I do a art practice of SoulCollage® that was created by Seen Frost. It is a way to work intuitively with images to gain greater insight into all aspects of our personality and your world.
One part of the SoulCollage® practice is to work with our Shadow side. In SoulCollage®, this does not mean seeing the Shadow as evil or the opposite of good.
Here we look to those aspects of ourselves there is too much expression of a part or too little expression of that part.
For example, I have a Shadow card for my Perfectionist self.
Her energy could be helpful for getting things done well but taken to an extreme of perfectionism she can be destrutively critical and cause endless suffering for not measuring up.
She came into being when I was a child to counteract the shame I felt from the sexual abuse. I thought if I could just be perfect the abuse would stop (wrong thinking: it happened because I was a bad child, something wrong with me), or at least no one would see how broken I was (wrong thinking: I was disgusting and unloveable).
These Shadow aspects have the potential to become unbalanced in each of us as a nature of our being human.
And most of us try to hide them inside ourselves. We may look the other way, repress, deny, or even excuse them.
For many, these are our child inner parts that were shamed or that we were taught were bad by our parents, families or other authority figures in our lives.
If these Shadow aspects of ourselves are not recognized, acknowledged, are not worked with to transform their negative energy into more balanced energy, they will fester, grow, and shapeshift until they find new ways to show themselves in the world through destructive behaviors, judgementalness, and projection onto others.
We can work as a good parent to ourselves paying attention to the difficult “children” parts of ourselves. We can listen to them, acknowledge their needs, and allow their vibrant energy to be released and their creativity to be displayed.
