Tips On How You Can Face Your ‘Dark’ Side, Get Through Your Pain & Find Your Inner Peace

this is a lie! “I’m feeling overwhelmed – I’ll do the work when I’m settled.” “It’s all too much for me – I need to take a break.” If I had a penny for every time I’ve heard this, I’d be a wealthy woman.

The saddest part? This is EXACTLY why your spiritual journey keeps stalling. When it gets crazy hectic it’s NOT a sign to slow down – it’s sign for you to speed up, because the shift is at its peak, and the stuff is ready to release.

The exhaustion, anger, emotion, fatigue? That’s the shift itself... and when you reach the right statements, you will find the relief from what you are feeling in that moment. When you stop and take a break until you feel better, you just ensure that you have to go through all of that again and dredge up and relive all that emotion again. When things get hectic is when you knuckle down deeper into your shift... so yes, take the day off, but spend it shifting instead of vegging. In the beginning, it will be hell to try to force yourself to move forward when you feel that bad, so you probably need to contact a healer to help you. Good healers will be able to do distance healing work on you if necessary, to help you reconcile and release stuff. However, you want to get to a point of coaching and mentoring style work as quickly as possible.

The way that coaching and mentoring style work differs is that it happens on the conscious level, so when you take that approach, you learn from the coach or mentor how to do this for yourself – it becomes a conscious skill you can call on at a later stage. You’ll need that, because this is never the last time you’ll spend in this place. We spend our whole journeys trying to avoid pain and trying to gain immediate personal happiness, and then when it gets to the kitchen sink work of the spiritual journey – like feeling the stuff that lies inside us – we fall over because we have no skills or stamina to manage it. At its core, regardless of the modalities you apply, journey, healing and development work is about bringing stuff to consciousness – which means processing it with our conscious minds.

The part of us that is awake that we think of as “me”. So with insights you understand this... you’re fumbling around in the dark and suddenly you get an “aha” moment or insight that comes to your conscious mind and you feel the release. Usually accompanied by a “duh – how was I that daft previously?” Do you see the pattern above about how it’s when the thought becomes conscious that you get relief? Okay good. Now – understand that your emotions and thoughts work in exactly the same way. So when you bottle an emotion up, or ignore it, or let it play out or settle, what you are doing is keeping it at the subconscious level. When it’s subconscious it can hurt and unsettle you... just think about the chaos a few seconds before you have the conscious thought? That moment before the “duh”.... it was chaos that led you to seek an answer or insight in the first place. It’s the same chaos that you’re experiencing in these emotions and thoughts, and the physical state you’re in, at the moment you need to “rest” before you come back and face this again. So, it stands to reason that you release that emotional, mental and physical state in the same way: by bringing the awareness to consciousness. Why does it feel so bad when you’re doing it? First because you spend so much time avoiding doing it that you have no stamina to do it, and secondly because it is made up of a bunch of insights or aha moments, all of which have to be brought to awareness.

The reason you’re feeling like hell in that moment is because you have raised those feelings and thoughts up from the level of the subconscious to the level of the conscious – and you are consciously aware of and feeling them, on the conscious level now. In the same way the moment of insight, or aha, had to come to your conscious mind and be consciously experienced by you for a second, is the same way that you release that built up emotion. So you have to feel the anger or pain or sadness or doubt consciously, with your active mind. You have to sit with and feel that emotion for a bit while you shift it – and it only feels so strong because it is so close to the surface. If you take a break, all you’ll do is push that back down into the subconscious layers and you’ll have to repeat the work of digging it all up again. That also means you’d have to feel all this bad stuff you’re feeling in the moment you “need a break” from, plus more, later on. You may as well push ahead, bring this to consciousness once, and never have to deal with it again. What we do is hard... don’t kid yourself. I have been rock bottom and suicidal more times than I can count. I’ve learned two things though... when I stop personalizing the journey, the terrible pain subsides almost completely. And when you’re going through hell – keep going. When you’re in this horrible physical, emotional and mental state, it’s easy to want to crawl under the covers and avoid.... and that’s how ego traps you and keeps you stuck. Facing your shadow (the pain and ego that lives inside you – pain, anger, judgement, fear, humiliation, doubt, shame, embarrassment, envy, jealousy, possessiveness, competitiveness, frustration, impatience, awe and admiration) is not something that is understood in the spiritual communities, but it’s exactly about this: bringing your pain to the surface and airing it consciously so that it has no power over you anymore. Every single journeyer HAS TO face their shadow and their pain.... “free will does not mean that you get to choose the curriculum and define the content, it merely means you get to decide WHEN you take the course.” (A Course In Miracles) You will not progress past a certain level until you master shadow work and learn to face and sit with your pain – so you might as well start early and get really good at this process. Right now it feels like hell to agree to that, but down the line, you will be very glad you did do this – especially once you’ve experienced your first few down and out cycles – where you cycle to the lowest point of an emotion to shift it. Those ego deaths of the down and out cycles contain so much relief in them, and they truly are the meat of your journey. And it’s easy to think that facing this will mean confining yourself to a life of psychic pain, but the opposite is actually true: you will have a way to release pain almost immediately, so that it cannot linger and cause long-term problems for you. When stuff gets hectic, push harder. Take the break AFTER you have found the statement of relief, when you’re in a better space and can ENJOY the time off, and really rest. All the big breakthroughs you are looking for lie in facing these shadow aspects of yourself... don’t waste your journey and what you’ve achieved so far by avoiding the hard work. As someone who did the work I can only say that I wish I had started sooner instead of allowing myself to linger in that horrible personal pain for so many years. I could have saved myself so much trauma. All you achieve by taking a break at these junctures is to ensure that you sit with the pain you’ve raised, lingering and dwelling on it, before it goes back down and can come up for a second round.

The process of taking breaks is actually what is making so many journeys so painful. Push through and go as deep into the pain as you possibly can – it goes against every instinct you have, I know; it did for me too. But you have nothing to lose by trying this – except for that horrible pain that lives inside you. Article on how to do shadow work and cycle down to the bottom of a lesson: http://lifecoachestoolbox.com/index.php/how-to-do-shadow-work-how-to-face-your-dark-shadow-or-ego .

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