Shadow Work for the Soul

Autorentext

Mary Mueller Shutan is a spiritual healer and teacher with an extensive background in Chinese Medicine, CranioSacral therapy, Zero Balancing, and energy work. She is the author of The Spiritual Awakening Guide, The Complete Cord Course, The Body Deva, and Managing Psychic Abilities. Mary lives near Chicago, Illinois.

Zusammenfassung
A comprehensive guide to identifying and reclaiming your shadow

• Explains how your shadow develops and how your reactivity to specific people and situations reflects the ways you project your shadow onto others

• Presents a wide variety of shadow work tools, emotional intelligence exercises, and self-inquiry practices to help you identify your shadow and heal and release any shadow-related traumas

• Explores the concept of collective shadows, including online shadows and relationship shadows, and reveals how to free yourself from shadow projections

Throughout our lives, we repress and deny the parts of our authentic selves that our families, peers, and the world told us were wrong, unlovable, or “too much,” and from this repression our shadow is born. By the time we reach adulthood, much of our authentic self is shadow. The connection we once had to who we truly are has been severed, and we no longer feel vibrant and enthusiastic about life.

In this practical and trauma-informed guide to deep shadow work, Mary Mueller Shutan explains how to find compassion for your dark side, reconnect with the repressed and abandoned parts of yourself, and reclaim the resiliency and joy of your authentic, whole self. She reflects on the positive, protective role of the shadow and describes how it is composed not only of the trauma and darkness we have experienced, but also the light we have yet to absorb. She explains how your reactivity to specific people and situations—your “triggers”—reflects your own pain and the ways you project your shadow onto others and the outer world. Presenting a wide variety of shadow work tools and emotional intelligence exercises, the author teaches you how to identify your shadow projections and safely and skillfully work with the difficult emotions that may arise during shadow work.

As you discover and understand more of your personal dark places, the author then introduces the concept of collective shadows that are created by society yet affect us individually, including online shadows and relationship shadows. She explains how to identify and free yourself from the projections of collective shadows to promote individual and collective health.

Offering a self-directed process for healing trauma and reclaiming the eclipsed light of your shadow, Shutan shows how shadow work allows you to move beyond the restrictions you’ve placed on yourself and others and see the beauty inherent in the dark places of the self.

Inhalt
Introduction

Part 1
Meeting the Shadow

1 Understanding the Shadow
2 The Self and the Ego
3 Defense Mechanisms of the Ego
4 The Benefits of Shadow Work
5 Helpful Tools

Part 2
Working with the Shadow

6 Developing Emotional Intelligence
7 Emotional Intelligence Tools
8 The World as Mirror
9 Understanding Our Play
10 Casting Roles
11 Recrafting Our Narrative

Part 3
Collective Shadows

12 Archetypal Figures
13 Animus and Anima
14 Loops
15 Understanding Collective Shadows

Part 4
Embracing the Other
(Essays and Contradictions)

16 Embracing Our Full Continuum
17 The Power of Being Ordinary
18 The Myth of Perfection
19 Moving beyond Forgiveness
20 Rediscovering the Child Self
21 Releasing the Shame of the Body
22 Recapturing Voice
23 Engaging the Deep Wild
24 Our Online Shadows
25 Fear of Death, Fear of Life

Afterword: Seeing the Beauty in the Dark

Further Reading

About the Author