Transcript
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I’m Joanna Lindenbaum, a coach ritualist and all around transformation nerd who is obsessed with helping clients go deep to create more change and results with their clients. I created the coaching.
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Revolution podcast to share with you coaching skills, tips and advice as well as a deeper understanding of human behavior and.
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Of yourself so that you can do even better client work and group work. Grow your business organically.
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And know that you’re making a real difference in the world. This is about creating a revolution in the transformational industry so that more practitioners feel amazing.
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Ohh.
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About what they do and so that more of our clients experience life changing shifts, let’s get started.
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Joanna, you have been a mentor of mine for, I think about 7 years now. I remember first meeting you when my daughter was first born and my office was sitting in my bed doing a call with you. And I remember whatever you said.
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You just got right to the core issue of self.
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Yes.
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And not that I’ve resolved that issue, but I’ve come.
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A long way.
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Come a long way. Seven years and I want to honor you as such. A bright light in the coaching industry.
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Whose light is defined by the duration with which.
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You have been such a steady voice for true, responsible integrity based transformation in this industry that has a lot.
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Of.
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Lights flicker and dye and yours continues to to shine and.
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Be such an important voice for really taking our work seriously and devoting ourselves to the practice of holding space for other people’s transformation.
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So thank you.
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Thank you for your contribution.
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Thank you. I’m taking that in. I actually I feel a little teary hearing you say it because you you nailed my mission exactly. So thank you.
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As I think about some of the work that I’ve done with you through your sacred depth program and shadow work retreats.
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I think fear and power working with fear and power are some of my biggest learnings.
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I would love.
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You to share more about Shadow work, in particular what is the shadow and why are we so prone to hiding our power in it?
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Yeah, such a good question, I’ll.
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I’ll give us the short version because.
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Of course we.
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Could talk for days on it.
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But you know the.
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Easiest way to describe shadow at least the way Carl Jung described it is the shadows are the parts of ourselves that we have disinherited, that we’ve rejected, that we have decided are wrong or shameful and.
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We’ve disenfranchised ourselves from them in one way or another. We have decided I cannot be that thing.
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And of course, there’s plenty of reasons for us to decide. We don’t want to be that thing. Some of us think anger is shameful or hurts other people, and so maybe we put our anger into shadow. Some of us feel selfishness is bad or hurts others.
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There isn’t right or we’ll end up alone if we’re too selfish. And so we decide there’s no part of me that can be selfish whatsoever. And of course, some of this comes from personal history. Some of this is from cultural messaging.
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But whatever it is, here’s what it comes down to.
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Whenever we deny parts of ourselves.
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We are denying ourselves. We cannot wish parts of ourself away. We cannot hide it really, truly hide parts of ourselves away. Though many of us try, we attempt and to go even further than that.
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Our shadows are necessary parts of ourselves inside of each one of our shadows.
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Is a gift.
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And when we try to cut that shadow off from who we are, we no longer have access to that gift. So when you ask about, well, why do we?
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Put.
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Power into shadow.
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You know, listeners might be listening right now and saying, but but I want power. Like I say all the time I want to be more empowered. I want to be able to do more in my life and.
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Business in my work, in my relationships, I want that power. Right? So how do we associate power with shadow?
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Well, for as much as it is a natural normal human instinct and desire to want to have power.
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At the same time, so many of us have seen, personally and culturally, what happens when power is abused. It can really hurt other people when it’s abused. We see this on all levels, right? And on family levels.
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On political levels or governmental levels, whatever it is, and so for as much as.
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We have the desire to be empowered.
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We also deeply are clear that we do not want that the that being the abusing power and because we so vehemently do not want that.
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So many of us end up hiding away empowerment inside of that shadow of power.
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So my experience with this is.
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Wanting to step into leadership in a more powerful way.
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And.
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Yet being terrified of calling myself a leader.
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And some work I did with you helped me surface that I had in my psyche a powerful imprint that I.
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Hadn’t thought about in a long time the the powerful imprint of Reverend Moon who?
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I grew up at the feet of.
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Who was a model of a really powerful charismatic leader?
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Who operated from a place of control.
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Who operated from a place of self glorification and diminishment of others.
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And I didn’t realize until I started working on my leadership how strong that imprint was.
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Yeah. And you did some work with me where you invited me to.
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Step into the shoes of that kind of leader.
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I remember how.
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Scary. That was to actually get into that person’s body and feel the rush of power. And I remember feeling like I actually had a penis and it and I was acting it out. And I was letting it be really big.
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And then you invited me to this other extreme of the disempowered expression of that which, when we don’t want to be that one version, we go into the complete, disempowered version of that.
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And how easily when I am in rooms where I perceive people to be more powerful than I am, or in that room can include the online space or my work in any not, not necessarily just a physical room. How quickly I diminish myself.
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How immediately it gets small and feel like I have nothing at all to say. I would love to hear your perspective on this, what you call the the hyper and the hypo expression of shadow and how we bring them into relationship in an authentic.
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Question. Yeah, such a good question. And I remember that process and wow, it was it was so powerful.
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Watching you.
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Grow that metaphorical you know.
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So there’s there’s so much in what you just.
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Shared. Yeah. And I want to explain a little bit more and unpack.
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It so the the.
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1st is that when we’re working so hard.
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To not be that thing that we are so ashamed of that we think is so terrible. Right, whatever. We’re putting in shadow. In your case, leadership and power.
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What ends up happening is inadvertently.
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Any out of our control, we end up running to the exact opposite extreme. So if the hyper of power is this extreme like you said, self glorification and control of others and diminishment of others, then what often happens?
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Is we end up rushing all the way to the exact the hypo, the exact opposite, extreme end.
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Of the spectrum not being able to speak our truths, not sharing our important thoughts, or the amazing work that we’re doing, or making ourselves seem, you know, whatever it is, right. And then what? What happens for so many people?
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Well.
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When they go to the the hypo, the extreme of whatever the shadow is, they’re like I have no control. Like I just end up here and I don’t know why, because I want to speak my truth. I want to be a leader. I want to have empowerment, but I have no control here and essentially.
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What is happening there is because we’ve cut ourselves off from all of the qualities of power, self glorification control, making ourselves, you know, speaking up, being big.
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We don’t have access to be able to modulate it in aligned ways.
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We just don’t have access to those skills and to those powers and so part of the work of working with shadow.
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Is actually.
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Supporting ourselves our clients to lean in to the most unsavory parts of the shadow.
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To look them in the eye.
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And to even say.
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With a regulated nervous system and it takes work to do that. I am this also right? So in that process Cara, part of what we did is it you were able to claim the part of yourself that wants to glorify yourself, that wants to be bigger.
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Than everybody else that wants to have more control.
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We need to be able to to own up to that without shame in a neutral way, right to say. Ohh yeah, this is a part of me too. And then then we can start to modulate the gifts inside of it for good.
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Then we can not over glorify ourselves or under glorify ourselves, but.
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Actually have a healthy relationship to bragging, let’s say and and really sharing who we are and our gifts. Then we can move out of hyper control or no control at all and modulate that actually harness that to have.
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Control of ourselves over ourselves, but not control over others.
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To have our power but allow others to have their power. So that’s why we want to kind of understand that Hypo Hyper spectrum and work with it. And usually I think this is what we did for your process. We go to the to the place the person.
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Knows the best first, so we actually went first to that diminished place for you because that’s easy in a way. It’s painful. You’ll wanna be there. But you know that well.
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And then in a safe way, and we made it fun, right? We allowed you to just to play with that caricature of the powerful extreme hyper powerful leader to then find that aligned place in between the two.
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Yeah.
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It was like taking the.
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The best of that caricature, and pouring it into the the well of my usual state of being, and I remember.
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And I remember when I first told you this, this felt like a secret that only Joanna is ever going to know. But.
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Now I’m going to tell everyone.
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I remember once I started pulling the align pieces from the shadow.
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I tuned into the soul.
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Well.
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Desire. You know Reverend Moon was famous for arranging marriages with the point of a finger, right? There’s the control. But.
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Bringing people together in stadiums.
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And conducting these marriage ceremonies.
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And I remember connecting to the soul desire of.
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I want to move stadiums full of people.
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I actually want that like it just it was like buried somewhere in there and it just like, Oh my God, I want that. And I would never have admitted that to myself. And I’m. I can feel that little.
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Hypo version being.
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Like, you can’t say that out loud.
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But I, but I want that and I also saw this image of myself standing on a stage and inviting everyone in the audience to rise up with me.
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It’s so beautiful, I get chills again. I got chills then and I’m getting.
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It now because it feels so true.
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And you know, just along.
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This topic of shadow the fact.
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Kara that you can share it here on?
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The podcast this.
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Desire that you want to move stadiums and you want to encourage a whole stadium to stand up.
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It speaks so deeply to to help powerfully, you worked with Shadow because before that session, you.
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Couldn’t even admit.
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It to yourself and now it’s not shameful anymore, right? There might be that little tinge, like you said of. Oh, my God. What? Right.
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But now it’s not coming from, Oh my God, it is horrible to be that thing because it is evil and misused to have that kind of power. And you’ve moved it into this place of. No, I I actually want that. And also everybody in that stadium is going to have their own agency.
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To decide if they want to stand.
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Up or not, and that’s cool too.
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And it might not even be a stadium. It’s just, you know, maybe my a book reaches its way into the hands of that many people. But yeah, it was something to unearth.
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Metaphor.
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Yeah.
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And I would love to hear you talk a little bit about the power of this work. The potency of this work once you surface those kinds of insights, what the integration process looks like, it can be a lot to admit that there are other things in your work that that felt similar in terms of like bonky.
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Over the.
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Head.
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And then you have to go back to your usual life, you know, so talk about the importance of the integration process for the shadow.
00:17:40 Speaker 1
Insights. Yeah. I’m so glad you’re asking about it because it’s everything. And you know, you’ve heard me say probably 100 times. There’s a difference between a breakthrough.
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Kind of transformation and it’s all about the integration. So breakthroughs are sexy and awesome and new insights and awarenesses and we all want new insights and awarenesses, they’re very, very valuable. But after the new insight and the awareness actually comes the.
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Harder work. The more effort, even the even more effortful work.
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Of coming back to the insight and the breakthrough and the awareness and embodying it and embodying it again, and embodying it again, and you have some of that, there’s so many different ways to do it, but just even to use you as an example, Kara, you know, some of it is coming back on the inner level, right?
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For the fact that you are uttering out loud about the stadium.
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That you’re able to come back to and pave the neural pathways and the somatic pathways.
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Of owning like.
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Yes, I want this power and this glory and then some of the integration is baby steps on the outer right and some not. So baby steps like this.
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Podcast is definitely I am positive a piece of it is an outcropping of that work that we did right. This is a type of stadium that you’re claiming now. And so I think you part of the reason why you asked the question is because.
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As reentry can be hardware in the sacred space when we’re in session or retreat, and we’re finding the shadow and you know, coming to reclaim it, but then we have to deal with our everyday lives, the people around us maybe aren’t used to us being in a leadership energy in this way or a selfish.
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Energy or an angry energy or whatever it is that we’ve put into shadow. And so the more that we can do the inner practice.
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Yes.
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As well as take the those those baby outer action steps, the stronger it grows inside of us, and it doesn’t mean that some relationships don’t.
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Fall away? They might.
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Some projects might fall right, like all of that.
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So.
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But we then know, and here’s the here’s.
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The the most important part that I want.
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To say about this.
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The more we we go to.
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Get the shadows from the hiding places and do the integration work to reclaim them.
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The more we get of ourselves.
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The more connected we are to our life force.
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And so all of the parts that we need and the less shame we have about our very normal human desires and impulses.
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And in my book.
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That is worth everything like it is. It is a new perspective on how to walk this path of life and.
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What I have come to see is that the more that I walk it, the more my clients walk it. The people in the situations that are meant to stick will stick and everything else falls away.
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I can attest to.
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The fact that.
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The more of myself that I uncover.
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The more I deepen my relationships with.
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The most aligned people in my life.
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And.
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It can be scary. I know. Even in my marriage, sometimes uncovering new parts of myself.
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Yes. And do you know you’re with the right person?
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When they welcome that.
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Yes.
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I would love to hear just a little bit about your journey with this. I’ve experienced in working with you how? One insight.
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Can just Ripple and Ripple and Ripple if you keep taking those baby internal and external steps.
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How his shadow work?
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Evolved you.
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As someone who facilitates it and lives it.
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I love that I’m trying to think of.
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There’s so many examples.
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Because let me tell you, I’ve had a lot of parts.
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Of myself that I’ve had to reclaim, that I I have made.
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Wrong and that.
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I’ll share this one. It also is about power, you know, since we’re we’re on the topic of power, so.
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The short story is when I first started my business, I had a business partner and who was also my best friend and we were leading women circles and we were incredible thought partners, facilitation partners.
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All the things.
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We would create outlines for our circle.
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And then we’d divide.
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Up.
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You know, she would take one part. I would take another part. So on and so forth, whatever we felt called to facilitate.
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And I always wanted the bigger, more dramatic pieces because I wanted to be seen. I wanted to be the biggest person in the room, even though I loved my friend and my business partner. I wanted to be the biggest.
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Except I had so much shame about that.
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I thought it.
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Was so wrong, so terrible, and especially for women, too, that when.
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We would go to Divya.
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The pieces I never said. I want the bigger piece. I want to facilitate that dramatic piece.
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Because I didn’t want.
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He wanted to know this terrible secret about me.
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That I wanted to be big.
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And So what would happen? I would.
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Get the smaller pieces.
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But at our circles, when we were facilitating.
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After my partner would facilitate the big piece instead of moving on to my other piece, I would backtrack over her piece and I would say something that sounded smart and almost made her look not as smart, right?
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And it was like it was still coming out because that’s the thing about.
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Shadow it doesn’t go.
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Away we can try to repress it and hide it, suppress it, whatever. It’s still. And when it comes out, it comes out to bite us in the **** because we’re not harnessing it right. And it was awkward, and I always felt guilty afterwards, and I worried that she was.
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Angry at me that I was still annoyed at her, that she was getting the bigger she fell all that until one day she finally confronted me and basically said, what the heck is going on and you know, and thank goodness for her and our friendship and that she didn’t give up on me and she confronted me in this way.
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And it was the turning point for me to be able to finally start to say, Oh my gosh, I want to be big.
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So big, even bigger than others. And the more I started working with this shadow.
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Here’s what happened. It’s not that I started harming others with my bigness, but me. And and my business partner. We came into more alignment. I would some, I would say, when I wanted the bigger pieces. Sometimes she would say great, other times we would fight it out, you know, and and here’s what also came along with that.
00:25:48 Speaker 1
I stopped being so paranoid about other business owners being bigger than.
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Now kind of like how you started Kara, was that the end of the story? Did I have all my power issues sorted after that? Absolutely not. It has been an ongoing project for the last 20 years since then. But.
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Every time I come back and I pull out more of the power shadow from the crags, I have more of myself. I feel less shame. I’m able to accomplish more and give more to the world and my loved ones. What I meant to give.
00:26:28 Speaker 2
I want to say it’s so refreshing to hear you and just be in this conversation about bigness.
00:26:35 Speaker 2
Because in my work I see that there’s so many people who hold such potent medicine that been have been taught, that that’s bad and that.
00:26:44
Yes.
00:26:47 Speaker 2
This reframe of it as something that comes from your soul.
00:26:52
Yeah.
00:26:53
Yes.
00:26:54 Speaker 2
To honor and to to devote yourself to and something that when you don’t, it’s gonna bite you in the ****. Something’s going to feel off. It’s going to impact.
00:27:03 Speaker 2
Your health, yes.
00:27:04 Speaker 2
All those things? Yes. Thank you for the powerful work you do with Shadow and all the work you do. I would love to close.
00:27:14 Speaker 2
Just with you sharing a little bit about how people can learn more about shadow and working with you.
00:27:21 Speaker 2
Any resources or practices you recommend to be aware of it going out there in?
00:27:27 Speaker 2
The world.
00:27:28 Speaker 1
Yes, I actually have an e-book called how to work with the.
00:27:32 Speaker 1
Shadow.
00:27:34 Speaker 1
So and you can find that on my website which is applied depth Institute and it is. It’s a great resource. I I go into great detail on some of the.
00:27:48 Speaker 1
Foundational pieces on what shadow is and different ways you can start working with it.
00:27:55 Speaker 2
And what are some ways that people can be walking through the world?
00:27:59 Speaker 2
And just be more mindful of when Shadow might be at.
00:28:04 Speaker 1
Play. Notice the places and parts of yourself that you are ashamed of and want to hide. So just.
00:28:18 Speaker 1
That alone, right?
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If anyone that has already listened to this conversation, you have enough context as you move through your day. Notice, am I ashamed that I.
00:28:29 Speaker 1
Have a lazy streak.
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Am I ashamed or want to hide my southern background? You know, whatever it is that I want to be big that I like, really fancy things, right? Cause I was taught that it’s bad to really like, you know, all of that. So first just start to notice it.
00:28:53 Speaker 1
And just the next step you can take is when you notice it.
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Take a deep breath and just hold space for the neutral possibility.
00:29:05 Speaker 1
That this might.
00:29:06 Speaker 1
Be an incredible part of who you are. You’re just not using it in the most aligned ways yet.
00:29:13 Speaker 2
I prayed you describe it as a superpower. It’s that shame can be a pointer to our superpowers. And as you shared a a way to not only welcome but just love more of who we are, yes.
00:29:29 Speaker 2
Thank you so much.
