⚠️ Content note: This post talks about big emotions like grief, anger, and being overwhelmed. Please take care of yourself and only read if you’re in the right headspace.
🌑 Shadow work is a practice of sitting with difficult emotions, noticing them instead of pushing them away, and learning what they might be trying to teach us.
In the West, we’re often taught there are “good” emotions and “bad” emotions. That’s a trash thought.
Your feelings aren’t bad — they’re part of you. They exist for a reason. You’re the result of generations of survival, and your ancestors lived long enough to create you because they listened to their instincts and emotions.
Don’t get me wrong — sometimes I panic for no reason, or for very small reasons. And yeah, I absolutely love my chill pills (they keep me upright). But most of the time, emotions are messengers. Listening to them — especially when they get too big — can help us shift, heal, or grow.
That’s where shadow work comes in. It’s a term for sitting with the hard stuff — the “icky” feelings we don’t always want to face. Shadow work is about noticing, naming, and giving space to those emotions instead of pushing them down.
Grief because someone died? That’s okay. Anger because you worked so hard but didn’t get the job? That’s valid too. (Anger is often fear in disguise — fear that your best isn’t enough. Spoiler: it is. Sometimes life just nudges us in another direction.)
The next time you feel overwhelmed, scared, or angry, try sitting with it. Personally, I like taking a bath or shower and letting myself cry, or just turning the moment over in my head until I can make sense of it. Feeling the emotion fully, letting it pass, and then greeting tomorrow with a fresh start is powerful magic.
Of course, not everything can be “fixed” in an afternoon bath. And that’s okay too. Sometimes healing takes many revisits. What matters is that with each revisit, it gets a little easier to hold.
✨ And just as a reminder: it’s okay to ask for help. Shadow work doesn’t mean doing it all alone.
How do you do your best shadow work — or, in other words, how do you take time to sit with hard emotions when they come up?
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