How To See What's In Your Shadow

Happy Halloween! That Scorpio new moon partial eclipse was something, wasn’t it? Scorpio is shadow energy. If you don’t know what you want, can’t get what you want, or are sabotaging yourself from having or keeping what you want, you have something in shadow that is standing in the way of success, and today I am going to help you see what that thing is so you can let it go.

Hi, I’m Laura Giles. Thanks for being here. If my podcast helps or entertains you, please give a little back by liking, sharing, subscribing or reviewing the podcast as it helps my rating so others can find us more easily. Thanks.

So, what am I talking about? What’s a shadow. Actually, it’s a pretty big buzz word that is making the rounds in the self help, psychology, and spiritual communities, but the idea has been around for at least a hundred years. To keep it simple, “shadow” just means the things you can’t see. So, anything that is not obvious or known to you is in shadow. It’s typically something unpleasant, but not always.

So raise your hand if you have ever been cheated on and were the last to know. That’s probably most of us, right? That was me a long time ago. It was a normal day like any other. The sun is shining. I’m in a good mood, doing my thing and the phone rings. I go to the kitchen to pick it up - this is back in the days before everyone had a cell phone. There is a woman on the line speaking words nobody ever wants to hear and even though it is the last thing I would have suspected just a moment before, I didn’t need any convincing to know that what she is telling me is true.

Why? Because we always know. We’re all connected. You, me, Einstein, Elvis, President Biden, the little girl who is sitting in the kindergarten class right now, are all connected. We are each within each other. So, whatever you know is knowable. What I know is also knowable. Everything is knowable if we just tune in and pay attention. This is why I don’t lie. I don't think we ever really get away with anything, so why bother lying? 

Anyway, once she tells me the details, I look back at all the evidence I overlooked. When you love someone, you want them to love you back. You want to believe that all the loving things they say are true, so you give them the benefit of the doubt. You write off the red flags as meaningless so you can keep on living the fantasy because the pain is too hard to bear. And that’s exactly what I did until I couldn’t do it anymore. 

We are often presented with little pings of information that we find unpleasant or painful. When we shove it down into shadow, it’s not gone. It’s still full of all the emotions that we didn’t feel. The more we push it down, the more power we give it, so it turns into physical pain, anxiety, or depression, and we don’t know why.

We don’t know why we say we want to go back to school, but we don’t sign up for classes. Our job bores us to tears, but we won’t look for another one. We’re overweight, depressed, and look like we just rolled out of bed most days and it’s like we barely notice. That’s shadow stuff. 

For me, it was anger. I wasn’t as easy going as I used to be. I wasn’t horrible, but I wasn’t myself. I would get upset faster and stay upset a little longer. My tone wasn’t as perky and warm as it used to be. Looking back now I can see it, but then I couldn’t. That’s not how I see myself. That’s not who I want to be, so when it all came out, I said I was taken by surprise, but was I really? No, not really.

So, if you want to see your shadow, the first thing you have to do is stop lying to yourself. My ex didn’t get away with it because he was such a good liar. He did lie, but I bought the lie. Our bodies don’t lie. Our bodies know, and mine ignored it because I didn’t want to lose him. I didn’t want my life to change. I didn’t want to go through that heartache and grief. So, I just denied the whole thing until I couldn’t deny it anymore.

So, if you want to see your shadow, you’re going to have to practice what I call radical honesty. Yes, we want to give people the benefit of the doubt. We don’t want to be on high alert for every trespass and perceive everything as an insult. I am not talking about that. I am talking about seeing everything as it is objectively, without creating a story about it.

See, we not only lie to ourselves, we tell ourselves stories about our experiences that aren’t true. These stories can either hurt us or harm us. The story that I was telling myself was that he loved me way too much to do such a thing. Our relationship was way too important and precious to him. That belief overrode the evidence of my intuition and eyes. 

If I were awake and practicing radical honesty with myself, I would have had more questions a lot earlier on.

Radical honesty means taking ownership of your own experience. If it’s morning time and your honey is walking out the door saying, “I am going to play ball with the guys after work. I’ll be a little late tonight” and then later says, “I didn’t say that. You must have been thinking about last week” or “No, I said I was going to get a haircut” do you brush it off as a small thing? Most of us do. Most of us dismiss it and said, “Okay, I must have been mistaken” because we know that we have made mistakes in the past. It’s an easy thing to do, right? And the stakes seem low, so why make a big deal out of it? 

This is the stuff I’m talking about. Now, I am not advocating that you start nitpicking people and hold them to exact details. The point that I am making is that when you start doubting yourself, you might be preparing the darkroom of secrets for another entry.

Paying attention is another way to stay awake and aware. If you make a practice of feeling your feelings, talking about your experiences, and validating your experiences, things don’t have a reason to go into hiding. It’s also easier for what’s hiding there to pop out where you can see it.

It’s about building trust with yourself. If your inner self feels that you can handle the truth, you will begin to see it in flashes of insight, in your dreams, in the song on the radio. You will just know. It’s like a gut punch of truth serum. 

But you’ve got to be emotionally capable - after all the reason why the thing is in shadow to begin with is that some part of you felt reality would be too hard to handle. Making a commitment to know yourself and be yourself and then really honoring that commitment will bring things out of shadow.

But let says we are total chickens and want to let sleeping dogs lie. Guess what? Your shadow will creep up on you and look for any opening to hijack your dreams or disrupt your emotions anyway.

Have you ever been in an argument and spoke a horrible truth that as soon as it’s out of your mouth, you wish you could unsay it? That’s your shadow. A part of you really meant that. I know most people say they don’t mean it, apologize, and wish that they could take it back, but I’m urging you to look at it. It’s speaking a fear, a truth.

Have you seen When a Monster Calls? It’s one of my favorite movies. I won’t ruin the punchline, but that happens in that movie. Someone speaks a horrible truth and what’s in shadow bursts into the light of day and the healing process begins.

That’s why there is so much energy behind our shadow selves. They want to come out, be recognized, and accepted so we can be whole. We can’t really love ourselves if we are denying the ugly parts. We have ugly parts!

Trauma triggers are another way that our shadow comes out. Invalidation is a common trigger for all of us. I was triggered once by watching this video. I wasn’t even face to face with the speaker. This was a rebroadcast of her talking and I was feeling really funky. I just wanted to push her away. I had such a strong reaction to her that I was on alert that something was triggered.

So, let me pause for a second to help you understand what a trigger is so that you know when you’re being triggered. A trigger is any event that evokes an emotional reaction that is bigger than the situation calls for from someone who is in a healthy, balanced state. If you grew up in a family that is loud, argues, and calls each other names, you may not realize that this is abusive behavior, hence the qualification of what a healthy response looks like. So, had I been objective and centered, her words would have had no emotional impact at all. I may have disagreed or not liked something about her hair or clothes or something, but I wouldn’t have been bothered by it. So, a trigger is different from simply not agreeing or liking something. It’s bigger than that.

But it might also look like erupting in anger, shutting down, leaving, becoming really sweet and nice so that someone will be easier to be around. These are all fight, flight, flee, and fawn responses that happen when we are in a state of high emotion. These are giant red flags that something is in shadow that is poking the bear - meaning you.

So, when I was watching that video, the speaker wasn’t saying anything provocative, but my sense was that she was talking down to me. That left me feeling invalidated. So the thing that is in shadow is going to be something around that - not feeling appreciated, seen, or maybe good enough. 

Are you getting the idea that what’s in shadow really isn’t hiding all that well? It’s not. You’ve heard me say a million times that the body tells the truth. We all carry the truth of our stories in our bodies. If you walk with your chest caved in, that’s a protective posture. It’s easy to see that you don’t feel confident. You’re shrinking and don’t want to be seen. Something happened to create that posture and belief. Getting that out in the open and releasing it can dramatically change the way your body functions in seconds.

This happened to me twice. Well, more than that actually, but I once did some Rolfing just for the experience of it. I didn’t have any expectations, but the Rolfer told me that my shoulders were not moving freely. Now, I’ve known most of my life that I had really poor upper body strength. I am like a little T-Rex with these itty bitty arms that can’t do a whole lot. It has inhibited my ability to swim well, surf, and lift heavy weights. Well, the Rolfer did something miraculous and freed up my whole upper body and I was able to move with a lot more ease, breathe better, and lift more.

I have no idea what created that stuck pattern. Sometimes when you’re releasing it, something clicks and you figure things out, but I never got the story, but it doesn’t matter. Sometimes we never do. All I know is that something was in my body, and now it’s not. We can carry things that we aren’t aware we are carrying because we’ve had them so long that they just seem normal - it’s a part of us.

Another time, I was in a training and we were practicing a technique on each other. I didn’t go there searching for something to release. I wasn’t looking for something in Shadow. We were just following the lead of the body and again, something released and it changed the way that I stand. It sounds kind of funny, but I used to walk with my shoulders pulled forward so when I was standing, my arms didn’t hang at my sides. They were always a little in front. After doing this energy release, they now hang at my sides naturally.

So, when I say that we all carry emotion in our bodies, this is what I mean. It impacts how we move, sit, breathe, and function in the world. If you are trained in the language of the body, you can look at someone and see their life story in their structure. The body can tell when an emotional or physical injury occurred. It can say whether a man or women hurt you. It shows how that impacted you - by that I mean, you responded in anger, or by being small, or by not speaking up.

This is another reason why I say that everything is knowable. Nothing is in secret. If nothing is destroyed, just transformed, the energy or truth that you seek to hide is just moved to another form. It’s out there. You just have to know where to look for it to see it. 

We’re physical creatures. Our bodies aren’t incidental. We’re not meat wagons. They are part of us. If you aren’t in touch with your body, it’s like flying blind or being deaf. You’re living in a greatly diminished capacity.

We’re energetic creatures. Emotions are energy that is experienced through the body, so healing it energetically is possible.

Sound can heal like this, so can breathwork. There are so many ways to release stuck energy forever. Fall is the season for dying and letting go. My opinion is that if you aren’t learning how your body works, how to take care of it, and how to release it, you’re doing yourself a disservice. We’re physical beings and for as long as you are here, that is part of you. It’s an expression of your inner self. If you ignore it and dissociate from it, you’re going to have a diminished experience of life and probably not be all that healthy.

So shadow work is a way to get to know your whole self. Becoming conscious to the self awakens the entire universe, so there is no better use of anyone’s time than that. And I mean this for the self and the whole. We’re part of the whole, and as within, so without, so as I straighten and clean myself up, everything outside of me changes too.

One of the most awesome things I’ve ever heard about myself is, “You’re living a different experience.” I took that as a compliment, and people who have worked with me a while begin to pick that up. They see the world differently, ask different questions, and respond more honestly to life because they are having a more conscious experience. 

Last week, a client and I were speaking about a problem she was having. Here we are on a sunny afternoon. I’m sitting at my computer, looking at her through a screen and she says, “You know, I know what skill you will tell me to use. I can do it. It’s been a great help to me in the past, and I am just not willing to do that in this instance.” I am thinking, “Wow, this is really honest and amazing” because willingness is one of the key things that you are going to need if you are going to go anywhere, but particularly if you are going to do shadow work. 

Now it might sound like a strange thing to applaud her statement, given that she was offering me a conscious roadblock, but it wasn’t. She was never stuck. She knew exactly where she was and was choosing to be there. I didn’t have to dig around for anything. We didn’t have to ask her body. Her mind, body, and spirit were pretty close to being in alignment so all I had to do was reframe the situation and turn it to help her see things differently and she switched right back into being willing to move forward with things as they are.

The beautiful thing about this is that if you are not seeking to reveal your shadow, you’re choosing unconsciousness, plain and simple, and you can’t have a vibrant, authentic life from there. Life’s not all sugar and spice. There are parts that are not nice, hard, painful, and unfair, but it can be brutiful. And all that means is that we accept both sides of the coin. We can’t have a front without a back. We can’t have light without dark, and consciousness is choosing to engage with both as they are.

So, I mentioned non-traumatic shadows. Now remember that what’s in shadow is something that we’re simply unaware of. It doesn’t have to have been a painful memory, but since these things are driving our unconscious bus, it helps to be aware of them if they are creating behavior patterns that aren’t what we want so we can release the energy behind them.

Now, one of my non-traumatic shadows resulted in a behavior pattern of, um, I’m not sure what to call it. It wasn’t exactly invisibility, but maybe more something like being overlooked or unapplauded. That feels more right - unsung. What actually happened was, I think it was last week, I said that people don’t listen to me. I’m like Cassandra. I say something, and then some times passes, and they tell me about this wonderful thing that they just discovered because someone else said it. 

That’s cool. That happens. But this was happening a lot. So, I said it in my podcast and was tempted to delete it, but then I said, “It’s my truth in this moment, so leave it in. Let me use this.” I admit it bothered me because it sounded like a pity party or blaming or weakness, so I leaned into it.

The first thing I do is to take responsibility for things that aren’t to my liking. I may not have created the problem, but if I take responsibility, I have the power to do something and that’s far preferable to being a sitting duck. And there are three parts to any problem: knowledge, skill, and seeing what’s in shadow. For the things we can control, the solution is going to lie in one of those three things.

Did I have a knowledge deficit? A knowledge deficit is a key that leads to greater understanding. One of my little nuggets is “The system seeks homeostasis.” A system is anything with two or more parts. Every system wants to be balanced, and it finds a way to do that. Mother Nature is a system, our bodies are systems, relationships are systems. When we do something in one area, another area will shift to compensate and find the balance that we are used to. So, if I am used to being in a dysfunctional relationship and I am trying to get better, my partner may push back because I am changing things and disrupting the status quo. If I don’t know this, I might think that the push back is a sign that things will never change, this is hopeless, and I give up. So, this is an example of a knowledge deficit, and in my case, my Cassandra complex wasn’t about that.

So, the obvious thing would be to become a better speaker. That’s a skill issue. Communication happens when the intended message is received, and if my message isn’t being received, it’s because I’m doing something or not doing something to help it land. I have control over what and how I am sending my message and can change that so that it’s clearer and more impactful, right? 

Now that’s a real possibility. Box checked. It’s in the process of improving, but that ball is rolling. Now, I am not naïve enough to think that it’s simply a skill issue, although it could be. Just to be sure, I checked in with myself to see if there could be a block or a program running in the background that I was unaware of and sure enough, bingo! There are lots of memories of being unsung. It’s not just with speaking.

And where did that get started? Well, guess what? It was taught. Of course, right? When I was a kid, I was taught to not stand out, to be humble, don’t let your accomplishments go to your head, and that kind of thing. I was a pretty dynamite kid. I did a lot of things that other kids didn’t have the opportunity to do, and to fit in, I chose to downplay all this and be a regular guy. 

Not to say I am not a regular gal, but you can see how this might contribute to being unsung, right? None of what I was taught or chose to do was a bad thing. In fact, I think it’s a pro-social thing. The more we stand out, get on a pedestal, and climb our way to the top, the more distance we put between ourselves and other people. It disconnects us. 

And yet there is always an “and” and this one is that being appreciated or seen doesn’t have to mean that you can’t be connected too. So, use everything at your disposal to see your whole self. See how both the positive and undesirable things created the person who you are now.

There is a beautiful line in the movie “What’s Eating Gilbert Grape.” Becky is a girl who is traveling through this small town with her grandmother and their RV breaks down. She meets some of the local people and one of them, Gilbert, takes her to meet his mother, who is an obese shut in who is used to being laughed at. Mom’s ashamed of herself. She’s sitting there with her head hanging down, and the first thing mom says to Becky is, “I wasn’t always like this.” Becky, being a wise and conscious girl, responds, “I wasn’t always like this.”

None of us were always like this. We can change if we are willing. We will change whether we want to or not - that’s the nature of life. At the very least, we will get older, but if you want to grow in a conscious direction and on the path of your choosing, you have to become aware of your shadow. 

Some say that our shadow stays with us forever. The nature of life is that light and darkness are balanced, and what that means for me is that I will always have the capacity for anger, jealousy, hurt, hate, lust, shame, and all the things we don’t encourage in a person. But that doesn’t mean I have to choose it. The more light that I shine into those dark corners, the more that life becomes a choice. So, those hurt parts of myself can be healed and the negative things can be things that happened that hold no negative charge.

In today’s podcast, I’ve given you lots of ways to see what’s in shadow. If you want to see how easy it is to release known blocks and the ones that are in shadow that are keeping you stuck, come to my free monthly gathering where that’s what I do. I work with attendees to knock out blind spots without having to talk about them. It’s quick and easy so why would you not? I will put the link in the show notes. 

Thanks for joining me. Don’t forget to subscribe to the podcast, so you get an alert when the next one drops. Happy Halloween! See you all next week.