Embracing Your Shadow: 5 Steps to Self-Empowerment

Empowering yourself can seem like a daunting task. Something you added to your growing to-do list. Adding something like spiritual development, self-care, or worse, shadow work to your lists may make you feel you need more sleep instead. What if every moment of every day done intentionally makes your self-empowerment seem seamless? 

First, let’s identify self-empowerment. According to Maryville University, “self-empowerment means making a conscious decision to take charge of your destiny.” Identifying destiny, according to dictonary.com, is “the events that will necessarily happen to a particular person or thing in the future.” If self-empowerment is making a conscious choice of your destiny, then we can acknowledge that the “who or what” you are playing out in a series of events that will occur in the future. What governs the future? Scientifically it’s the law of cause and effect but energetically its intentionality of consciousness.  

As a Shadow Walker, we walk between the worlds of the conscious and unconscious realities that govern the lines of destiny. Shadow work is an act of self-empowerment as it helps you identify the conscious and unconscious choices made to govern the reality you live. A reality is a dream you create and believe it is by choice. How you justify your life’s circumstances is solely based on the fine line we walk between your story and authenticity. Shadow work is not painful, hard, or terrifying. I teach my students that the only pain and scary thing they face is resisting seeing their effects in motion from their own cause. Coming to terms that they can no longer blame the other for their stories. They lose their excuses. The shadow helps you see how you feel about another is how you truly feel about yourself. Once conscious, you make a CHOICE daily to live that story. 

Five steps of self-empowerment to alter your authentic destiny line: 

1. Breath and take responsibility! Repeat this to yourself: “If I am to empower myself to live a life free from the chains that I believe bind me, then I must be willing to see what I deem binds me.” It tends to be the moment in time when it can make or break you. I’ve had students look at me like a deer in headlights as their entire life runs them over with a semi-truck. In the shadow realm, we call this silent scream, where the deep emotion of our authenticity surfaces to an audible cry. At that moment, you have another choice, to fight it or embody it. 
2. Untangle stories. When we choose to embody our screams of illusions, we begin the process of untangling stories. This step is done throughout your life and is based on your conscious awareness, intentionality, and willingness to see yourself fully. Stories are born through our myths to explain something we can’t fully explain yet. Each thought comes from a deep feeling. The mind wants to validate that feeling by creating a story. Then acknowledge that everyone runs on this same principle, you begin to see the entangled web of stories you have chosen to create your life unintentionally. 
3. Untangle obligations. Now that you see that all of life is a dance of stories created to justify something in your life, it’s now time to ask yourself the hard question. Is this ______ situation sustainable? Is it stainable for what matters most to me? What matters to you most? What have you committed to doing for the benefit of another? What are your motives for committing to ___ things that benefit another? What feelings are you hoping to receive to justify your story? These are all questions we ask ourselves in our shadow work not to beat ourselves up but to bring to our conscious awareness the entanglement of stories that are stirring us away from our authentic destiny. 
4. SIMPLIFY your life. This self-empowerment task comes with the sword of intentionality. Keep in mind that a sword is used as a tool or a weapon. Look at your stories and obligations, making a list of a stress scale. The number one reason our health and relationships suffer is our landslide of stress. Rate each story and obligation for the stress it creates on a scale of 0-10, 10 being the most. Then comes the sword of intentionality. We begin to weed out of our lives what doesn’t serve us. Sometimes this means we need to ask for help, leave an unhealthy situation, talk to someone, and commit to our authenticity. An actual act of self-empowerment happens with each choice we make.  
5. Tend to the small things. I am a mother of 2 young boys, run a business, run our household, run endless workshops, write books, and take care of elderly dogs; if anyone understands how the small things pile up, it’s me. When in doubt, we handle it NOW. Small things can add up fast, creating more of a problem than a catastrophic event can. The small things we go unconscious of beginning to override our mind to our basic needs. Notice all the stories and obligations you put upon yourself to run away from your authentic destiny. So next time your stress spikes because the sink is full of dishes, stop and do them, ask for help, or talk to someone before you boil over.  

Finally, never stop challenging yourself. You are UNIQUE with a set of circumstances created based on stories you accepted to be true. It’s not going to turn around in a day, but if you are committed to a self-empowered destiny, repeat steps 1-5 often. Always do them in moderation based on your set of ethics and values. Getting to know yourself through the shadow walk does not have to be painful; it is an act of taking control of your authentic contract for this life. Make this life one to remember.