Shadow Work®
An Embodied Healing Process
Shadow Work gently invites us to see the many parts within us - how they formed early in life and how they have been shaping our inner and outer worlds ever since.
When our minds and bodies become stuck in a stress response, Shadow Work opens a pathway to healing and change through movement and metaphor, offering a visceral experience of a different outcome.
What Is Shadow Work?
Creating Space for Your Inner World
Shadow Work is a modaility that creates a space where your inner world can take shape in three dimensions, allowing you to see the system of parts you carry within you. This clarity reveals the beliefs you hold about yourself and how they influence your reactions to relationships and experiences, both past and present.
Exploring Your Embodied Self
Guided by a trained facilitator, you have the opportunity to create, in embodied space, what you may not have had in the past. To experiment with interacting with these memories in real, embodied space. You are invited to feel and experience what you once did - but now with the possibility of a different outcome.
Experiencing a New Way of Relating
Shadow Work creates safe and contained spaces for you to say, do, feel and experience what wasn’t available to you as a child, and to receive what may have been missing in your formative years - protection, delight, unconditional love and acceptance.
Working as Part of a Group
Shadow Work is typically done in small groupswhich can be same-gender or mixed-gender. When one person is working, other group members take turns acting as “placeholders” or role players, helping bring that person’s inner parts into the room. There is powerful healing in being seen and supported by a group; however, individual sessions with a facilitator in-person or online are also powerful and effective.
“In my experience, physically re-experiencing the past in the present and then reworking it in a safe and supportive ‘container’ can be powerful enough to create new, supplemental memories: simulated experiences of growing up in an attuned, affectionate setting where you are protected from harm…an alternative memory in which your basic human needs are met and your longings for love and protection are fulfilled.”
— Bessel Van Der Kolk, The Body Keeps the Score
