shadow work – Stacy Crep

My friend and I created the School of Illumination, beginning with a six-month foundation to prepare participants for deep shadow work. The advanced training, Shadow Song: A Journey Into Illumination, invites students to dig deep, study themselves, and confront the shadow.

As we guide participants through the next 12 months, I’ve decided to journey alongside them. I’m choosing to put myself first, engage fully in the coursework, and once again face my own shadow. It’s important to me to become the best version of myself I can be.

The work includes daily meditation, journal prompts, and homework activities between our monthly classes. Our first journal prompt this month focused on resistance. As I reflected, I noticed something: I’ve been resisting sitting still to meditate each day.

Throughout my life, I’ve had a steady meditation practice — sometimes even twice a day — yet I feel resistance to simply being still and quiet. I teach walking meditation, and the Kundalini yoga I love combines chanting and movement with meditation, but even these practices have fallen away lately. Hmm… what is this about?

As I prepared to meditate today, I caught myself wanting to blow my nose, clean my ears, brush my hair. Was I distracting myself with little tasks to avoid the stillness, or were these small acts part of settling into my body before I got quiet?

While journaling about this resistance, I asked my wise higher self for guidance. I was reminded of a tool we shared with our students: box breath. This simple pattern — inhale for a count of five, hold for five, exhale for five, hold out for five, then repeat — can help calm the mind and body. I decided to use box breathing as I meditated today. It worked.

At first, I kept my attention occupied by counting, breathing, and holding. As my meditation deepened, I lengthened the counts to ten, drawing my breath more fully into my body. A calm, slow rhythm emerged.

Eventually, I stopped counting. My breath continued in the same pattern, but my awareness opened to the world around me: the rustling of leaves, a distant dog barking, birds chirping, the steady song of insects. The wind moved through the trees like the breathing of the earth. Occasionally, wind chimes sang, and I felt part of it all.

I’m grateful I worked through my resistance and allowed myself this moment of connection. I’m grateful for the peace I felt afterward, and for showing up for myself despite hesitation. Will this completely dissolve my resistance? I don’t know — but I’ve found a tool to help me meet it with curiosity and move forward.

Today I meditated on compassion and not judging people, but just accepting them as is, including myself. My meditations are always a bit ADHD with thoughts coming and going. Images popping up before me and dissipating like smoke. I have learned not to fight what happens during meditation. I just stay present and accept what comes. I ignore my mind, which is constantly trying to narrate and document everything that is happening. I focus on my breathing, or a mantra, when the mind gets to insistent and just let it float to the background.

Today was no different. I was meditating, as usual, when suddenly there was this white light before my mind’s eye. It was a bright light and grew in intensity as it came closer. I grew to realize that this was God. I sat with him and just accepted the Divinity of this moment. My mind screamed at me to write it down and document it. I ignored the mind and allowed the observer part of myself to enjoy this extraordinary experience. Then it changed. The bright white light changed into an inky purplish black color. It was no longer a concentrated sun as the white light had been. It spread and filled the area of my vision, nebulous and changing. I came to understand that this was also God. She explained to me that God is all things; light and shadow. Duality is a necessary part of all things. She said just as I do not judge the moon, the negative charge of electrons or femininity, as bad, nor is the dark side of God or anyone. It just is.

This is a hard concept to wrap one’s head around. In the Taoist philosophy there is the Yin/Yang. This is the symbol we often see where the white and black swirls meet to form a perfect circle with a little spot of the opposite color on each side. It shows the nature of both being necessary for the whole and that each contains a bit of the other. Yin is feminine and the dark side. Yang is masculine and the light side. Neither is good or bad. But both are necessary for the formation of life. We could not continue the human race without both. A battery does not work if the charges are not aligned correctly. Night and day are both required for nature to exist in harmony. We must work and we must sleep. Why should it be shocking that God contains balance, duality within the Divinity of our source?

We have put so much negative connotation to the shadow side, that perhaps some of its true nature has been lost. Darth Vader tries to get Luke to come to the Dark Side and the movies make it all very evil. If you have ever watched the Disney movie Maleficent with Angelina Jolie, you know that a story can be told in a very different way, in which the villain’s story looks less like a villain and more human. Someone who is doing the best they can in the time and space they are in. What if we say that God is in all people? What if we noticed the duality and knew they were doing the best they could in the time and space they are currently in; to balance the duality within themselves? Know that they are doing their very best possible, to express the divinity from which they come. It does shift how we see each other, doesn’t it? I feel this makes it a bit easier to have compassion, rather than judgement, when experiencing others along this path called life.

Spend some time with this concept. Let it float around in your mind and in your dreams. Try it on and see how it feels. Find your own truth within it. I hope it helps you find more compassion for yourself as well as for others.

Thank you for reading my blog today. I love you! May you find compassion over judgement naturally, as if by magic.

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