Love Me Lab
Episode 011: Let's Talk About Shadow Work
Jordana Che Toback and I sit down to discuss what we see as the shadow of our human nature and ways to learn to accept and love it, meaning ourselves, more, since it's a part of ourselves.
Follow Jordana @jordanache_ to see her videos and find her website as a performance elevation coach!
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Meditation Course!
By friend to the show, Michael Korman! Use this link to sign up and help support Love Me Lab!
Disclaimer: This post contains affiliate links. If you make a purchase, I may receive a commission at no extra cost to you.
Jordana Che Toback and I sit down to discuss what we see as the shadow of our human nature and ways to learn to accept and love it, meaning ourselves, more, since it's a part of ourselves.
Follow Jordana @jordanache_ to see her videos and find her website as a performance elevation coach!
Start for FREE
Meditation Course!
By friend to the show, Michael Korman! Use this link to sign up and help support Love Me Lab!
Disclaimer: This post contains affiliate links. If you make a purchase, I may receive a commission at no extra cost to you.
This is a story that he and I are still friends. But anyway, Simon. Simon was a British fellow. I was involved with. He was a good deal older than I was. This was a long time ago. And I remember he he'd had some serious stuff, go through his life and we were kind of doing this cross ocean thing. I've done that. It's like, it's silly, but you know, I was in my twenties, but He sent me this postcard, like they're always a holiday the year he was on holiday and some cycling trip and he writes me like, I'm in such a bad state. It's best you forget about me. And I remember reading the card and being like, okay, I'm just going to listen and let this go. And then we were, I was in the city and I think he was in town. I knew he was in town for an extended period of time. We're walking by each other and I just kept walking and he was mortified. He called me like 10 times, like, how can you ignore me? And I was like, because you told me it was best to forget about it. So I did never done it. I just listened because sometimes it's kind of like, you just have to go, okay. And see what happens really. If someone, if you can't choose yourself, like if you can't choose someone else, the way you can't choose yourself, which is really, it's a hard thing to commit to. It's a hard decision to make. It's not an easy place. I think you have to be rock bottom. To know what choosing yourself is to know what it is to choose someone else to like really have a committed thing where you're not wavering and waffling. And I don't think that's simple to me. It should be simple, but I'm very, I can be very blunt going through a ton of shit. Yeah. To get here. So yeah, that's how I, you know, what it is to choose yourself. So for you, when you choose someone you're ready, you're like that. I choose you, but most people are not living like that in my opinion. No, it's true. I mean, what I hear in the rooms and in circles and just listening to people is just a constant victim story. With a little bit of a different outfit on over it. And I know I had one, you know, before you hit rock bottom, I think you don't know. You're even telling a victim story. Yeah. And then I think if you really go through the ringer, was your ever physical, your sort of rock bottom. Did you ever have like a physical? I don't remember if you told me like where your body wouldn't do, what you wanted it to do. I had a complete my body just like fell apart. I had a, my L four L five, like exploded when I was 22 years old. And then. It did the same thing again, seven years later, but don't forget. I actually, if I told you that though, I've written about it didn't yeah, I don't think I did, but then I think replicates the emotional breakdown or the emotional breakdown rapid replicates the body's breakdown. They're the same. Yes. And I developed a lot of like chronic pain from that. Just, I think it was the toxic stress, you know, I still have stuff, but it's not like psychologically it, I handle it differently, you know? It's like, Oh yeah, you're in pain. And I don't beat myself up for needing to take a break and I also don't stay down because I'm scared if that makes any sense. Yeah. Yeah. You don't just like disappear and you still live it decent thing about it. Yeah. It's different. Yeah. Yeah. This is one of the things I sort of realizing is that the people I know that fragment themselves the most are the most in physical pain. Yeah. And that part of that cultural phenomena of like, like thinking that we only can think positive, we can only be positive love and light love, and light love, and light kindness, kindness, kindness. It's a trap because if you're not processing the whole of you, which doesn't feel kind, it doesn't feel the loving and has. Demand of children inside of you and the darkness of a dark child inside of you. Like all these different aspects. I think of it as like the wants to destroy everything like a little demon child that just wants to break it. If it doesn't get what it wants that tantrum that's in us and if you haven't fully voiced it and you haven't taken it with you, then your love and light and kindness is a performance. And that's a mask. I would say that's most of the people I know. You know, generally speaking, unless they're in this community, people I know that are really working deeply. Yeah. But you know what I mean? Like we all have them. Yeah. It kind of, when I've heard and I was watching your last video today, I'd seen it before, but I wanted to kind of refresh your last one and the one before that on Instagram. And of course I draw everything back to myself because, you know so, but that's what I think that's why we talk and that's why we tell story and we all feel more connected that way. But, I was thinking about that in terms of how I would. Like Gaslight myself. Right. And be like, yeah, it was really hard, but you know what? I'm really grateful for how hard it was. And it taught me to be this way. And like, I lived like that for years and I did, I basically gaslighted myself. I understand why it wasn't my fault, but you're rewarded. In our world by doing, if you do that right now, like that's the sense of yeah. That's the climate is like, when people say, Oh, you turned out really well, like, okay, Yeah. What does it say? Oh, right. Like it's all. Okay. Because it turned out. Okay. Yeah. Like it made you a better person. Probably like I'm like, there was probably nothing really wrong with me, but, well, that's a very good point. And, and I'm going to say, add to that. There's an aspect to the work I do, where there's a sort of premise that you come in, your soul comes into the body. Everyone has a different aspect of explaining this, how the soul comes into the body and why it picks that body and that life, if you take full responsibility, if that's your premise, if that's the framework, but there's a tons of ways to look at this, but in the framework, I'm sort of using the one that agrees with me the most is we choose this. It's an IF who knows who, who knows, but if the soul chooses this experience, then there's two things we're talking about the soul's journey and then the environment it's in. And that has variables, right? The environment always has variables. But the soul comes in in the, in the framework I'm sort of using. With lessons to learn already. So from the past life that it didn't quite finish learning. And I feel that in my body that I had things to learn and I can't, I'm sort of surprised it took me this long to get to where I am today because I wouldn't, I didn't, I ignored it. I heard the call so many times that I was meant to sort of learn some stuff and I ignored it so many times. But my, I definitely feel like my soul came in with stuff to learn already and pick these parents to learn it a little more and then projected out onto them more stuff I needed to learn. And I continue to do that. And that's kind of, yeah, I know who knows. And that's the explanation I'd give myself because it feels right. But there's this other thing I just want to mention really quick, which is that. The soul. One of the things I read recently, so the, the way that Freud and Wilhelm Reich. Sort of had this system of looking at the evolution from zero to six years old. So this is psychotherapeutic looking at phases of development. And the premise is that the soul comes into the body. And that that's a struggle because soul energy, spirit energy is so different than human. Energy. And so the, the spirit has to transform in order to adapt to the human body while it's in the womb of the mother. And depending on that mother, depending on her chemistry, depending on the soul that's coming in, that can be the most terrifying thing for that soul to encounter. And you could come in with that terror. There are souls that come in with a mother who didn't want them or a mother who's being abused, or a mother is abusing yourself and. You could come in already just from zero to being boring with terror, very much at the forefront of your psyche, which is one way of looking at why do people come out a certain way and no, we don't know. Yeah. There's this one way to sort of explain it anyway. So interesting. A little of this. I like to look at generational stuff too. I'm very. Curious about, and, and, and the mind of the heart, there's more research around like the heart has memory, that kind of thing. And also the generational stuff. Sometimes I wonder if that feeling of a past life, because I don't know. Sometimes I wonder if that isn't like our ancestors, you know, like I feel it like timelines. That's how I been feeling it lately. Yeah. Like that they're all happening. At the same time, I started feeling this about three years ago, I had a sort of lightning bolt experience from shaking someone's hand and it kind of, it changed my life in this way that I can't explain. I felt like all the timelines went and present was past and past present and things I didn't imagine were also happening at the same time as it's not drug induced, which is crazy. And suddenly. All of that hearing timelines collapsing. I would never have understood that before, but having that experience of feeling like I knew someone for many years, having never met them before, but having had like weird intersections with them in my mind in the past. And it just was like mind blowing, like what, you know, I don't know. We don't know. There's lots of, there's lots of Carl Sagan type. Science I'm talking about. It would only make sense that there are other things going on besides what we know. Yeah. Yeah. It's super, it's super psychologically interesting. I recently read a book by a guy and I don't agree with everything he says, but all of his therapy is based on the stories that we're telling ourselves from our ancestors. It's called it. Didn't start with you. I forgot who it's by, but he, that it didn't start with you. A lot of like people's phobias and fears and even predispositions to like overeat or whatever he believes all. Maybe not all of, all of them, but much of, much of it starts prior to us within our ancestry. Well, now, scientifically, that would be true. I mean, there are countries in that how we know about the eggs and are. The engg that is you, this was being developed in your great, you know, like in your grandma when your grandma was in your great grandma, do you know what I mean? Like you was just it's there. Yeah. Yeah. There's a lot of other science on that and the way that heart has memory, it makes sense to me that a story that was being told or something that someone lived through before I was even thought of is a story that lives in me. That I'm living out in some way. And so this is what he tries to get to is like, he tries to dig into people's pasts and an old stories from the past, down in their families. And like, people are discovering that they are actually living out things that are stories and their family, and they, he gets them to like, do healing, work through either talking to that relative and like, not literally, but. Imagining talking to them, telling them that they're okay. Yeah. It's not like, you know, supernatural. No, but it's, it is right. He's having people connect to other timelines in their own psyche. I liked that, but I was thinking about the shadow, like stuff you're talking about. Yeah. And it's, I love this because there is such a push to like be super positive and it works on anyone I would for sure. Want to. Neat know them. Yeah. I've never seen it work on any, so they have a lot of physical problems and they had a lot of emotional problems and you deny your ego. You could lose your mind. It's true. So I kind of want to explore, I want to hear you talk about all this stuff. A couple of things running through my mind. What will you say to the people who fear like. Someone who's going to go with like completely negative all the time. Cause we've all encountered those people. Right. Who just are never happy with anything and complaining also. What do you consider shadow? Like I'd love to have you explain that. I could say what it is to me, but I want to hear what it is. So what else and how that plays into healing? What does it look like towork through it or accept it? Whatever, because I think especially for my audience there's this danger of, of, of feeling like you're playing the victim. So I think people go one of two ways when there's a fear of that there's super angry all the time and just pissed off and they live in that state. Continuously where they hang on to their rage and anger, which I don't know. It doesn't happen like that though. I mean, I could see why someone would be afraid of it if they hadn't walked through it. Yeah. It, it just looks like that. I guess they haven't processed their actions. Victim mindset maybe is more what I'm thinking of, like what the victimized that only lives. If you have not processed. Your actual victim. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I'm yeah. So I want to hear, you've probably got so many thoughts on all this. No, just the victim thing is really, it's really interesting because everyone's afraid of looking like a victim these days. Well, that goes to not wanting to be vulnerable and not in thinking that so if you're in a situation presently like a victim, I'm going to go, I'll go back to your first question is the victim thing is pretty interesting. Yeah. I know a couple of people who are perpetually victims. I also have that part of myself that can see a situation like a victim would that I've seen repeated a bunch of times. And I was a victim of some stuff, you know, as a child, but when you start to, okay, so if I'm in the present moment, And I see some victim shit happening to me and I feel victimized and I say it out loud. How shitty it feels, how angry I am about it. Why the fuck are they doing that? And I start to maybe with the help of a trusted person witnessed myself in the victim story, even just saying it out loud with a, with a witness, who's also bringing a little bit to light. Who says, yes, I hear you, but also can bring a little to light. What's what might be happening with some perspective. You also, even if they didn't give you the perspective, even just saying it can move energy, then you're talking. I mean, there is a very, if you don't have a good therapist, you don't have a good witness and you don't have someone saying. Challenging you in that moment to also take responsibility for your part in the victim hood, right? If you have nobody giving you that perspective, then the movement of energy could just be negative pleasure. But if you actually get to move it to the point of, self-responsibility like just the little piece, that's your, you brought yourself there, you asked for something in that relationship. I'm not, we're not talking about rape or anything, but you know what I mean? And even there, you know, you can go really deep with self-responsibility. I'll talk about that in a second, but if someone can just give you the perspective of the little bit of self-responsibility you have in your own victim hood, even in just how you're seeing the story, then energy moves through you. You don't want to keep telling this story over and over again and victimize others and be that black cloud that I know. I know who you're talking about. I know a couple of people like that, where their victim story is like an addiction. Yeah, but it's an addiction because they never seen in that structure, how they're responsible for themselves. No one's ever helped them and they are unable to see it. So it's a it's an addiction, it's a vicious cycle. They just keep going back into the victim story, victim story, victim story. And you're like, Oh my God, take a breath. Like I can't even sit next to you. You know, people are like that. It's really hard to be around them. I call it black cloud. Black labs. Yeah. I think I'm thinking of that. I'm going to interrupt you. Because in my circles, I run into people who are advocates, right? They're speaking out. They tell their story because. People can relate to it. And it's a way for people to be like, yes, that happened to me. I want to do something about it. How did you do something about it? Maybe I can do that too. That kind of a thing. And there are people who will look at, for example. Yeah. And there are people who will look at that and be like, shut up already. Like we know, do you know, like because you're saying, okay, so for example, I have talked about abuse in the Christian Church, like spiritual abuse. Because people use religion to control people. There are groups of people who will be like, stop blaming the church for all your problems, which isn't what I'm doing, I'm stating what's happened. Right. So that anyone else can recognize if it might be happening to them. Yes. But people don't like the truth being spoken, like, because it makes their life really inconvenient. Like it makes them. Facing that truth is really inconvenient, right? On each individual level, they would have to recognize that truth in themselves. Yeah. That lie. Yeah. So then there's actually telling your story and then there's like actually living the victim story. So what is the, what is living the victim? What's an example of like what living story looks, hold on to that question for one second. The thing is, is that your job is to understand and have a little compassion that your truth triggers people who are living a lie. Yeah. Yeah. And just to like, be like, okay, I can totally see how hard that would be. Yeah. Because I had a really big wake up moment and it was hard. It was, it was a rendering like was what do you call it? Just a different R word. It was like revelation. Yeah, no, there was a movie reckoning. It was a reckoning of me and myself like, Oh okay. So, so it's not, is it to have a little compassion for that in you and that, and other people that they're going to defend themselves? That's that's, that's their job. Okay. So what did you say? What was the question? I lost it. Yeah. I guess I have a very specific, like, it looks a certain way in my head and I don't know if I'm communicating it well, what's the difference. Right. So what's the difference. And what does it look like when someone's playing out that victim? The only thing that when you're playing it out is you're not listening to the person who's hearing you and trying to help you shift the victim. I've had experiences with people who have a black cloud energy in healing situations and what that energy feels like in a lot of people do this to lesser degrees. It looks like this I'm a victim. My story is so awful. And you say, well, okay, I hear you. Maybe you could look at it like this and they go, no, no, no, no. My story is so awful. And you say. Yeah, it is fucking awful. Yeah. And there's an aspect that you could take response, you know, and they say, no, no, no, no. Right. That is what keeps you in the victim story is you can't even hear the person who loves you, giving you feedback. And I, I noticed my therapist doing this with me. Well, he just goes with me and I'm like, why is he agreeing with me on all this shit? Cause you know, me being heard in that place, in the place of the victim and the place of the child brings me to go, okay, now what else are we going to talk about? Like you have to say it and be heard. And so here's the other thing is that you, as a witness, can't be like, I know, I know. I know. Let me, let me tell you what to do. Let me fix you. That's not a good friend and that's not a good witness of a victim. I think a good way to help a victim who's in that consistent vicious cycle might be to really listen, really let them play it out, go with them into their victim hood, which sucks. Nobody wants to do that, right? Everybody's like, no, no, no, it's fine. Let's bypass that and feel better. But like, if you go with them on their journey of totally beating themselves and just go with them and be like, Oh, that sucks. Feel it with them. And then say, you know, I see a way out of this. Let's try this, try this on, you know, and just try to be with them, actually, literally try to hold what they're holding. Cause that's camaraderie that, that right there, the energy shifts, like we're talking about energy and we're talking about people that can't stop telling themselves a story. Yeah. And I do think the work I do physically helps cause it is through the body that I have more stamina to sit with somebody who's in that energy. Hmm. I have more stamina to hold more breadth of myself in fight or flight. I have more breadth of myself, so I can sit with somebody in their pain and not try to fix them, change them, stop them. I can tell a real healer, a real teacher, by the way, they listen to you when you're in pain or when you say something that might trigger them, like their ability to hold space for you wherever you're at. Very few, most people have limits because they don't know themselves that well. So most healers therapists and Sean, and these kinds of people, everyone has limits. Right. But I would say that most people are not able to hold each other in their pain and in their discomfort and their awkwardness and the work I do. Performance elevation is about you letting yourself feel all this discomfort physically. So you begin to get to know your own defenses, your own. Stop your own limits, extend those limits, get to know the breadth of yourself, physically pushing through fight or flight response to get beyond fight or flight response. Then not only can you sit with others like that, which is what I'm sort of talking about. You can really compete with yourself with more patients and more like breath, just more like, okay, this is where I'm at today. You know, just going to be with myself, even though I suck today. Yeah, no, that's really good. I feel that really hard, especially like this last week. I tell me, I'm going to tell you because I think you can, I think, yeah, so I'm the lately I've just been like, I, I've never written down my negative feelings without also trying to. Like give both sides. Like I, I try to, you know, so I started doing this path of sorts. Like it's just, I feel shitty. I just feel shitty. Yeah. So I'm getting more comfortable with really just. And it's, it's private, it's in a journal it's like for myself and just really like writing down all the feelings and letting the emotion kind of just like, and I do it, I write with a pen and I don't like type it out, you know, just cause I, it, something feels like it needs to get blocked. And I've also noticed unblocked and I have noticed that I have this tendency, when I come back around to things that I've thought I've dealt with, I want to be like, why aren't you over the summer? That kind of a thing. I think of that. Hi. Yeah. I think of that as like my shadow, like the feelings that were not okay to feel because they made other people uncomfortable. When you're young, you know, like anger, sadness, the, the feelings that parents who aren't emotionally capable of holding that don't want you to feel. And then we learn not to feel that. Or I, yeah, I would say the shadow is the part of you that's unlooked at, yeah, that works. So if you're compensating in that way, because your parents don't want you to be a certain way, have feelings. And then you go like this new person down, or you adjust your behavior, the shadow. I, in my opinion, I don't know. Cause I know it's looked at a lot of different ways and I'm hearing it a lot of different ways right now. I would say it's the aspect that hasn't been looked at that is, has a sabotage to it. It has a darkness there's I think, I think every aspect of us has a shadow aspect. This is how I see. Because I think when you think, I think of it this way. Cause I was, I did talk to my mentor therapist about this, like all these yogis losing their minds and raping people and like being power, hungry, crazies. They're not just all bad. Right? They're not beautiful lessons. Like you'll be budged on. This is a perfect example. He was my Kundalini. That was the master of Koons Leni, who I followed too to a degree. And he apparently had like, Gun smuggling. I don't know. He had some seriously dark shit going on. And one thing we talked about was like that I talked about with Warren was, so let's say this aspect of him is, is, is the higher self is growing. The lower self is also growing darkest shadow. And if you're not aware that that aspect grows as the higher self grows, if you're not in check, it does shit in secret that the higher self is not aware of in a way splinter off more. And the goal, hopefully I think, I mean, I think this is what I extrapolated from. What we talked about was the goal is really to just keep checking, where am I right now? Where's that? Where's that coming from that I want to do that you keep the ego in check, but the ego isn't necessarily shamed or disregarded because then it works in secret and it does that shit like arms dealing. Weird control. And apparently he had corn going, this yoga teacher had porn going. People would come see him about get advice, spiritual advice. And he does porn on the TV and lots of people sitting around watching it. So some part of him had to splinter off to think, yeah, It's okay to do this because I'm educating people in their sexual, whatever, like some part of it. I don't think he was mentally ill. I think he really splintered higher self was confused with lower self stuff because his head herself was teaching great yoga that I got that changed my life. So I'm going to take that, but also look at that. Anyone has the ability to, I'm sorry, where did, I don't know, we started with this, but to not keep in check. The shadow aspect. Yeah. Okay. And so I'm relating that to like my feelings that I've never really been able to like look at or, or invite to the party. Yeah. Like what if you just let them be? I think they're probably ego related, which is fine. Yeah. Because I think those are some of the feelings that keep you alive. This is my premise. This is something I'm just making up. But I think that the ego. That holds that like the feelings that you don't want to talk about, because they're not pretty yeah. That you go, okay, I can put them in this journal, but you've usually when you've talked about them, you have to talk about the positive side too, right. Those feelings. I'm really starting to look at this slightly that, because I think it gets into our sexuality. I think it starts to really get, because I think if we really don't look at our fantasies. Dark, whatever, whatever judgments we have about them, then we're not fully embracing our own sexuality because inevitably some of our childhood God is going to be in our sex life. Yeah. My therapist even said, this I'm going to just keep quoting him. Cause I'm not making this up. He said that the constellation of a family is consistently the constellation of the sexual fantasy. And I was like, that makes sense. Right. But it's hard to know. It was so clear and he's the guy sitting with all the, that he's sat with way more people than I have. So, and he just like is like, he, you could just tell from his eyes, like consistent across the board. Wow. That the constellation of the family dynamic, however, the child interpreted it. However that is because it could be interpreted. Mine is gonna be different than my brothers, even though we were in the same family. Right. Although there's similarities. I can hear it when he's telling me stuff. I'm like, Yeah. There's similarities, but I'm sure we're very different in terms of, yeah. So interesting. So you said what to do about the people that are like are so negative that they can't get out of it, right? Yeah. I think, I, I think it's important to make the distinction that we kind of were making, like telling your story. Isn't living. And your victim story, necessarily many people, many people are advocates and are working for a cause and are using their story because, wow, I didn't know if people were shamed for having a story. It's a very different energy to me telling your story, to get something to move is different than telling your story, to get someone to collude with you. So you can be more of a victim. Yeah, it's an, it's a weird thing to run into because I recently, and it was just one person, but I don't know. I feel like there's a feeling a little bit from that would be an issue. You don't talk about your family. How dare you. Don't like fate brought that up in you. What she said to me, she said that I was blaming the church for all my problems. Oh, right, right. I was like no, I was literally like saying what happens in church and this many people experience this and you don't have to stay there like, right. But I didn't, I don't know why I felt the need to defend myself. Well, because she was basically saying that your story, that it didn't, it's an annihilation yeah. Of acknowledgement. There's a way people connect annihilate. When you're in a place when you're telling your story and you're telling your story, there's a vulnerability, right? There's a, there is. And I could just, the there's like a bypass in the Christian Church too. There's it happens in every organization and every, every way of believing basically, because. I think those things are formed because we're human and we don't, I'm trying to make sense of everything really. And it doesn't fit into this cute box that looks great. And we can show the world and we don't know what to do with it. And it was just, I could tell what I was saying was really bothersome to her because I kind of know, I just know, I know the circles. I know the thinking. I understand it. Cause I've been. In close proximity to it is all that saying, she says to you, you can't blame the church for all your problems. What it says to me is she hasn't allowed herself to go through owning her complaint. Right. And her argument, her argument to me was like, basically put it on Jesus' shoulders and don't worry about it. Yeah, but you can't do that until you. Okay. So here's the thing. We can put it on Jesus's shoulders. I don't, I'm not against that. I love Jesus. Yeah. And I love the idea of getting to a place where you're enlightened love with anything. You let it go. You give it up to God, but it's not the process. That's the last part of the process is giving it up the voice saying, okay. So I would also put these people in a physical position, a posture where they cannot avoid how they feel. Like anyone talking with that kind of an energy, I would put them in a physical posture where they can fatigue the fight or flight armor. And then what happens is the energy moves physically. And then you can talk about the real pain, the real shame, the real inability whatever you expressed, you know, whatever it is about the church. And then from that place of having fully voiced yourself, you're vibrating at a different frequency. You can actually then give it up to God, but it doesn't happen. You can't just give it up to God down from the base of your spine. It doesn't go up to God. God is up there. Right? Space masculine, God earth down here, goddess. Like you could bounce it into the earth, maybe with your physical body, but he, no, I disagree with myself there. You really have to physicalize it, move it up. Say it, it has to get to the voice. It has to come up through the third eye. Through the crown. And then it's like, then it becomes a column where you're connecting with source and you're connecting with source and you're moving and then you can give it up to God and say take it. Common to skip steps by the way. People love to miss quote and misapply scripture all the time. So it's, it was just this over and over again saying, I can do nothing without Christ. Right. So she was basically saying there's literally nothing I can do without Christ. And. That to me is, is, is what the church has become in many ways. Like it's where you go right off into like, wait a second. Wait a second. Wait a second. Wait a second. What about you in you? It's inside of you though, and you're you and you are actually separate and you're also one, but you're also separate, but wait. Yeah. The thing about putting it on Jesus, his shoulders. This is another slippery slope where you say it's outside of you before you've embodied it. Yeah, it doesn't work. No, it doesn't work. If I saw everybody being happy with that and physically happy, I would say. Okay. But what I see when people do that is that they're like this, they're having a conversation with you where they can't even take you in. So clearly it's not working. Whatever she's doing my sign, that it was working. If she was a woman of God, really feeling it and processing it and she'd be able to listen to you and go, wow, that is so great that you're doing that for yourself. Tell me more, right. And what my mind goes to, anything that you're doing is you're going to blame it on Christ or give Christ the credit. Like anything that you're doing. That is what they do though. They say, gee, you know, everything is it's because of Jesus that I have. Yes. Yeah. Very much that, the question, like I was talking about this with a friend of ours, a friend of mine. Yeah about surrender. And he was saying, when he feels surrender, he feels the most. Hmm, so this question of like surrender and, and the power of surrendering to Jesus, putting on Jesus, your shoulders. Yeah. There's a slippery slope of, are you denying your own physical body and presence in order to do that? Or are you acknowledging there's God in you and God outside of you? And so you can recognize how to surrender to God. That's how I see it. I just don't know if you can surrender without embodiment, right? Like, how can you it's so here's, here's why it doesn't work. Here's why this doesn't work I ust figured it out. So, because I know, I know what works, it always comes from the ground up. Right. But what doesn't work is anything that you put on top of yourself that doesn't allow a full expression of you, because that is what God wants you to do is to be fully you, otherwise you wouldn't be here. With the potential to be fully you as you. Yeah. Like why would you be made in you? Are you right? God says you should deny parts of yourself. No, no, no, no, no. God would never, that's not God, that's not God. As I know it, as I know it, it's, you're, you're here meant to be fully expressing with yourself, with someone you trust with, you know, it turns into love at some point, and then you can actually connect a source and say, thank you. Help me, let this go. Help me surrender to the things I cannot control, you know, take it. Yeah. But if you're, if you're putting it as a mask on yourself and skipping steps, you're fragmenting yourself and this does cost. It causes physical harm to your body. And I believe those physical harms the lower back pain you had, the slipping discs, all that stuff is meant to show you as a mirror has stopped and look at yourself. Yeah. And get it. I think that's what God is doing when we deny our own power, making us sick was a way to start doing it. Yeah. I think the real work. Yeah, I think you're right, because I was, I've literally been reading journals. Okay. So this happened in three and at that time I had. Tried to break away from my mother, like build my own life and this thing happened and she, I could see the, I could literally see the brainwashing happened. Like I was going at 19. I wonder if I should have no contact with my mother for a while, just to like, prove that she doesn't need to be in control of everything. Two in my journals being broken, repentant, saying I was horrible. I deserve to be going through this. Mother must think that God loves me so much to do this to me. And I must be, I must learn to be a better daughter to God. And to her, this was like filling journals for the next seven years. I completely dropped any idea of like having my own life, my own, whatever. This is how powerful our parents are to us. Yeah. Yeah. So, yeah, I took it to mean, like I just, I spent the next, I don't know, five to seven years and just deep prayer and like pleading with God to teach me my lesson and get me out of that situation. I wasn't taking any responsibility for myself. Granted. But if I had a process of continually talking and saying these things to yourself and your journal and giving it up to God is a process. That will help you find yourself for sure. Interestingly enough, it did. And by the time, my disc ruptured for the second time with all this stuff going on, there was a lot going on psychologically at this time. And my discs don't rupture in a small way. They do really big, like end up in emergency a lot down. I felt like I was being crushed. Yeah. That's what it sounds like. But before I, I, my surgery got put on the books and I packed up all my things and moved while I had that really severely ruptured disc, because I said to myself, if I have to recover with my mother taking care of me, I might not ever get out of this situation. Right, right. Yeah. Really weird way. Like I can see how. You're you're right. Like, I see what you're saying. Like our bodies are showing us things a hundred percent and nothing was happening in my life. Nothing was moving until I took the initiation until I said enough until I did something. You know, all those years of prayer and just me hoping, I don't know that that's a process. That's a process. And it's a process that you have to get to that point. You hit, you have to hit rock bottom. They was me hitting rock bottom. You did physically, the body sometimes has to be so gone that he can't cheat. Yeah. I mean, I didn't leave my house for two years. I didn't, you know, it was, it was a lot. I totally get I get it. Yeah. Yeah. It's an interesting thing. I even think, I even think that that injury is like even injuries where we get hit by a car or we fall on the ice. Or we, I actually have found a, sort of a path to thinking that because we have weaknesses in the body that hold our wounding emotional wounding. We're going to injure in those weak places, even if it's being hit by a car and we're an actual victim of something. I think so too. I still think it's important to go into those injuries, into the physical wounding, into the physical body, not in order to become stronger, but to, in order to listen, hear what's there and then it moves and then we can. I think that being flexible is being strong because you can just go with the punches of life because life is crazy. And especially now, so I think that injury has its own way of telling you something and a victim would use it to tell themselves that they're a victim. Until they're hearing themselves sound like a victim with a little bit of compassion and then they can start to go, okay, how can I take a little more responsibility for myself? How can I take a look? But there are, there is a combination of defenses where I go, okay. That persons, they might never see the light. There's a couple it's, it's the, it's the wounding at a certain age and another point in rigidity or they might never see it. But. I don't know. I think with rock bottom, you never know. I think we all handle it differently, but it's a gift. Yeah. I know. There's some of the stuff I'm saying is a little bit it doesn't go with people's victim story and that can be really off putting to people and, you know, and I do have some stories around this. Like my life had to be a total. Shit show over again. Like I was miscarrying and on the Eve of my fifth miscarriage, the loft that I rented out, which I'd been bringing tenants into, I used it for rehearsal. So it was my workspace, but there were three bedrooms and I'd always rented it to people legally, but one of them had been there for a few years, decided to start doing drugs and him and his new girlfriend were doing drugs. They set the room on fire. And they found a lawyer at some party who, when I tried to kick them out, they basically got this lawyer who was also, I think just some kind of crazy dude, but he was actually a legit lawyer to Sue me for trying to get them to leave for setting the room on fire and doing drugs in my loft. Like I had total like legit, but I was also psychically weak. And also I brought in other people at that time because I was a psychically weak. That were crazy. So there was like, mayhem mayhem, when I say mayhem, people suing you for no reason, you have no money and you're trying to get pregnant with any money you have. I was like, I, I don't know how I didn't find it there because I mean, I was just like, I was like a chicken with my head cut off, but like also just like on the floor, like I couldn't get, I just didn't know what to do with myself. And I really white knuckled it. I did not do the work until after. And it was even after Una was born, that the work really started for me. It's been a slow process, but it was like, I had to hit that point where I had nothing and I was like, okay, well I have nothing. I have no money. I have no kid. I don't my career been on, on hold. Cause I'm trying to get pregnant and doing all my money. I don't have enough energy for work and I just sort of stopped. And I was like, all I want is a baby. That's it. I just want to meet her. And I connected with her and then I got pregnant. Like I just had to really start from scratch. And I think in a lot of ways she healed me, but I don't think that I would have ever gotten pregnant if I hadn't hit that point where. I had nothing. It's just sort of caught me up and let me think I was fine. I had no, I had no Bronx. Yeah. I think what you're saying is it's why I kind of struggle with the whole, a lot of the self-help stuff. Like a lot of the pull yourself up by your bootstraps, like change your mindset, change your life. Yeah. That's true. Change your mindset. Change your life. But. Also is that bypassing a lot of stuff. A lot of it is just do this, maybe stuff from this, do these activities. I think a lot of it's about organization and you should do stipulate your own thoughts to not have the thoughts you're having instead of a full, deep acknowledgement of having those thoughts and why, where are they coming from? Exactly. Why are you having them and allow yourself to be who you are? Yeah. And actually most self-help stuff just makes you more fragmented and more idealized. Yeah. There's a, there's a person talking about magnetism, not going to name names, but I'm like, it just doesn't feel legit because I can't, I don't hear any deep work in it. There's some deep work. It's very, it's like some of it's a little deep. Some of it, it just feels vibrationally like. Like a selling point for people. Yeah. Instead of a process that is going to be a constant relationship, you have to yourself just again, like for that. Yeah. It's true. I think that's why I feel like I don't, I don't know where to fit into the whole scheme of things and that's okay. It's just, it's like, The reason I do what I do is because I feel like it's really important to like, go to understand, to dig up to like, can't always force everything. You can't always just change your mindset. Sometimes you just have to like, Be open to whatever the process is going to be in that moment. Like, I think our brains in our bodies know like what we're ready for. They know when you're lying to yourself. I used to say I did a whole video before. I don't know if you remember on my old page about how mantras don't do anything. I think those are bullets. Affirmations are bullshit. They're bullshit. When I was trying, there was a moment where I was really, I was in this like movement of peak potentials. It was like financial. Yeah, financial you know, shifting, but through like, they did a lot of emotional work. It was great stuff. It definitely took me to a different, like my money mindset has sucked my whole life because I don't, it's just a re it's a reflection of other things. Yeah. And mine is too, to a degree. Yeah. And I'm not sure how to remedy that. I don't have the answers, but I'll say this all the mantras I was saying about financial freedom. None of them felt right. Because I wasn't, I didn't believe them. And if you, if you really are listening to yourself and you don't believe the shit, you're telling yourself to say to yourself, what is that doing? It doesn't reset anything. You're just bossing yourself around. You're just manipulating yourself. It just causes like a almost a hysteric vibration instead of. Being around somebody who's actually like feels their pelvic floor and feels their feet on the ground and is just present and like listening to you is the hottest most powerful. It's not like tell yourself you're good. I think that just is crazy. It's making people crazier it's not helping. But it's an industry, so it sells books, but it's not actually, I don't think it's helped. It's an industry and there's something to it. There's some, there is something about believing, believing that you are good enough and you deserve these things. And all that belief comes from it comes from you. And if it's not, if it is being put on, you know, and it is like this propping you up, it's all going to come crumbling down. And it'll be worse than the second time. That's right. Yeah. Gimmicky. And I think on some levels it works if you're ready, but I have a, an embodiment coach who does Rolfing and she's like, yeah, this is something that people who are ready. Right. Yeah. I love that. That's similar in a way that similar energetically to the work I do too. I, I see some similarities there. I feel lucky to have worked with her, but yeah, it's so interesting. Yeah. It's amazing. You can see why it's not that popular as a massage therapy. How's everybody not doing, not everyone's like us, but yes, it's true healing from that work. Yeah, it really is. So it's like, I. Like the affirmations make sense to me, but only on this level of like, I don't know what I'm trying to say. You have to have processed the feelings before you can make a choice to go for me. Like I have just fully accepted that. I, you know, all the things about me that I think it has to come from having acknowledged yourself. I do before you say, I'm going to choose a positive moment instead of a negative one, in order to get to the choice you had to have, you have to have listened to yourself. You can't just make the choice before fully embodying and physicalizing that's my mind. No, that's true. I think there's so much bypass. I think people say I don't have a great money mindset. These are the things, but they don't go deeply into. Either why they're believing that, or like the deep, the stories that are running, running, running, running, running their lives and dig it all up. I have a story in me that only comes up when I give up my power, but the only time I really give up my power is with really powerful people. So it's happened like very few times. And so I haven't even had to look at it because I'm so compensated. I can kind of get through. And I was pretty successful except in these situations where I would give up my power and kind of lie on my back. Like you're the master, you're the God. And then I would wonder why I was in so much pain and I literally have this with someone where it brings up so much of my stuff. My lack of worthiness, my feeling ugly. I didn't even know those things were, I didn't even know until like now that I'm walking through it with, I'm actually walking into this, like being around this person, let's say I'm actually walking into it to say, okay, I'm just going to see how I feel and see if I can walk myself through this. But I think also part of the problem is that I didn't even know. And I think this is a lot of high-functioning people who maybe can't make money. Or if you have certain things that don't work, you know, there's a deep lack of value of self that you're not even listening to you because you've mastered the art of the bypass. You've mastered it too. It only comes up when you're around a super, like I danced for Mark Morris. He's a super powerful, charismatic dude. I felt like nothing. Like I was going to prove myself and I was in this energy of nothing, but I'll prove myself. I'm nothing, but I'll prove myself. It was devastating for many. It's very devastating because I never could actually feel myself around him. And if you're, if you're living your life, you know, like we're very talkative, we're verbal, or, you know, you're, you're clever, you go, you get into things you can kind of get by without doing deep work. Oh yeah. You know, and then until you've really on flat on your back, you're not gonna. You're not going to necessarily want to do it. Right. Right. Yeah. So that was weird. Yeah. I sort of have, there's a new age. It's an interesting topic because I do think it's pretty prevalent. It's new age affirmation. Repeat this. You'll feel better. I have found that stuff to not work. Yeah. The things that just make you feel better in the moment. They never felt maybe for a couple seconds maybe, but I usually punish myself. I'm a pretty masochistic person. And so I would just punish myself that I didn't really feel that way while you're a lot more aware. That a lot of people are. I feel like, I think a lot of people might feel better for a few seconds and then wonder why it's not working permanently or something. I don't know. Sure, sure. Like, why didn't it work? I told myself I was good. I'm in good enough. And yet we completely don't. We didn't, we don't value feeling. We don't value opinion based on feeling like every book I read. I was just talking about this today. Every book I read about acting and the movement I'm doing for actors, right. They're all like telling people to, I said this in one of my videos, like they're saying start from a neutral place. Like, what the fuck does that mean? And they're acting they're already putting in play that you need to be somewhere else other than where you are. Yeah. And then they're constantly quoting other philosophers and other people that are enacting to validate themselves. Yeah. What if you just said, and I'm going to do this, I'm going to do a pamphlet and just be like, this is what I think, based on my experience, see if it works for you and I'm not going to quote any muthafuckas. I mean, like what if I didn't quote, Lasky instruments, not Stravinsky. What's the other S there's another S the Strasburg. What about, what am I didn't quote people. Anything in anything we do, if we didn't get you to, if you just say you, youre, you, youre Tabitha, that, and this is what you think, and this is based on your opinions and your experience. People get really freaked out. I know who are you? And you just feel it what's that mean? Like, is it, you know? Yeah. So true. You always get me to think really, really hard. Yeah. Like my brain wants to go to the basement. You're already there. You're already thinking it's not like, yeah, I'm always thinking and overthinking, but. So back to shadow my shadow. I have 15 more minutes. Good. Okay. Just talk. I feel like you're just better when you're just, I'm not interrupting when I'm a psychopath and I'm just dressing. Sometimes I get lost. Okay. So. Let's talk about the shadow work. I feel like so many people that especially would be listening to me and my stuff are afraid of their feelings are afraid the carry so much shame to begin with. Yeah. And you, yeah. Yeah. I think that, I think that everyone I listened to who's talking about shadow work. Talks about it in sort of different aspects. But I do think that the one thing that I'm saying consistently on our little conversation here is that it's all important. All of you is important. Yeah. And the parts, I would say the shadow is an aspect to every voice in your head. Every voice in my head has a shadow and a light. Every voice in my head has a divine masculine and divine, feminine, and higher self, a lower self. Every voice has a different age. It's from a different place in me that it became a voice in my head. Or I would say a strand as part of this channel. This is how I am trying to think of it, to kind of explain it to myself. Because there's a shadow part. And like, if I'm, I'm expressing a complaint about something, there's an aspect of it. That's this age, that's the age I'm at. Now having an experience I'm explaining to you. And the shadow aspect of it is the part that takes no responsibility. And isn't known to me maybe fully. And I think I'm pretty sure that's how Yung looked at shadow was anything that was in the dark doing its bidding on its own. Without your knowledge of it from any age, from any aspect of you, I believe, I hope I'm not saying that now. So I've kind of, that's where I kind of came from when I can use that word, but I want to use it without shame. Because there are aspects of shadow that are just young. There are aspects of shadow like the crystal that are just that want what they want. Like a child innocently wants what it wants demands. It will tear the whole game down. It doesn't get what it wants. It's not always this like evil. Spirit like taking over that's bad and shouldn't be, you know, so if you start to look at it like that, that there's a shadow aspect to every strand and every strand is a voice in your head, then it becomes something you have to hear every time you hear yourself. So part of me is like, I'm really I'm on this fast and I'm really excited to have the actual food. I didn't have any yet. It's like a mimicking fasting, fasting, mimicking diet. And then part of me is there's probably a negative pleasure aspect to that because I'm kind of, part of me doesn't think I deserve to eat normally, but there's a shadow. There's a positive, I'm doing a fast for a reason. And there's a negative, darker aspect that I'm going to say, okay, say what you want come along. Cause you're there anyway. And when I deny that I have the negative aspects, because I shame them and think they're bad. I'm literally saying there's a half of every part of me that's bad. Yeah. And not worthy. So there's no way to be putting yourself out as worthy. If you think 50% of you is not worthy, it's like you're completely confusing yourself constantly. And giving yourself parameters that are not healthy physically and the physical body reflects all of this. So for me, it was not being able to hold a pregnancy. I wanted to get pregnant, but my body wouldn't hold a pregnancy. So there was a, there was a huge duality going on inside my body. I was over defended and under receiving, like, I, I, there's a part of me, the feminine part of me that was not, was not able to receive and surrender for so many, so many, so many reasons. I just think if we understand that there is shadow in every light part of us. If we understand that there is no light without the dark, then what we're saying is, okay, it's my responsibility to constantly voice the dark with the light, because they're the same. They're not one, like not the same. They make a strand like they're together. That's what I think. I think they're together having like yin yang sex. They are, they are the same in that way that they are bonded like men and women in sex. And and we can go all over the place with that. But that's what I think. Yeah, I mean, you think about the words light and shadow, anything that has a light shining on it. It's going to have shadow on the other side, you know, it's not. They do go together. They are whole thing. And if we're splitting ourselves, we're literally splitting those parts of ourselves. And there is a lecture on this about duality, how it comes into play, why we do this in our psyche, I'm going to refresh and I'll make sure I email you about it. But I don't remember because it's dense, but it's in the pathwork lectures about how duality starts. Okay. Wait, it's that? You love. Okay. Here's what it is. It's exactly that you love your parents so much. Yeah. You also hate them when they say no. So the minute they start saying, no, the child from the child's place hates them for saying no is not allowed to hate them because they know that's bad. They know that they should love their parents. It's already a construct and the minute you both love and hate, but don't allow the hate. You've created duality. You're not allowed to hate them. So then you mask it, then you start doing these weird things that magnetize to perform for your parents so that they don't, you don't have to have a temper gender. Don't yell at you. They tell you don't do this. Then sometimes I try to play because I've read all this shit and done all this research. Yeah. Go feel mad. I know you're not, I won't give you candy. Let's scream. You know, like I just didn't indulge her in, instead of telling her to mask it. She's like, you know, I don't love you anymore. I'm like, okay. I accept. I still love you. Like, I let her it's so good that she can say that though. Like, do you have any idea? I'm sure you do. I do now because she's at this age, just starting to come out the stuff she says, I'm like, dude, like she said to me, you know what she said to me the other day she goes, I go, Oh no, I don't want to hear any whine anymore. And I said it like, I'm done with the whining. And she goes, yeah, I need to let this out. Are you kidding me? What kind of superhero have I raised? Like, she's like, no, no, I need to express myself. She's six. This is, yeah. That's what happened, you know, that's good. It's good. And I was like, okay, you know, I'm, I'm receptive. I'm like, okay, I'll stop yelling at you for whining like half a minute. So that's where it starts. It starts in zero to six years old. You're not allowed to hate, you're not allowed to have a tantrum. You're not allowed to express you aren't most, I would say 99% of kids are not, or they're indulged in the other way. They're allowed to do whatever they want, which isn't good. I wrote a bunch of stuff using the word hate last week, because I said I was never allowed to use the word hate, hates a really strong word. Do you even know what hate is? Like, that's what I was taught. Right? Like, You're not supposed to hate anything or anybody, you know? So I just let myself yeah, totally get that bypass. It's an immediate bypass. I have to check. I do it with Una too, though. Even though I'm looked at to a degree, like if she says someone's dumb, I'm like, don't say that that's not nice. It's like, I don't care if you're nice. Okay. So how do I reframe this? Yeah. Tell me why you don't like them. Like it's, but I forget sometimes to take the time yeah. To do that. It's true. Because I think expressing feelings is like, like that's totally okay. Or like, I hate, I love, but like to say someone's dumb, like that's, that's different jreducing them to one thing, right? Yeah. Yeah. It is different. So like, it's okay to say why you don't like somebody that, that focuses on this is an aspect of this person. That's basically rubbing me the wrong way or whatever. Yeah. You're allowed to have that fearing. Yeah. Right. So it's almost like I'm in real time, re rebirth, not reversing. What is it? What do they call it? Re parenting. They call it the parents, you know, you're repenting, you're yourself, myself, trying to do it with her because it is, it is kind of interactive. The more I do it with her, the more I realize I'm not, you know, how do I give myself the time? So, you know, like you just start to do it, you start to see. Yeah. But the more, the more we notice that the shadow is the light is the shadow. That it's, that which came first, the more, you know, the less fragmented we are. Yeah. I always appreciate your thought processes and yeah, I love following you. You have so much content. Thank you. Really do. Yeah, I've been a little bit. It's a little bit like, I can't, it's hard for you to say anything without getting political and I don't really, I don't care. But I'll be back. I get it. I so appreciate you being on this has been a pleasure. Thank you so much for letting me do it again. Oh yeah. To do more. I highly recommend everybody follow you. I'm going to be putting that in the outro and everything like that. Not that I've got like a huge following, I love it, but I didn't have to pick up my daughter. I asked you stay in gossip more. Yeah, we can talk any time. Let's do it. Get out of here. I'll be talking to you so great to see you. You too. You too. You're the best. I appreciate you. That's all right. No. Wow. No, really? I admire you a lot. I don't mean real person. Yeah. Right. It's so like, I would hug you. I know I'm such a hugger. I'm there for I'm for it. I'm there for it. Okay. Good. All right. I'm going to let you go. And this won't be the end, so, all right. Okay. I'll see you later. Okay. I'm hitting it. Bye.
