“Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.” - C.G. Jung
Shadow work, if you’re not familiar with it, is recognizing how people and experiences in our environment are reflecting something in our subconscious that needs to be healed. This often means that we project onto others and blame them for the way we are feeling. We may feel like we are experiencing a string of seemingly unfortunate events or feel like the world is out to get us when we have a lot of shadow work to do. The shadow is not in your physical body, it is an energetic holding tank outside of your physical body that holds your heavy memories that need to be dealt with when you are ready. Just as stacking too many cards on the edge of a table will cause them to fall, when the shadow self get’s full, it will act out often with people seeing things they call shadows or feeling as though they have a haunting.
Shadow work is actually one of the most if not the most empowering and liberating concepts to understand in a lifetime so of course when I saw Christine offering a class on it, I had to highlight it! There’s a great book we carry called “The Shadow Effect” which is co-written by Deepak Chopra, Debbie Ford and Marianne Williamson. I think this book would pair well with Christine’s class this Sunday or if you’re unable to make the class, at least get the book (I know a lot of our readers do not live in LA).
In Christine’s class she will be going over the major and minor arcana specifically focusing on the light and dark shadow aspects which come up through the tarot to help empower us to realize what needs healing and how we can shift our reality (we are not out of control of what happens to us). The dark shadow inevitably is a source of power for you. Using the cards as a conduit you can tap into both the light and dark shadow. You can transmute the energy stored in your personal dark shadow into raw power. You don’t have to fully understand this right now. I suggest reading the book and taking her class! If you are noticing patterns in your life such as always seeing negative people or people fighting around you, chances are this is your subconscious trying to get a message through to you that a memory needs to be healed. The memories are stored as electromagnetic charges and attract experiences that resonate at the same frequency, whether it is shame, anger or resentment.
We also classify people (in order to understand ourselves better) as light shadow people or dark shadow people. In my mind this is kind of like the optimist and the pessimist. The light shadow person will be looking at the shiny water and walk right into the alligator’s mouth while the dark shadow person will always think of what could go wrong, keeping them from moving forward. The goal is to strike a balance and not act like we are living in a world of cotton candy flowers and unicorns all the time but also not be a conspiracy theorist and paranoid. Finally, to drive my point home, if you are in a relationship personally, platonically or unintentionally that makes you feel as though the emotions generated from it have control over you, this work is going to help you. The negative traits you observe in others, at the end of the day (just like the positive ones) are actually a part of you. When we own these traits and find the positive expression of them, we then channel the energy stored for our good to attract more good. Emotions are energy and energy cannot be destroyed. Emotions are energy in motion.
To sign up for Christine’s class at our Echo Park location click here. Class is $20 this Sunday January 8th at 6-7:30pm. You can bring a Rider Waite style deck or contact Christine on Meetup to see if your deck will work. We do sell the decks at all three of our locations and you do not have to have any prior tarot experience to take this class. If you’re a tarot practitioner or like giving readings for friends, this class can help you take your readings to a deeper more helpful level for people. Christine picked up her first deck when she was just 15 years old and her knowledge of the symbolism in the cards is complimented by her background in shamanism, Western Hermeticism and Quabalah.
