It seems shadow work is coming up in my life again. There were some issues the last time I did it. It was last year, and I thought I was good for a while, but the universe has a way of letting you know when it’s time to start working on something again. There are no coincidences. Divine timing, it’s called. Which is different from human timing, but often, that’s how it goes.

I’ve written about shadow work previously, giving the basic run down of how to do it and how it works. I’m being prompted to write a little more in-depth about it. About how superficial or how deeply shadow work can affect us.

Shadow work can be helpful if you’re looking to break a bad habit like smoking or to supercharge your confidence by removing and replacing beliefs and thought patterns that are sabotaging your efforts. It can also help you release pent-up emotions from a traumatic event.

The difference is you. You get to decide how deep you want to go. You are in control the entire time and determine the level of pain you’re willing to explore and release. The problem with pain, whether physical or emotional, is that there’s only so much of it we can take before we crack. What happens when we finally break apart can range from hurting ourselves and someone else to lying on the floor, curled into a ball, speechless, and staring at nothing. Pain can transform a person into someone unrecognizable, even to themselves.

The difficult part of doing shadow work is the emotions that can often arise in the process. Things that have hurt us stick with us. They can be associated with words, sounds, locations, scent, taste, or color. Almost everyone has a story about something unpleasant they ate or drank, and just a whiff of it takes them right back to the experience. For me, it’s Bacardi, don’t ask.

All joking aside, when doing shadow work, we might be working on being less judgmental when a memory comes back to us about how someone once judged us and how that felt. We then see how that one moment made us turn and become more critical of ourselves and others to the point where we now stand on the other side of that interaction. Emotion is the key.

Part of what makes shadow work effective is that it allows us to release pent-up emotions. Things we have stuffed down and refused to deal with – refused to feel. When things happen, we can’t always take the time to feel. We have to act, to respond to the experience we’re having. Later on, we can choose to store those feelings away and get on with our lives as if they never happened.

Except they did.

An experience can never be erased. The feelings that go with it can’t be ignored forever. How do we know this? One way or another, the pain will show itself. If not expressed in a healthy way, it will rise in unhealthy ways such as addiction or criminal activity. Misery does love company. People who hurt want others to hurt too. It can also be expressed as aggression, intimidation, lack of empathy, or thoughtlessness. There are many ways to hurt others and ourselves. Shadow work makes it possible to explore that pain in a safe, secure way where there is no judgment, no wrong answers, and no wrong way to feel.

The point is to feel. So many of us push away our emotions to avoid feeling anything. We often believe that it’s better to feel nothing than to feel pain, but we can’t run from it. We take it with us wherever we go until we release it. To release it, you have to feel it. We don’t have to deal with everything all at once in shadow work. We can take our time and release our feelings a little at a time. There is no wrong way to do this, no time limit. It’s what we can handle and when. Whatever you decide is perfect. Whether you choose to let things rise to be exposed to light and air or allow them to sink back into the inky darkness of your shadow self is up to you. Keep going. The only way forward is through.