I recently came out of a period of self-directed inner healing. I spent about a year moving through it. If you are embarking on this yourself it could be intimidating, perhaps a little scary or overwhelming. That is why I put together some tips I hope will be helpful for those of you new to this, or perhaps early in your healing journey.
Shadow work and self-healing can be difficult work, but the reward far outweighs the difficulty of it. The early stages of it can be really tough, but as you gain insight and experience breakthroughs it gets easier and you will almost want to kick yourself for avoiding it, because what is on the other side is beautiful.
I spent about a year doing my own self-healing work, or at least having that be my primary focus. I know now it is lifelong and ongoing, but once you get the hang of it you can move through things faster and with less turmoil. I developed some tips to help with guiding the process based on my own journey with this:
- Commit to doing this for yourself.
- Lean into the work.
- Give yourself grace.
- Ask for help and support when needed.
- Use meditation.
I had all sorts of pain and trauma that I had been carrying around most of my life that I was largely oblivious to before I learned about and started my inner healing journey. Yes, there were more obvious things like the effects of being verbally and physically bullied by many kids, for many years. But, there were also other things that had created trauma or otherwise scarred me emotionally that I was unaware of, or more specifically, unaware of how it was manifesting in my mental health and my outlook and life. This is why it is called shadow work; because you start to uncover parts of yourself and your past that you were blind to before starting the work.
Triggers are our primary clues to these past hurts and traumas. Triggers are essentially automatic, intense emotional responses or knee-jerk reactions to various things we experience. A range of things can cause them. Some examples are things people say, certain social or environmental situations and circumstances, things we see in movies or videos, sometimes even just hearing a certain type of story from someone. We can experience them in multiple ways as well. It could be a physical reaction, a feeling in the body. It could cause an emotional reaction like anger, panic, or sorrow. They can also cause us to go into a form of self-sabotage, which can be things like binge eating, drinking, smoking, procrastinating, avoiding, pushing people away, saying hurtful things or behaviors that hurt ourselves or those we love.
If you are unaware of the underlying cause of these triggers, like I was, you may be mystified as to why you cycle through the patterns you do. I could never understand it. One example I experienced in recent years is where I would get close to my body goal and I’d start indulging in drinking more, which led me to not eating as well, or eating the wrong types of things when I was drinking. I relapsed on smoking several times. Then I’d beat myself up about it asking myself what is wrong with you? Why can’t you get it together? Why do you keep doing this? Well, years later I start doing the shadow and healing work and I finally started getting to the root of it. It took me about a year to get down to the root and identify all the different past traumas, hurts, and other painful experiences that had collectively led to a lifelong battle with my weight, body image, depression, anxiety, and self-sabotage.
It wasn’t necessarily that I was avoiding the work, it was that I didn’t know how to do the work or that I even needed to. I recently hosted a free master class in my private, free Facebook group around this. If you aren’t in there yet, I welcome you to join and check it out before I take it down. It is called the Connection between Health and Unhealed Past Trauma. I share how I uncovered this for myself as well as the impacts of this on our health, so I won’t cover that here. For today, I want to focus on some tips that I found helpful as I moved through my own shadow work and inner healing.
- Commit to doing this for yourself.
This is the first thing for a reason and that’s because it is the most important. You won’t get far with this work if you aren’t fully committed to doing the work and more importantly doing this for yourself; for your wellbeing. This is not a journey full of sunshine and rainbows. Let’s just be real about it. But, it is the path to a better you and, ultimately, the life of your dreams; because when you get to the root of all this shit and learn how to process it and clear it, you change and grow and shift in ways you won’t believe. You will not be the same person at the end, in the best way possible. - Lean into the work.
Stuff is going to come up; it is supposed to, that’s how you heal it. You will want to avoid it. You will want to suppress, rationalize, burry, etc. Do not do this. Lean into it. Sit with the feelings that come up, so you can let them out. If you need to isolate yourself for periods of time, so be it. You have never really processed the things that come up, which is why it is presenting as a trigger or pattern or cycle. One of my previous episodes and blog posts on this provides a framework for this part. It is called “Seven Steps for Healing Emotional Triggers” check it out for more in-depth guidance on moving through the emotional triggers that inevitably arise when you do this. I also created a journal that supports this phase of the work, called the Growth and Healing Journal. You can find the link in the episode description. - Give yourself grace.
One of the most important aspects of this work is to give yourself lots of love and grace through the inner healing process. A lot of what you are doing in this is healing past versions of you that experienced these different things. It will be important to mother yourself, so to speak at this time. How do you respond to your child when they are hurting in some way? Treat yourself in a similar manner. Take the rest you need. Care for yourself and most of all be loving to yourself as you move through this process. - Ask for help and support when needed.
Lean on friends and loved ones as much as possible through this. Seek those you trust and talk to them if you need some extra support through this. You may even want to consider a few sessions with a therapist, depending on what you uncover. You can also search social media for groups focused on this work as there are all sorts of groups and communities out there where you could find people moving through this as well. - Use Meditation.
Last is meditation. Simple, no agenda meditations that just help calm the nervous system. Reach out to God in your meditations as well. He will help carry the weight of these emotions and help you heal. It is very simple. Start with deep breathing. Breathe in to a count of four. Hold for a count of four. Exhale as long and slow as you can. Repeat several times. When you feel yourself start to relax, just continue breathing and allow yourself to sit in meditation for a few minutes.
So, those are some tips I discovered through my own healing journey. I can tell you that with time it gets easier and you get faster at moving through it. I can also tell you that this has been huge in breaking negative cycles and patterns of self-sabotage for me. Now that I am aware of the reasons that were leading me down these paths in the past, they no longer have the power over me that they used to. Now I have learned to stop and ask myself questions so I can figure out what why the trigger is coming up, what is it I am moving into that my ego finds uncomfortable? This is the key to breaking cycles and ascending to the next level version of you.
Alright, I really hope this blesses and helps you. As always, I’d love to hear from you so please share your thoughts in the comments. If you aren’t already, please join the FREE Faith Fitness Joy Facebook group. Thanks so much for stopping by!