As a witch who is deeply intertwined with her dark feminine, shadow work has become an intricate and necessary party of my craft. It helps me to progress both in my mundane and metaphysical way. I know I am not alone in my connection to shadow work, after all the digital space has put a strong emphasis on shadow work, but often our obsessions turn into pressure for younger witches. So I wanted to say that Shadow Work is not mandatory to practice witchcraft. There is no definitive proof that a witch who does shadow work regularly will automatically be more attune with the energy force, with nature, with the divine, or with themselves. If shadow work does not seem like your thing, ok don’t do it. If, on the other hand, you are avoiding shadow work because you don’t want to put effort into healing yourself, then you will see detriments in your craft. Witchcraft requires trust in yourself when casting, and doubt will make it easier for spells to not work or backfire. You should always work on mending the relationship with yourself.
The Shadow Self
An intrinsic part of shadow work is the understanding of the shadow self. In the simplest terms, your shadow self is all the parts of you you try to suppress (both consciously and subconsciously). Do you have this compulsive desire to lie in unnecessary situations? Have you ever enjoyed hurting someone? The shadow self is sometimes thought of as the devil on your shoulder but it’s different for everyone. Some people try to suppress the angel on their shoulder, by pretending they don’t care about anyone, when in actuality they can’t stop themselves from caring for everyone. The shadow self are all the qualities about ourselves that we try to deny exist in the first place.
In addition to the parts of ourselves we consciously try to hide from, there are the parts of ourselves that we have unconsciously hid from ourselves. These parts usually hold the traumas of our lives. During traumatic events, our conscious brain may modify, alter, or just delete certain actions, emotions, and/or experiences that it believes we will not be able to handle. Although there exists some debate in the scientific world on whether repression can truly occur, as someone with lots of trauma and a multitude of recently unlocked repressed memories, skeptics can kindly Fuck off. In shadow work we ask the questions that will get our brain to start letting the repressed memories slide out of the unconscious headspace into the conscious headspace.
The shadow self is the holder of all of this, and in shadow work you will develop a new relationship with your shadow self. How you develop this relationship will vary from other practitioners based on how you perceive your shadow self. For me I separate my shadow self, conscious self, and higher self into three unique states of being that can interact in conversation as if separate individuals. I do this in order to create the disconnect I need for more raw answers to questions I’m not particularly ready for but need to hear.
Methods for Shadow Work
The most discussed way to do shadow work is through journaling and answering shadow prompts. Shadow prompts set out an activity for you to perform or a question for you to answer, and they usually are made to be done through writing. However, this does not mean you have to write to do shadow work. For some people, sitting and writing mini essays analyzing yourself after a week of writing reports for work or assignments for school is just too stressful. So what else is there we can do?
Remember shadow work is simply the process by which you access and build a relationship with your shadow self. You can do this in therapy. Therapists tend to have us answer the hard questions about ourselves during sessions. These deep verbal expressions of repressed memory and desires require you to access them. Another method is deep meditations in which we examine the questions we find from shadow prompts. Rather than writing it all down, for some it’s just easier to lose ourselves in deep thought and start answering the questions in our head. Another method is through artistic self expression: poetry, drawing, dancing, singing, which are all methods for evoking previously concealed emotions. Sometimes simply listening to music with song lyrics that resonate with our trauma, can force us to go through our repressions.
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