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Shadow Work is the process of acknowledging and accepting the hidden parts of your personality in order to live a balanced and fulfilling life. Shadow work is the intentional practice of becoming aware of your unconscious shadow and integrating these neglected qualities into your being—becoming whole. This is a process of building self-awareness, self-acceptance, and universal Love. The idea of the shadow self was popularized by famed psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Carl Jung who said that it describes those aspects of the personality that we choose to reject and repress. For one reason or another, we all have parts of ourselves that we don't like—or that we think society won't like—so we push those parts down into our unconscious psyches. "Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate." -Carl Jung
Jung describes the "shadow" as the disowned and unconscious parts of a person's personality that their ego fails to accept, acknowledge, or see. In some cases, it's the stuff we've buried so deep, our conscious minds aren't even aware of them anymore. Essentially, it is the parts of ourselves that we like to lock away and hide from. The shadow is comprised of all that is frowned upon by family, peers, friends as well as all that which is deemed 'bad' by broader society. A part of the ongoing socialisation process we take part in starting early in life is the dampening and rejection of certain impulses and behaviours that misalign societal expectations. The shadow is the "dark side" of our personality because it consists chiefly of primitive, negative human emotions and impulses. Whatever we most dislike about other people is usually a clue about our own shadow self.
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