Hello,
I wanted to generally ask about shadow work and share my experience with shadow work briefly. I did shadow work mainly for two years from 2016-2018 and then more sporadically in the course of the year 2019 and stop completely in October 2019.
I was often unsure when I did shadow work how often I should or can do it for e.g in one week. There were days where I felt nothing triggered me or for instance, I was at home studying or simply nothing triggered me or overly positively triggered me for this day. For these days I was unsure if I should do shadow work out of obligation and most of the time I did not or I tried to find something that triggered me in the past and write about that.
Shadow work helped me a lot, yet I am unsure how to rate my progress with working with my shadow self.
I can generally say I am less:
- Delusional about my perception of things
- Personally Offended
- Arrogant
- Use less projection
- More passionate
- Open-minded
- Generally more positive
- More drive
It is difficult since it is very personal and everyone has his or hers unique quirks. Regardless if positive and negative.
I had a lot of struggles the last year personally and had a giant stepback in my progress in other areas of my life due to circumstances I had minor influence in and had little power for change. For e.g I lost my entire social group due to a dispute with a friend over something I said and another friend told him. I am not going into specifics I said, basically only that I do not want to live a life like him and he went on a rampage for whatever reason… anyway.
These are weird situations since I am not triggered by it anymore I would have been in the past and did shadow work for instance about arrogance or inflated ego and projection. Yet, at this point people sometimes get angry at me for things I have integrated and are projecting it on me and I can’t help often times but laugh at the situation because it is unreal or I am just facing it unfazed.
Would this be healthy integration ?
There is a lot of new stuff that triggers me mostly about understanding and caring you could say social justice or injustice and understanding the historical impacts of it till today, by the same token it also makes me very passionate… it is rather specific. I am currently at a tipping point for getting out of rock bottom from all of this stuff that occured in the past year.
How often should I do shadow work in general let’s say in a week for example. This is very important for me because it helped me a lot also I am doing a Vipassana related meditation technique which makes it according to Wilber more important to take care of the shadow self or cleaning up.
There is a lot of information on the internet. Yet, since I digested a rather large portion of it as well as books and or audiobooks and podcasts I would be very thankful for help in this area, I am sort of lost here as well as I am getting out of this rock bottom and shifted my priorities of what I digest and learn. Shadow work is now increasingly becoming important again. Gaining clarity in this area would be great !
EDIT:
Coincidentally, there was a shadow episode on integral live yesterday. I wanted to ask the simple question how to deal with introjections while doing the 3-2-1 process ? I mostly did work with my own projections and re-owned them, yet rarely ejected an introjection. Especially in the 1 phase of the 3-2-1 process do I just write for example I am not unattractive, I am not the voice that tells me I am unattractive, I am not vengeful or being vengeful is not a part of me. Would that approach be correct ?
