What does shadow work actually look like? It’s one thing to understand it theoretically, and I explained all that in another post, but another thing to experience it practically. How do we go from repressing the shadow to integrating the shadow? I’ve shared many examples of shadow integration based on my clients’ lives. I feature those coaching conversations in my podcast, Partners in Sublime. But here, I wanted to share some of my own personal journey and the ways in which I’ve integrated my own shadow.
Example One: Mom Rage
My first example is from when I first started doing shadow work. I was in my final trimester with my first kid, and I discovered a podcast about Jungian psychology that I started listening to regularly and thought to myself, “Whoa, this makes so much sense. This explains why shadow work is so important on the spiritual path.” I started my training in Jungian psychology, and two years later became a master Jungian life coach. By the time I had enrolled in the program and was assigned a mentor coach, I had had my baby, and so many things were coming up to the surface for me.
The first unmistakable one was mom rage.
Now keep in mind, I have been a yoga teacher. I have been in all these spiritual ashrams in the Himalayan foothills, and I know for a fact that anger is the enemy. You do not be angry in spiritual circles. You want to be calm. You want to be at peace, so understandably, anger was in my shadow.
I had disowned it as part of my experience. It doesn’t mean that I didn’t get angry, but when I would get angry, I would tell myself, “Oh, this is righteous anger. This is well-deserved, and of course it’s there, and it’s gonna spring me into action.” And while all that was true, I had come to realize when I became a mom that overall I was not comfortable with my anger. It was something I did not want myself seeing in me, and it was something I definitely did not want other people seeing in me.
Two weeks after my son was born and I had heard about this term called baby blues, that I’d have these rapid shifting of hormones, and I might feel all kinds of extreme emotions. I saw that somebody in the house had opened a bag of wipes to change my son’s diaper even though another bag of open wipes already existed, and that small event tripped me up so bad. I started crying. I started screaming. It got so bad that I punched a pillow for the very first time, and I couldn’t even believe that I was doing that, and for what?
Just because somebody had opened a bag of wipes that we would have to open eventually anyway. I wrestled with that for a bit. At first I told myself, “Oh, this must be the baby blues thing that everyone is talking about.” Yes, hormones can have a way of intensifying our emotions, but they don’t create those emotions in the first place.
It is our past conditioning, our past experiences, things that we’ve forgotten about and repressed that come to the surface with so much charge that creates that emotional upheaval. So it began this long process, and it’s still going on, of me realizing that I too can be an angry person, that I have just as much anger as the next person, and all those people that I was judging when I was in spiritual circles as like, “They are the ones who are angry. They’re the ones who don’t have their temper under control,” all those people, fragments of those people, live within me too.
And I have talked to several moms since, and I’m the first one to admit my mom rage, and that usually gives people the floor to share theirs too, and I really haven’t met a single one who hasn’t told me that they’ve felt so much irritability, and outright mom rage after having a child.
How I Worked With It
So now how did I do shadow work with this? Well, it was a long and cumbersome process, and it’s still going on. But I had to first see what was so bad about this anger that I had to keep it at bay. I really tried initially to limit these spontaneous expressions of mom rage to when nobody was around.
But eventually, it started to spill over when I would talk to my husband or when I talked to my mom, who would be visiting. And initially I tried to hide it. I tried to make it sound like “Of course I’m angry. It’s because my hormones are all over the place,” or, “It’s because my son did this,” or something happened.
But as I started to do my shadow work and realize how uncomfortable I had been with accepting anger as a part of me for my whole life, I started to see that this flow of anger was just a conscious recognition of everything that had always been underneath the surface. All the times that I suppressed my anger in order to be more spiritual, it was now coming out and showing itself. And as I reduced judgment against my anger, I asked myself, “What would happen if people thought I was angry?”
They might think I’m not spiritual enough, or I’m not spiritually advanced enough. And then what is so bad about that? Then I would be just like everybody else. I would be so ordinary. And you keep playing that out, and at the heart of it was just this fear of not being seen as this evolved person that I was spending my whole life becoming. And it is in that pursuit that I had ironically created this shadow that was now coming out and disrupting my plans. As soon as I began to accept that, yep, I can be angry, things became a lot easier.
Whenever I would feel my temper rising — I had one more kid after that, and, you know, invariably I find myself in situations where I’m one person with two toddlers who are trying to run the show, and I feel absolutely out of control, and I get angry about that.
Instead of denying that anger, I simply say out loud, sometimes to myself and sometimes if other people are present, I’ll just say, “I am so mad right now. I need to go to my room.” And I don’t blame the kids, and I don’t blame anybody else, and I just own my anger. I have integrated it into the part of this motherhood and life experience, and now I get to go in a different room and decide what I want to do with it.
I have punched pillows. Like I said, it’s something I had never done until I became a mother. I have cried out loud. I have opened up my laptop and furiously typed all the angry thoughts that are in my head. And invariably, just like with any emotion, when you let yourself express it, it loses its power over you.
It spikes up, and then it comes down. And then a few minutes, maybe an hour of doing that, and I’m able to calm down, come back. And when I do come back, I don’t overexplain or justify why I got angry, why my anger was righteous like I used to. I just own it as a part of me.
Where I’d Rate This Now
I thought it’d be fun to give myself a little rating on how much I’ve integrated my mom rage, and I think now I would give myself a solid eight on ten.
The rage still comes up. I still have some judgment about it. Like, I really wish I could just be calm. But I’ve learned to not hide it from others, and I can own it, not just with my husband, but even with extended family, and then take the time I need to get myself to a good place, and then come back, and continue living life.
Example Two: The Two Kitchens
So the time I began working with a mentor coach on shadow work was the time when I was a new mother. So a lot of the things that I brought to coaching were about my frustrations of not being able to keep up with my spiritual practices that were once the hallmark of my identity during this time of intense sleep deprivation and being able to care for another human being, in a way that totally consumed my life.
One of the rules I had instituted in my home, and I really call it a rule because it was very much of an imposition, is that we had two separate kitchens, and I really did not want to be around any meat or alcohol. So I told my partner, “Hey, you cook in this one, and I’ll cook in this one, and then we can both sit and eat together.”
We both had long days and limited time with each other, and then we had a newborn to care for. But I really tried initially to keep up with this rule no matter what happened. To me, it meant keeping my space pure. It meant arranging my kitchen in this nice Ayurvedic way, free of any bad karma coming from the consumption of a dead animal or alcohol, all of which to me were uncruel acts or vices. I had really been conditioned by the spiritual community to see these things as lowly and unspiritual and not for my taste.
So obviously I didn’t want to allow that in my space. And when I started talking to my coach and explaining, she kind of went down those same line of questioning with me as I explained in part one, “So what’s so bad if people saw that there was meat around you? What’s so bad if there was beer in your fridge?”
And the more I answered that question, the more I realized that it had nothing to do with my own spiritual progress, but it had everything to do with how I thought others might perceive me. And I saw the presence of these things around me as a slippery slope to becoming an unspiritual person myself.
And again, there it was, the fear of not having that cherished, elevated spiritual persona and being just like everybody else. And as I confronted that fear, allowed it to exist, allowed myself to watch it, it started to loosen its grip on me.
One Session, Immediate Change
And just like that, after one session, my husband came back from work, and I told him, “You know, I’ve rearranged things in the kitchen a little bit. From now on, we can all cook together, use the same utensils. I don’t care.” He was so surprised ’cause I had fervently held out this differentiation in our household for so long that he told me, “Are you sure? Is this some temporary tryout thing?” And I’m like, “No, I am sure. This is how it’s gonna be. It doesn’t bother me anymore.”
The change felt so quick because what I had done, and I realize this now, is that I had taken all the emotional charge that was lying underneath that particular trigger and rule, and I had seen it for what it really was and realized that it was nothing, and I was able to make a conscious choice about which food I should or shouldn’t allow.
Now, keep in mind, I did not become a meat eater after this. I did not start drinking alcohol. In fact, not very much changed around my own beliefs. I used to be vegan. I started consuming some raw milk when I was breastfeeding, to help with lactation. But I did not judge myself for it.
The entire judgment around what people eat was suddenly gone, and I found it so liberating that I could just hang out with my partner in our home, not worry about having to keep my space all sattvic and pure, and it was the biggest energy release that I had experienced ’cause this thing was bothering me from the day I entered the US.
The Coconut Water in a Wine Glass
Every time I would go to a networking event in business school, and they would serve alcohol, and there’d be nothing for me to eat or drink. Even water would be icy cold. I remember going to a bartender once and saying, “Hey, can I get water without ice?” And they poured from the same jug and just avoided the ice cubes. And I was like, “Why don’t they understand? You can’t have freezing cold water in the middle of New York winters.” And now I see that that’s just something that people do, and people can be different, and they can make different choices.
And me judging those choices was just me fervently holding on to the purity and sanctity and supremeness of my own choices, none of which needed to be done. And I’d mentioned in part one that we all do shadow work unconsciously because if we’re progressing in life and getting older and having experiences, it will happen.
Over a few years of being in the U.S., I had realized how central alcohol was to any kind of festivities and hanging out. So there was this one time I was working in a tech company in San Francisco and they were going to Napa Valley for a wine tasting tour as part of a team building event.
So normally I would be really annoyed about this, at that point I had been in the U.S. three, four years and I knew what to expect. So instead of complaining that the event was not inclusive — I never did that out loud, by the way, but I had lots of inward judgments — I just took two packs of coconut water with me to this trip and I remember there’s a picture of me: I’m just sitting in a nice chair holding a wine glass filled with coconut water. I’ve never had alcohol in my life, but I truly enjoyed that trip because I was able to accept it, not judge it and just be able to drink coconut water. But I had come to see that as a form of adaptation that I just had to do and I wasn’t exactly very happy about needing to do it.
But the change that I made in my own space, where I was holding myself to a much higher standard, letting myself come down from that standard was truly liberating. So you too, as you’re reading these examples, you might realize that you might have been doing shadow work a little bit here and there, but it’s engaging in that process consciously and with zeal that you start to really multiply your results, and each layer uncovers another layer that you can peel, and the process is lifelong, but you continue making yourself freer and lighter as you go through it.
Where I’d Rate This Now
If I had to rate this part of my life, I’d give myself a good nine on ten in this area because I was able to really make my home space very nice and judgment free. And the only times I still experience this judgment is if I go to a party and I realize there’s nothing that I enjoy eating or drinking there.
And even then I’ve learned to eat in advance, take my own food with me, and I no longer make it somebody else’s problem.
Example Three: The Fear of Getting Married Again
Okay, time for the final example. I saved this one for the last, even though I think I worked on it relatively early. So I’ve been married before and the end of that marriage was one of the most tragic experiences of my life. I might share more about it another time, but suffice to say it truly hurt every plan I’d made for myself and the very core of my identity and I had to rebuild my life from scratch after that happened.
So when I met my partner, the one I’ve been referring to this whole time, I was so sure, and I told him, “I don’t wanna be married again.” I told him that it was such a pain to go through divorce with someone who was mentally unstable, and I just did not want to risk it again. And I also told him that the veil had lifted from my eyes when it comes to marriage.
I don’t see this as a sacred container anymore. I see it as a legal contract that is very difficult to get out of if things go south, and we don’t need a piece of paper. We just need to be together and have a life. And I was totally ready to have a life with him. We already had a baby by this point, and we were hoping to have another one.
But marriage was not on my list of things to do. I’d kind of written it off as something I tried, I failed at, and I’m not doing it again. And it came up in passing in one of my coaching conversations, and I told this whole story that I’m just telling you to my coach, and she was like, “Okay, so basically you don’t wanna get married ’cause you’re afraid you might get divorced again.”
The Question That Changed Things
And I tried to reflect it back to her and correct it so it sounded better, but I just couldn’t. I was like, “Yeah. Yeah, I guess that’s what I’m doing.” I get divorced once, maybe I can blame the other person, but if I get divorced again, that’s gonna be my problem. And she asked me that if I had no fear of getting divorced again, or if I had no fear of being judged for getting divorced again, what would I do?
And without a thought, I told her, “I would totally marry my partner. I’m absolutely in love with him. We have a child together. We wanna grow and have a family. He’s one of the best things that have happened to me.” And I always believed in the idea of marriage, even though I’ve come to see another aspect of it.
And then, yeah, I just put two and two together and realized that it was my fear of getting divorced again that was holding me back from marriage. And again, just like that, that day, my husband came home from work, and I told him, “Hey, we’re traveling to visit family over the holidays, over winter break, and I would love for us to get married there if you’re open to it.”
And he was really joyed, because it’s something that he wanted and he had been divorced before too, but he didn’t carry that kind of judgment against divorce that I carried growing up in India where almost nobody I saw ever got divorced. And if somebody did, you know, it was their fault for not trying hard enough.
And I realized all that judgment still lived inside me and was in my shadow. And the minute I confronted it, I saw what it was about. And I was able to make a conscious choice from this vantage point that I didn’t have before.
Where I’d Rate This Now
For my marriage, I’ll give myself a good ten on ten because I did go ahead and take the leap and fully confronted this fear. And now I’m married and very happy, and I’m so glad that I did the shadow work to be able to go to this point, to wholeheartedly embrace this part of my journey that always mattered to me, but I had let fear keep me from it.
The Common Thread
So if you see the common thread across these examples, you’ll notice that the shadow comes about in strong emotional reactions, in these patterns of like, this is how I have to be. This is the face I have to show to the world. This is the face I have to show myself. And the process of integration looks like replacing that have to or should or must with want to.
Nothing really changed. If you look at the situation with what I was eating before and after, nothing really changed. I also don’t think that miraculously my mom rage evaporated. But what did change was my attitude toward it. And there was no longer any shame or guilt associated with it. There was no longer any rigidity.
I allowed myself to feel angry. I allowed myself to experience the joy of marriage again. I allowed myself to eat what I wanted to eat without judging other people. I know these three are very distinct examples, but the common thread is that I went from having to do something to choosing to do something.
And this transition, this choice is what represents our free will.
We go from the unconscious directing our life without us even knowing it to us consciously choosing what to do and how to be moment to moment.
I hope all these examples motivate you to begin your own shadow work, to finally free yourself from the unconscious actors that are directing your life. Go get to know your shadow and tell me in the comments what you found.
