Goldmining the Shadows helps you access qualities of your personality that went underground when they proved to be unacceptable to your caregivers and culture. “Shadow” is the term for these discarded aspects that inform your life. Becoming familiar with your shadow reveals lost innocence, gifts, and hurts seeking healing. Working with your shadow effectively breaks repetitive cycles of suffering.
Digestible, yet powerful, this book explores the ways shadow expresses in your life, how to engage your shadow to heal generational patterns, and how consciousness breaks the repetitive loop of suffering. This book will help you prioritize your healing while cultivating empathy, self-forgiveness, compassion, improved communication, and a broader sense of how our shadows work together to create great harm in the world. It’s purpose is to prime you for an ongoing, healthy inner dialogue with internal and external damaging influences so you can begin the process of liberation and restoration.
How do I work with my shadow?
The key to working with your shadow is to accept that you have one, and get to know it. See it for what it is and nurture it as your child while you build adult techniques for self-protection.
Peeking voluntarily behind the curtain of what formed your adulthood is a courageous move. To engage in shadow work when you aren’t triggered helps you get ahead of it and direct traffic. Gazing into the murkier parts of your family’s origins and underlying generational patterns yields valuable awareness about all of the moving parts and influences that have shaped you. Doing this with intention is a very big deal. With practice and some support, you can move beyond feeling victimized and into a more powerful stance. It’s a super-heroic task if you consider that heroes always have tragic flaws that keep them humble and in service to others.
Shadow work is an act of liberation for individuals and all members of society and culture. Once we have a grasp on what our personal shadows are and how they work, we can empathetically address the collective shadow that has our communities and societies in its grip. It is entirely possible to reshape our collective reality by catching our shadows in the act of responding to historical pain. Our repetitive loops of suffering cause ripples of stress and stress-related disorders in the body. Doing shadow work is one of many keys to breaking the cycles that contribute to ill health.
My wish is that Goldmining will be a supportive voice in a constellation of resources for interacting with your wounds. It is intended to connect you to your deep personal wisdom. My desire is for this work to reveal the beauty that you came into this world with before you adapted for your family, the culture, and the times. I hold the vision that you can love your soul profoundly, despite all it has had to do to survive here. I’m rooting for you, while still wandering the bogs learning to love and value the medicinal distillations of my own agonies.
