Loving Our Shadow

The journey to wholeness

Greetings, and a happy New Year!

Today I want to share about my experience with what is called ‘the shadow’.

Shadow work is gaining in popularity and I believe there’s a really good reason why. Personally, as a very Scorpio Scorpio, it is the water I swim in and I have a deep love for the process of exploration, growth and healing.

That all said, this part of the journey - loving our shadow - can be intimidating, scary, and just generally un-fun. So why is it so important that we face this part of ourselves?

Simply put, because it is this part of us that actually drives our behaviour. It is this part of ourselves that holds our life force, and contains our true power. When we are in denial of our deep unconscious, we are in fact a slave to it. There is no way of coming into full healing without the descent into meeting ourselves at this deep level.

In my life, my ‘unravelling’ began in 2017, which is when I entered my ‘Ketu Mahadasha’ according to Vedic astrology - this is a 7 year period of deep loss and ultimately a powerful purifier leading to the pearl at the depth of the ocean - coming into connection with our pure essence. This was not a fun journey. Slowly and surely, every part of my well constructed identity began to dismantle. In the January of 2017 I did my first psylicibin journey and it was brutal - I quite literally felt my identity, and all my defense mechanisms being torn down piece by piece. Little did I know that this was the prelude of a deep and profound process.

The culmination came after Covid, where I lost my business as a professional photographer (I was over it, so it was the nudge I needed to move on), my mother’s passing, my breast cancer diagnosis & treatment in which I came close to losing my life to septicemia, the breakup of my relationship, loss of my home, family and community when I decided to leave Cape Town and start a new life in the Garden Route. At the same time dealing with a recurrence of the breast cancer, multiple surgeries, and launching a new business as a Cancer Coach & Transformational Wellness Coach.

Needless to say, the launching of the new business took a back seat to all the other things that I was dealing with. I managed to heal my recurrence naturally and eventually, after a few hops and skips, finding a cottage on a beautiful farm where I could truly sink into my healing journey, in the warm embrace of nature.

Throughout the challenges that kept coming I had no choice but to surrender my sense of having the answers for anything, anymore. I didn’t. I didn’t know which way was up or down, I felt more powerless than I have ever felt, I questioned my use and value as a human being on earth, and many times wished it to all be over. It was all too much for me, and there was no light, no map, no directions, no certainty.

You see, the mind loves certainty. We have been programmed into believing that our mind has the answers. And sometimes, for some of us, our mind gets so loud that something has to come from the outside to break it. I descended into the Underworld. Again and again, I descended. Further and further into the dark. I had nothing to hold onto but the act of surrender. Something in me knew that this was the way - a deeper knowing, beyond the mind. So many New Age teachings promote ‘love and light’ and dismiss the dark as heavy and ‘bad’. We live in a culture of escapism, distraction and addictions defining our days. We have everything we need at our fingertips to take us away from ourselves.

Until the desire for life crushes us.

In the underworld, I learned to love my inner child. I learned to listen to her and give her the space to be heard. I also learned that there are two parts to her - there is the part to her that is sweet, gentle, innocent, naïve that needs my holding and my love. The other part, I call my inner wolf child. This is the child that is mean, angry, spiteful, jealous and petulant. When I met her I was shocked - for I’d so carefully constructed my identity to be a good girl, a people pleaser, kind and caring, never sad or mad or bad. In so doing I’d abandoned myself in the most fundamental way.

Of course we do this for good reason. As children we need to be accepted to be loved and have the safety we need - and so we split apart from the aspects of ourselves that aren’t ‘nice’. We push these away and down and we hide them behind layers of guilt and shame. In the hiding they burst out when we are triggered, yet we still cannot see them and deny their existence, blaming others and projecting these bad parts on anyone but ourselves. Our ego is both strong and fragile - it is fortified to defend and protect and it also cannot hold any suggestion of its fallibility.

The wolf child, once known, has become the key to my healing. She is teaching me unconditional love. And this is really the point of this story that I’m sharing today. When we are told to ‘love our shadow’ - what the hell does this actually mean? Why would we want to love our mean-ness - does that mean we are giving it license to run amok? It is deeper, sweeter and more gentle than that. We are loving the aspect of our child who, when her (or his) needs weren’t met, acted out in the only way they knew, at that tender young age. When children don’t have the support they need to learn to navigate life with safety and holding, they do the best they can with their underdeveloped brains - we are wired to survive, no matter what. We become a pot pourrie of defense mechanisms and survival strategies and these are at odds with how we see ourselves! This is the nature of our shadow. It serves a purpose - it has been trying to keep us safe, while unbeknownst to us, sabotaging our happiness and success.

So my invitation to you is to love your inner child, all parts of her (or him), fully an unconditionally. Love their innocence, their flaws, their ‘bad’ parts, knowing that they have got you this far. When you see rage, shame, lashing out, negative self talk, hold space. True love is holding space. Not abandoning - this is what cause the original wound in the first place. Holding vigil with yourself WITH the bad feelings. When we hold them, as a mother holds a child, they learn that they are not shameful, our compassion is the salve that brings the healing. This practice builds the muscle to recognise that those feelings aren’t who you are, they are merely aspects of self that need our attention and our love.

This is the beautiful path to healing. To meeting all parts of ourselves in love.

In this integration we are no longer pretending to be something we are not, we are no longer wasting energy trying to project a sanitised version of ourselves to the world, we become a loving container of all that we are and because we can own all parts of ourselves we are no longer driven by them. We have found wholeness.

Much love

Sally