COVID-19 is shining a light on your shadow

In addition to all the obvious ways this pandemic is affecting your life, it’s also shining a light on your shadow. Have you noticed?

Usually it’s challenging to see our shadow, we’re often looking forward. With more time at home, which may also be more time with family, triggers will be more apparent. If you look through the lens of your most extreme reactions and the things you find wrong with everyone around you, your shadow will be visible.

When you look closely, you’ll find all the parts of yourself that you may rather deny. It may not be pleasant to see your controlling side, your anger or your sadness but those are all essential parts of who you are. It’s even harder to see the more primitive qualities like envy, greed, selfishness or striving for power. However, the more you turn away, the greater the power those emotions have over you through your unconscious.

When you can see yourself in the depths of your sadness, you expand your capacity to feel joy. When you allow anger to move through you in a safe way, you may be able to hold healthier boundaries in your life. When you come to terms with the darker, uglier parts of yourself, you become more grounded and balanced. When you accept that you have the capacity to be envious and cutting, you won’t react as much when you see someone else behaving that way.

We’d like to believe that we’re only our best qualities, but in reality, we are all both the light and the dark. Being a human being means being both. To be our best selves, we need to see, own and commit to working with our dark side.  

The current pandemic lends itself to some intense shadow work on the personal and collective level. Can you make space to explore your shadow? Imagine the potential for collective change if more people said yes and committed to their inner work right now.