How to Be Present: Why Shadow Work & Trauma Integration Maybe Key to Presence

When we were born into this world, we assumed the vibration of our family, our ancestors. By virtue of us assuming such vibration, we will attract “wanted” as well as “unwanted” experiences into our lives.

And our predominant vibration, which is our core imprint, will be played out over and over again. As such, we may be attracting “wanted” events, as well as “unwanted” events of liked frequency until we change our point of attraction.

For example, one may have a painful core imprint which is feeling unwanted and abandoned. Perhaps one’s biological parents gave one up, or one’s parents wanted a different gender, or one’s parents never truly wanted one for who one is, or one’s parents subconsciously didn’t want children but still had one anyway given societal expectations or other reasons.

And, if you assume such vibration, even as a child, you are likely to be attracting events of the liked frequency. For instance, in the aforementioned case, one may attract events such as being an outcast, being bullied, being abused, etc. Such events mirror one’s vibration of feeling unwanted.

And when such negative events occur, your consciousness splits to cope with the trauma. Parts of your consciousness maybe stuck in time as you did not have the mental capacity deal with the trauma at that time, often at a very young age. And as you continue to grow, parts of your consciousness may still remain in the past, while parts of your consciousness is the “you” now.

As a result of such trauma and split in consciousness, you may not be able to truly be present in your physical body, as the part(s) of your consciousness that has been stuck in time is not fully integrated.

And until you integrate such parts, it can be very difficult to be fully present in the moment, because a part of you is still attached to the pain that has not been resolved. And in my experience, you can not integrate such parts by just positive focus, or other modalities that do not address the pain body. Even meditation can be used as a way to escape feeling emotions.

Pain & Suffering: Why Our Unresolved Trauma & Subconscious Beliefs May Be Causing Us to Suffer

When we have not found resolution from pain from the past, we suffer, because we have subconsciously assigned a painful meaning to what happened. And this meaning is our subconscious belief that influences our view of the world.

And just like we are wearing rose coloured lens from this subconscious belief, we can only see events around in “rose.” So we are also “manifesting” “rose” events, because we can’t see or/and attract otherwise given our subconscious beliefs.

While some subconscious beliefs can serve us, some subconscious beliefs like “I cannot trust anyone” may not be beneficial for our connection needs.

And in the case above, if your dominant vibration is feeling “unwanted” and your subconscious belief is “I am not wanted”, then you’ll suffer if you assign this meaning “I am unwanted” to events you experience, and you may even attract events where you are unwanted because of this belief.

Why Shadow Work Can Help to Cease Suffering

And if we want to cease our suffering, we’ll need to find resolution to the pain from such events we experienced, and reassign a different meaning to what happened. In order to find resolution to the pain we experienced, we need to offer our pain unconditional presence.

A lot of times, some of these painful events can be deep in our subconscious mind. And to find resolution to events in the past, we may need to dive into our subconscious to find out the meanings we have assigned to events in our lives.

This is why shadow work is so important to reprogram our subconscious, and perhaps, eventually change our “karma,” and cease suffering.

How to Not Suffer in Pain

After we start processing our pain and resolve our wounds, we may not suffer as much because we see pain as an experience, just like any other experience, especially when we experience “unwanted” or “painful” events going forward.

We can then become dis-identified with our pain and our story. But this can only happen when we offer our pain unconditional presence. 

When we offer ourselves unconditional presence, we become fully present in the moment. 

Unconditional presence is the capacity to fully allow, and open to whatever we are experiencing, even if our emotional experiences are deemed unacceptable from what we know.

However, many of us, instead of integrating our pain, resolve to resisting our pain by adopting coping mechanisms such as being a workaholic, or being an alcoholic, or being addicted to the gym, or being very independent so you don’t need anyone, etc. This is the exact opposite of offering unconditional presence to your pain body. Instead, this is resistance to pain. 

However, when you allow yourself to sit with your pain when negative emotions arise, you learn to offer unconditional presence to your pain body. When your pain body feel seen and validated, you learn to be more aware and present.

In such presence and awareness you can then learn to dis-identify with and question your thoughts by separating yourself from your thoughts. However, when a part of you in so much pain, that pain body part is so identified with your thoughts that it can be difficult to create space without addressing the pain body itself.

And, sometimes your pain body is buried deep into the subconscious. By making your subconscious conscious through shadow work, you become more aware.

How to Address Pain—Feel Your Pain

1. Learn to feel: The first step and key, in my opinion, to optimal physical and mental health, is to be in touch with your emotions. (I will elaborate on this in another article.) Ask yourself—what are you feeling in this moment? Name the feeling. Throughout the day, perhaps every few hours, take your attention all throughout your body and experience and write down any sensation you find. For example, tension in chest, back.
2. Ask yourself—Why are you feeling this way?
3. Let yourself experience your feelings, from sadness, to despair, to joy. If you look online, there are feeling charts you can download so you can identify the feelings you are feeling in every moment if you don’t know how to name them.
4. Tell yourself that it is valid that you are feeling this way, no matter what it is that you are feeling. 
5. If you are feeling numb, let yourself sit with the numbness, and ask your numbness—what are you so afraid of feeling? Why are you afraid of losing control over feeling?

The above steps should be sufficient for increasing awareness. To go deeper, you can proceed with the following questions.

Create Resolution & Meet Your Needs

1. Can you remember the sensations associated with this feeling?
2. When was the first time you felt this feeling in your life? Perhaps you were a child. Let your subconscious guide you to the most relevant scene in your life.
3. Can you re-experience the scene and all the feelings associated in that scene?
4. What do you, your inner child, need at that scene?
5. Meet your inner child’s needs in the scene. Your inner child may let you know that he/she needs a hug, or love, or something else. Pretend you’re Genie in a bottle—meet the child’s needs, no matter how impossible they may seem.
6. Retrieve your fragmented aspects back from the scene (When one is forced to cope with things one is not ready for, one may suppress an aspect of oneself. )

Through this exercise, you’ll have a better idea of what it is that you need that is missing in that scene and in your current life. When you allow the inner child to meet his/her need(s) in your visualisation, you have created resolution in your memory and experience what it is like to have your unmet needs met.

By meeting your unmet needs in that visualisation, you are most likely reprogramming your subconscious as well as the meaning you have been assigning to events in your life based on the meaning you have made from that one single event in that scene. 

This is why processes that address inner child work like the Completion Process are extremely powerful. By exploring your shadow through this healing work, you’ll be recovering suppressed aspects of yourself, changing your subconscious beliefs, and changing your “karma” by changing your vibrational point of attraction.

For more details on this work, please check out my workshops as well as coaching services here.

Call to Action

Did this article resonate with you? If you want to learn more about your purpose and get “clearer” on patterns that are affecting your life, you can schedule a chat with me by contacting me on my website here.

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