We have come to the halfway point in our Shadow Work for this season. How are you holding up? It can take a lot out of you to delve this deep into the things you haven’t wanted to see.
Make sure to take good care of yourself. Factor in at least a half-hour of true relaxation (not TV, alcohol, drugs or other means of escape) every few days. I know that can be tough, I’m a working mom, but you have to carve out the time in your schedule or months will go by and you will wear out.
Self-care is especially important when you are doing Shadow Work. You need to refuel. Even if it just means a cup of coffee or tea when you don’t look at a screen or a book, or talk to anyone. Just let yourself be.
This is not an easy meditation, so that is, even more reason to make sure your tank is full before starting. Read through the meditation and when you are ready, close your eyes. Remember what you can of the meditation but also allow yourself to follow your own path.
Take a few deep breaths and close your eyes. Find yourself standing in front of a wall of vines. Each vine is the thickness of an arm and they are covered with thorns. The wall surrounds a tunnel made of these vines. The vines create an archway in front of you that you can enter.
The tunnel is menacing with all the thorns but you know you must enter. Steel yourself, and when you are ready, enter the tunnel.
You are occasionally scraped by thorns as you proceed. It stings a bit but it is not too bad. Continue to move forward.
Focus on the beauty of the green vines around you. Ignore the rare discomfort of the scrapes. See the sunlight through the vines and the green glow they send through the tunnel.
You find that your clothes are occasionally torn by the thorns. Small pieces of fabric are ripped away. Let them go. You begin to feel cleansed by your trial through the tunnel of thorns.
This tunnel is long. Eventually, you see some brighter light and you are almost sad the ordeal is coming to an end. You feel lighter and refreshed by the process you have undergone.
You exit the tunnel into a bare meadow. The sun beats down hard onto the ground. You lay down on the grass to recover.
Feel the lightness and clarity of this experience. Now that it is gone, can you identify some of what was cleansed away from the tunnel? What did you need to let go of? What were you unwilling to part with easily? Are you willing to bear the pain for the clarity it has unveiled?
Don’t grasp onto the things you have released or you may draw them back to you. Just identify them and try not to connect too many emotions on to them. Take a few more deep breaths and enjoy this feeling of renewal.
When you are ready begin to hear the sounds around your physical body. Wiggle your fingers and toes. Open your eyes.
Take some time to journal or choose tarot or oracle cards on the following questions to gain more insights.
1 – What do you need to let go of?
2 – Are you strong enough to withstand the pain of letting go?
3 – What can help you cope with the pain?
Get the Shadow Work Meditation book on Amazon.
Take Care,
Jessica Cross
Free meditation recordings on Spotify: CLICK HERE
Journals on Amazon: Click Here
Jessica Cross 
The things that I want to give up are ways of thinking that I currently have, that are at best useless to me and at worst detrimental to me. I wish that I could give up these parts of myself so easily as described here, but they are much too ingrained in my psyche. The only way to remove them is by extremely painful methods that I don’t want to go through, and that would likely create other terrible problems in the process.
Right now, my feeling is one of being under siege. A minor factor is the weather. It has snowed each of the last seven days here. It hasn’t been constant snow by any means, Overall, we’ve received about 11 inches, which isn’t terrible over seven days. But it limits my ability to move about, to do things that I might want to do outside the house.
Fortunately, that siege will end relatively soon. The much larger problem is one that I find hard to describe in any coherent fashion. The world is full of bad leaders right now, whose greed is insatiable, whose desire for power is boundless, and whose tendency to be cruel seems to have no bottom. They have found power by preying on the fear that people have of “the other”, the person that is foreign to them because their color is different or their customs are different or their abilities are just too far outside the norm. They are people often caught up in the violent and punitive aspects of their religions that don’t allow for acceptance of people who don’t follow their religious precepts.
I fear these people, both the leaders and the followers, and as much as they are aware of me and people like me, they fear me. But living with fear isn’t something that I can do easily, and so I’ve converted my fear into hatred. Hatred is easier for me to deal with, but I know that it has other disastrous effects. I have less trust of people and am less willing to spend time around people I don’t know, lest one of them have an eruption of their own hatreds that they are just unable to resist shouting out. And in my hatred I have developed a siege mentality, in which I keep a distance from the rest of the world. In my mind, it seems that the zealots in the world are attempting to overwhelm me with their horrible ideas, their inability to deal with reality, as absurd as that may sound. I need to put up walls to keep them out, and hatred is the way to brace the walls. Of course, they keep me in, too.
I can’t give up my hatred, not now. I can’t bear to feel defenseless with all that is going on around me. It’s just too painful for me to be around these people right now. There is no way to change their minds about certain realities – they are incapable of learning from experience, their understanding of how the world works is different from mine (as an allegory, they still think that it may yet be possible to have two plus two equal five), and my arguments, often rambling, won’t persuade them. In this situation, ignorance seems like an infectious disease, and if I don’t put up walls against it, then I feel that I may be infected with it, and I know that that sounds really absurd. I seem to need some sort of active feeling inside me, and since physical violence is useless, I fall back on hate to keep the walls up.
In my fortress, it is a great relief to me to listen to the ASMR creations of you and others, and be reminded that there are still many positive forces in this world.
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