Sh8peshift Your Life

Shadow Work & Soul Glow: Healing What You Hide

• Zakiya Harris aka Sh8peshifter • Season 1 • Episode 29

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You can’t shift what you won’t face — and baby, your shadow’s got wisdom too.

This episode dives deep into the tender art of facing your hidden self. Scorpio season calls us inward to unearth the stories, fears, and patterns that shape our evolution. Through reflection, ritual, and truth-telling, we explore how to transform the shadow into sacred wisdom and reclaim your full radiance.

If this episode resonated with you, subscribe, leave a review, and share it with your people! Let’s keep the conversation going—connect with me and let me know your biggest takeaway.

Sh8peShift YourLife (00:

00.088) you 18.159) shape should fit 22.847) you 52.332) Welcome back, shapeshifters, with another exciting episode of the Shape Shift Your Life podcast. Today we are talking about shadow work and soul glow. We are going to delve into the tender art of facing our inner shadow, as we are now in Scorpio season, and Scorpio is all about calling us into the depths, calling us into the darkness. And so this is an invitation, a seasonal opportunity to transform the shadow into sacred wisdom and claim your full radiance. So what is the shadow? Let's take a step back and learn from nature. As above, so below is one of the universal laws that there is. We are a tiny microcosm of that. When we think about light and dark, days and nights, inhale and exhale. Divine feminine being associated with the moon, divine masculine energy being associated with the sun. This is not a gender. This is an energetic, that every element in nature, it has those polarities and is through those polarities that we create balance. And we live in a culture that is so obsessed with what can be seen, what is in the light. I've talked about this in past episodes, but the true wisdom, the true magic, is to explore the darkness because everything that comes to light begins in the dark. All of us have our own inner darkness. We have the visible, shiny, outward side of us, and inside of us there is that shadow. And that shadow is what creates who it is that we are going to become. Many times we want to look at our life. We can go back to the shadow to gain clarity as a teacher. For why do we behave the way that we do? Why do we react in the way that we do? Respond to certain triggers in the way that we do? Where did we learn some of our coping mechanisms or practices? What is our default that we go to in times of uncertainty, in times of challenge, and in times of opportunity? And if we trace that line back, it sits within the shadow self.

Sh8peShift YourLife (03:

09.282) The shadow is a guide. The shadow is not our enemy. The shadow is giving us clear data and indication and what we bury beneath the surface. And then it can support us in revealing what exactly it is that we need to learn or what is the antidote for what we're experiencing. The actual medicine lies in the shadow. Our ancestors understood this. That is where the idea of Sankofa comes from. They understood you have to go back before you can move forward. Another aspect that helps us examine the shadow in our own lives, a really simple exercise that you can do, is to look at those parts of your home that have been unattended to. We all have a junk drawer. Some of us have more than one. Some of us got junk closets. Some of us got junk houses. That place where you've buried those things that you no longer want to see. We all have those compartments in our life where we have places and spaces that we don't want to look at. We don't really want to tend to. What is the metaphysical equivalent of that in your own energetic field? Maybe it's part of your past, part of your childhood, a relationship, a health challenge, or any type of challenge that you've had in your life where you've decided to just buried something. And so often what happens is those triggers ignite and illuminate the work that we have not done. Really examining the roots of the shadow, following that line all the way back to the beginning, and looking at how generational and cultural survival patterns taught us how to shrink, how to mask, how to perform, how to hide. And so many of us are moving in a default of how we've had to adapt to an extremely traumatic event. And then we take that and we normalize it. For those of us who come from families who experienced extreme xenophobia and racism, and I know from my family anti-blackness, the survival pattern was to fit in, to straighten your hair, to worship the gods that were deemed acceptable.

Sh8peShift YourLife (05:

33.346) by society. It was speaking a certain way, code switching, where we have to leave who we are at the door in order to navigate certain corporate spaces, professional spaces, educational spaces. Those are just small examples of survival patterns. We've also seen this when folks have experiences of violence as a child or even as an adult. Sometimes you can become numb. Sometimes you can become overly sensitive to violence. Anytime the energy starts shifting, you want to tap out or remove yourself. People who are not able to experience discomfort, because discomfort for them brings them back to the discomfort that they had at some adult or childhood traumatic experience. And because we haven't learned the tools and techniques to move through discomfort, we tap down discomfort and as soon as we feel it, we tap out. And that is a huge impediment to healing because healing requires discomfort. Healing requires sitting in the shadow, examining it, looking at it. And those triggers are an invitation to point us directly to where that shadow is and to reverse engineer and reverse hack from that trigger to the actual impetus. for that trigger and to understand that we can create spaces through therapy, plant medicine, through spirituality to examine, navigate, heal and restore and literally rewire the neural pathways in your brain so that certain incidents are not completely associated with trauma. And that's how we begin to turn our triggers into tools to take discomfort as a data point. to really explore where is this coming from, why is this coming up, and that is where we can really hold the frequency of neutrality. I talk about this so often that we wanna, it's not always being happy, whatever, you know, happy means. Happy can just be, chilling. know, happy can be, I'm neutral. It doesn't have to be this over excitement. And that neutrality allows us to observe without emotion.

Sh8peShift YourLife (07:

59.18) and to understand what is it for us that we need to take and what are the things that are ready to compost that we are ready to release. In my own experience, one of the things that I've had to navigate in my life is imposter syndrome. I know many of you say, what? You seem so confident and you're such a leader. Yes, I am, but I still deal with imposter syndrome. And a lot of that comes from the fact that I grew up in a family where my gifts were not recognized. Anything that was outside of the mainstream was not supported and was even seen as a threat because I grew up in a family that had generation after generation after generational trauma. And so there was this idea of scarcity. My parents both were the first in their family to go to college. You know, they moved to California. They had this kind of radical life, I guess, compared to my people in Virginia, which is where my family is from. And so there was this idea that we've come so far. We can't lose this. We can't lose our jobs. We can't lose our position. We can't lose our status. And so there is no room for exploration. I was put in private schools my whole entire life because whiteness was seen as better. Those schools provided pathways into higher education and social networks that supported me in getting a job. And all of that was true, and I played that out. And yet, there was this inner part of me that yearned for different spiritual perspective, that was extremely psychic, and that was tapping into ancestors and other energetic forces that I didn't have the names for because there wasn't really a space in the Christian theology, in the...

Sh8peShift YourLife (09:

55.638) family that I grew up in. And my family, because of their radicalism, rejected their Christianity that they grew up in because for them, because that shadow was associated to trauma. And they saw folks in the church that were not practicing what they were preaching. And so that left a spiritual void in the household. Although academics and scholarship was rewarded, having a sense of cultural pride and cultural awareness. And so the microaggressions and the blatant racism that I experienced in white spaces didn't really matter. You know, it was like, hey, you're getting good grades. All of these other unseen things, right? Shadow things, things that you couldn't really put your finger on, but were swimming in the cosmic soup of my experience shaped that for me. And so I... found myself in my early 20s feeling like I had checked off all the boxes of capitalism and I was empty inside. That I had a cultural pride, that I wanted to delve deeper into other parts of spirituality. I could sing, I could dance, I was creative. And that creativity was not nourished because it wasn't this clear linear trajectory of how you're gonna make money. And even in my family, it was somewhat mocked. as if you were wasting your time. And so I was never able to bring my excitement home and have my excitement validated. Instead, my excitement was seen as naive. It was seen as a waste of time. And so I internalized that. That was my shadow. For all of the mothers out there and for all humans out there, a child's... energetic frequency is impacted just by the way your eyes light up when they walk into them. But there are these non-social cues, especially for my teachers, just the way you receive somebody, that you're opening this invitation of safety and reflecting back to that child their life.

Sh8peShift YourLife (12:

06.258) You're mirroring that light, that that in and of itself can make or break a child's self-esteem. And when that light is not reflected and you look at your child through the eyes of disappointment, through the eyes of stress, through the eyes of being broke, through the eyes of racism, through the eyes of overwhelm, through the eyes of your depression. I had a mother that looked at me with those eyes and I just no shade to her, her own shadow stuff. But it... it sent a message to me that, maybe I'm not good enough. And so now when I find myself in those spaces of wanting to do something different, whatever it is, moving to Mexico, recording an album, launching a podcast, whatever, that shadow voice still pops up and starts whispering all of the reasons why whatever I want to do is not going to And so rather than trying to ignore that voice, the invitation that I want to share with you is to invite it in. this voice is here. That means I'm in an uncomfortable place. Well, why am I uncomfortable? Because I'm doing something different. I'm stretching. I'm moving out of my comfort zone. I'm growing. Growth is uncomfortable. So of course, the shadow is going to descend. Of course, the shadow is going to show up. That's actually a data point that I'm moving in the right direction. Because if I'm not hearing that, I'm probably stagnant. I'm probably not stepping into the greatness of who I know myself to be. And so now I'm able to invite that shadow in the room and say, you're here. Welcome. Have a seat. You want a glass of water? Yeah, because we about to do some big shit here. And so that's why you're here. You're here to remind me that we are on the verge of something great. You're here to remind me that I am expanding into new spaces and places. And you're reminding me that I'm ascending. I'm leveling up. I'm laddering up. And so I can transform and alchemize that shadow energy into something that is positive.

Sh8peShift YourLife (14:

16.59) I have undergone hypnotherapy and that has been super transformative for the hypnotherapist was able to take me back to those spaces and rewire my brain. So by the time I wake up, I'm not still dealing with that. Now this is work that happened over a course of years. This is work that has happened over the course of multiple sessions. This is not a one and done and I'm still practicing. So it's not necessarily something that you ever get over, but it is something that you are able to recognize, have an awareness around, tap into your tool set and alchemize it. And the ability of me to go through those steps has accelerated. So I can just catch it now. And I'm just in a practice and a flow. I'm not paralyzed. I also want to take this from the microcosm of our individual bodies to the macrocosm. because many of us are experiencing tremendous anxiety, fear, hopelessness right now on the planet, particularly because of all of the changes and transformations that we're seeing in the world. And we're seeing the shadow of our collective consciousness. That means the consciousness of every human being on the planet is being projected out. When we look at the world right now, we're seeing the results of unresolved trauma of unresolved shadow work. You want to go to other parts of the world and colonize people on stolen land? You want to rape them of their natural resources and turn them into slaves? Okay. So then I don't want to hear you talking when they start flooding your borders. You want to destabilize countries and not allow them to their own self-determination of electing their own officials when you see the revolution coming and the civil wars coming. You want to not exercise and eat crap? So don't trip when you're sick and overweight. What we're seeing is the shadow of unresolved trauma that has played out for the 2025 years of this Abrahamic timeline. And so whether you're taking it on a macro scale on the planet,

Sh8peShift YourLife (16:

38.146) whether you're taking it on a micro scale, we can see in real time the impacts of not addressing, healing, and repairing our own shadows. And so we sit now on the precipice of the greatest transformational time that humanity has ever known. We are watching blood shed across the globe. We are watching every citizen in every part of the world revolting against its people regard, excuse me, revolting against its governments, regardless of what the mainstream media shows you. Go look at world news. Everybody's fighting back. Everybody's speaking truth to power. Everybody's waking up. And part of that waking up. That first stage is anger and it feels good to just tear shit up and we do need to destroy. But we also have, some of us are going to have to start moving in, and I talked about this in my last episode, into the recreation of what it is that we want to see, into the re-imagination of the world that we want to see, into the rebuilding of the world that we want to see. We can't get so caught up in the trigger that we don't understand the root. That is the call. And that is how we can use this time starting now because it's the season of harvest. It's the season of ancestors. It's the season of Scorpio. It's the season of darkness. It's the season of transformation and moving us all the way through the winter solstice up into spring. So I would really say that this darkness period, we're like in the fall, we're on the road to darkness right now in the fall. We're going to hit that darkness phase full blown. when we get to the winter solstice in December, and we're going to be there till March. So don't get caught up in the Abrahamic calendar right now and feel like, my God, the year is almost ending. No, you reclaim your own cycles. And those are the cycles of nature. And we work with that rhythm. Sometimes we can spin our wheels in all the things that happen to us. And we just sit in that space rather than

Sh8peShift YourLife (18:

49.677) What are my tools? Your greatest triggers, they're yours. They might not ever go away. You might have grief on your heart that's never going to go away. And part of this fast food, fast nation, quick, energetic, quick world is we think that it's about going away. We think healing it means I don't feel anymore. Healing it means I don't feel bad. Healing it means I feel great all the time. No, that's not healing. Healing is self-awareness and self-management and alchemizing it. I know I'm triggered over these things, so this is how I set my life up. I know that I have to get up early in the morning, because I'm just not productive later. I know that the way I start my day sets the tone for my entire day, so it's important for me to pray and meditate and move my body. I know that when I'm drinking more water, I feel better. I know that there's certain conversations I can't have with family. I've had to create a circle of chosen family of spiritual advisors and elders that can reflect me and see me that I can go to for counsel. I know I got daddy issues. I know these things. It's not like they went away. They're still with me. But I know how to recognize them and I know how to transmute them for my highest good. They don't debilitate me from moving forward. And we're in this spell of the dominant paradigm right now where the main thing they want to have you feel is debilitated and broken. Because when you are debilitated and you are paralyzed in that fire flight, first chakra, energy's not going anywhere. You just sit right there. The music keeps you there. The food keeps you there. The news keeps you there. Everything is designed to keep us in the lowest frequency possible. So this is liberation. in the 21st century. This is liberation in the age of Aquarius. It's about creating the own algorithm for your highest good and understanding that in that alchemy, we are in healing the last seven generations back and the next seven generations forward. That's the cycle breaker. That's being the shape-shifter. That's how we embody this dance of liberation. So take some time over this season to do some shadow work.

Sh8peShift YourLife (21:

08.248) However that shows up for you to honor every part of yourself without judgment, to understand that healing is a process and a practice. Just like we got to go to the gym and work out our bodies, we got to go to the gym and work out our healing. And that is how you change the world. By changing yourself, by healing your family, by magnetizing other like-minded people, and so that you walk in that lightness, but you will not get there without the dark. Okay. That is what I have for you today, Shapeshifters. I hope you have enjoyed. I will see you in later this month for our next episode. And until then, keep shifting. Bye. 50.104) much love and light for showing up today, shapeshifters. You could be doing anything right now and you chose to be here and I do not take that for granted. Looking for extra support on your journey? Explore my affordable coaching programs. Whether you prefer personalized one-on-one sessions or engaging group coaching, I'm here to help you align your vision and thrive on your own terms. Visit shapeshifterlife.com. That's S-H the number eight P-E. Shifterife.com. schedule your free shift call to discuss your coaching goals. Keep shifting.

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Zakiya aka Sh8peshifter

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