioning.

When we feel guilty, ashamed or self-persecuted and are not consciously aware of it, like with the Shadow, we are not able to consciously address this in our relationships and we pass on the stressors, pressures, and same dynamics of the system unto those in our lives who we should be protecting. (Our children.)

Perhaps our inner authority, the clarity of our caring-anger, and our intuition is hanging out there somewhere in the Spirit Matter of the World? Time to rescue that!

Not being able to consciously address something within us, means we are not able to ask for cleaning from Spirit...
We are not able to pray, we are not able to do anything with it if its not concious.

Where images become “fixed” and then “hooked”, the empathic relational algorithm can expose ways of relating that avoid holding uncomfortable emotional content that is ours to hold. When we go through trauma, especially with complex trauma, the severity of the unbearable emotional trauma is likely overwhelming, disorganised (jumping back and forth - say, between disowning true feelings of anger or shame and grasping at cover ups like bravado or pride), and loaded out onto the world - (as if the world is our dust bin for everything we dont want to own).

This becomes a real issue when the balance tips and the disowned personal power starts to become constellated in real world events that severly impact our lives.

Making ‘shadow work’ is not just about understanding that who we are coming in contact with is our mirror and what we see or how we see them is really our own attributes. That is way too reductive.

Making ‘shadow work’ is about understanding that all of this is energy.
What we refuse to hold in our bodies, within our somatic state of presence, or within our attention, or what we dont have the capacity to hold in our bodies - which is capacity for depth and true power - is instead given to the world in some sort of “bargain”.  Figuring out the coded bargain and stopping it or re-routing it when the deal made becomes too cheap, is the point.

The world is not ‘fair’ - not every identity we will be asked to make shadow work in different ways. There is no ‘one way’ for everyone.

The strongest healing, upgrades/in-grades and expansion in terms of shadow work comes from witnessing oneself through the mirrors of these relationships and making new conscious choices and setting in new algorithms.

CONSTELLATING IN SESSION

Regardless of how often you come in, shadow will pop up in all sessions, and the return to talk about them *is* the actual mechanism of ‘the work’.

WHICH SESSION ?

Golden-Shadow reclaiming is made through all session styles.

Talk Sessions hold space for continued analysis, hold projections within witness, helping each client to discern the origin of the psychic content and to eleviate some of the extra suffering around each polarity while we call in for greater power integration.

Alternatively, for diving straight into certain issues and asking directly for healing to Spirits - We work on shadow integration in the Ritual Sessions. We go in and "clear out" / "dust off" the shadow [dream fog and mirrors of the mind] with somatic, sound, poetic ritual techniques.

For taking the journey yourself and facing content head first [navigating a dream] check out the Active Constellation Sessions.

Please bring in your dreams to all sessions.

In what way was the relation fullfilling a need? How did that evolve? How did you respond?

Centralise the part within us who is attracted to the situation. What are they seeking, is there an innocence there?

Do they seek belonging, escape, merging, death? Why? Get into the details of how each side is seeing and what each side of a relation is seeking.

Perhaps this can tell you a bit about your gifts.
We give the inner parts of you what they seek, through ritual - which is supportive for their transformation.