For the first four weeks of The Path Back to You, we focused on energy, digging into what it looks like to raise our vibrations. Now, I bet I can guess what’s happened since you’ve started that journey.

Sh*t got hard. Really hard.

We have the phrase “growing pains” for a reason.

When you start growing, everything gets harder before it gets easier.

You’ve decided to wake up to yourself, which means casting off all the old coping mechanisms and numbing techniques you’ve used to get through hard things in the past.

You know what I mean. The mindless scrolling. The hours of reality TV. The binge eating. The restrictions that help you feel like you can control something. Anything. The anger. The resentment. The isolation. The overpacked schedule.

Evolving requires a lot of dissolving of old energy, old mindsets, old truths. Embracing the new you means doing the hard work in a new way.

It means instead of distracting ourselves from the darkness, we have to look at it full in the face.

The degree to which a person can grow is in direct proportion to the amount of truth they can accept about themselves without running away.
- Leland Val Van De Wall

Because only through embracing the coming darkness can we uncover our light.

So are you ready? It’s time to be brave. Here’s what it looks like to embrace the darkness…

In the spiritual world, “embracing darkness” can also be called shadow work. It’s when new enlightenment casts shadows on hard truths about who we are and what we still need to let go of.

Shadow work is scary. It’s hard. But it is the most important work you can ever do. But if you want the work you did in raising your vibration to ever be more than a temporary high, you have to love yourself enough to uncover even the worst parts of you, and promise yourself that a new, healthier, and more whole you will be there on the other side.

Shadow work is the inbetween. A space I call the hallway.

Imagine yourself in a hallway.

There is a door behind you, your old life as you remember it and the door in front of you, your new life, totally unknown.

The hallway is dark. It’s scary. You don’t know how to let go of the old life and you don’t feel prepared for the new life. But you know it’s necessary. The only problem is right now, you’re reaching a hand out to the doorknob of both doors. You can’t open the door in front of you until you let go of the door behind you. So you’re stuck in the hallway. You’re in the space between.

The hallway is where you deal with the already but not yet. It’s where you wrestle with the force pulling you back and prepare for the force pulling you forward. The hallway is restless and uncomfortable, but it’s exactly where you are meant to be.

The hallway is dark. It is scary. You can’t see anything. There is chaos and confusion.

But it is also a space of massive transformation.

A few years ago, I had no idea how to relate to someone who was depressed. I had a theoretical idea of what they were going through, but I had never personally experienced it.

That all changed when I began my shadow work. I experienced two things I had never experienced before: depression and anxiety.

I couldn’t get out of bed. I was worried. I lost a lot of weight. For the first time in my whole life, I couldn’t eat. That’s never been a problem for me!

When it comes to darkness, or grief, or despair, it either creeps up on you slowly or all at once.

I don’t know if either is better than the other.

Not everyone just wakes up to the technicolor world turned to shades of gray. But I did. This time at least.

Just like when I lost my sister to a car accident when she was eight years old, I woke up to a world changed to its core.

Different from watching a loved one slowly deteriorate from stage 4 cancer. Or losing your parent to dementia over months and years. Not harder. Not worse. But different flavors of grief. In a world that likes to keep grief at an arm’s length, it doesn’t matter how grief finds you. It’s just whether you want to turn toward the grief or away from grief. If you turn towards it, healing and hope lie on the other side. If you turn away, that grief lies in wait, ready to catch up to you when you least expect it.

Embracing the darkness means living in a world you no longer recognize.

And just like with grief, it never goes away, you just learn how to expand around it.

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When I started my shadow work, it was sudden impact. I woke up one day and just… couldn’t get out of bed. I couldn’t laugh. I couldn’t eat. I couldn’t work. I couldn’t trust anything I’d learned growing up and wasn’t deep enough into my new spiritual world to trust that either. I didn’t know what to believe and I couldn’t see my way forward.

I felt like every dark moment was being re-lived in my mind and re-experienced in my body.

It was rock f-ing bottom.

When I reached rock bottom, I did something I never thought I’d do and I called a spiritual advisor. Another name for her? A psychic.

One of the biggest takeaways she gave me that day, which I’ll share with you now, is the importance of gratitude and of intentionally shifting our mindset.

When you’re embracing darkness in a world that all of a sudden feels topsy turvy and you don’t know what to believe, there are still concrete things that are real and true that you can choose to focus on. She said anytime my mind went to a negative place or a place filled with fear, to do ten affirmations and to say them out loud or to write them down. Neurologically, gratitude and anxiety cannot be triggered at the same time.

So if I start thinking I have no idea where my life is headed and I'm scared, I started saying the simplest things out loud.

Thank you God I have a roof over my head.

Thank you God I have a bed to sleep in.

Thank you God I have clean water to drink.

Thank you God I have food in the pantry.

Thank you God my kids are healthy.

Thank you God I have clothes to wear.

Thank you God I have legs that work and I can go on a walk.

Thank you God for nature.

Thank you God for animals.

Thank you God for my health.

Just the simplest of things.

It was really going back to the basics and focusing on what I did know to be true. Sometimes we forget about the basics, and sometimes we forget truly how incredible we are.

If you're reading this, you're most likely reading this either on a computer or a smartphone, you have more than most. And sometimes we forget that. And when we boil it all down to the basics and can simply sit for a moment in gratitude, fear and gratitude can't exist at the same time. You have to choose one or the other.

The reason I’m talking about gratitude alongside embracing darkness and shadow work is not because you should use gratitude to avoid shadow work. There is such a thing as being too positive. “Toxic positivity” is real, and I have been guilty of it for sure.

Sometimes positivity can be toxic, and when I talk about gratitude, I'm not saying ignore your grief and pretend everything's fine. We do need to sit with it. We need to hear what it's teaching us. We need to learn the lesson from it.

But two things can be true. We can both embrace the difficult and hold on to the good so that we have the light we need to guide our way out of the darkness.

Without a little bit of light, there is no shadow.

Now, I’m going to address the question of medication. There are, of course, times when chemical deficiencies in the brain need to be corrected with medication. There are also times when medication can end up numbing all emotions that could be arrows pointing to root issues.

When I was a sophomore in college, my father got in a horrific motorcycle accident. He wasn't wearing a helmet (it was a different time!), he was in ICU for 76 days, he didn't know who I was, he didn't know who my mom was, we thought we might lose him, he might lose his leg, or if he did live he might not ever be who we knew him to be again.

This was another complete, sudden, unexpected event that impacted my life incredibly.

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I was incredibly sad. My mom wanted me to go to the doctor; I went to the doctor, and he wanted to put me on an antidepressant medicine. I remember looking at him and saying, “I'm not depressed, my dad is in ICU and he may never wake up. I'm sad. I don't need to numb my feelings, I need to feel my feelings. I think I’m having a totally normal reaction to the situation at hand.”

I remember leaving the prescription on the counter and walking out. I say all this to say I would encourage you to try being curious about seemingly negative emotions before numbing them.

One of the things that helped me tremendously was journaling. I know that doesn't sound fun for everybody, but I just gave myself permission to free write during my Dark Night of the Soul.

Whatever came to my mind I wrote down and I was able to get some of that out of my body and onto a page and somehow, some way that helped. I allowed myself to understand that I was going through something transformative deep deep deep down.

I know this was for a reason that I was going to come out of this so much stronger, so much better, and so much wiser, and that whatever I was experiencing in that moment during that time was going to be used somehow, some way to help people. But first I had to get through it. So just like gratitude was basic, my way of healing was pretty basic.

I made a lot of tough decisions during my year-and-a-half of embracing the darkness, but all of those decisions were for my best interest and for the best interest of my children. I finally realized that I couldn’t heal anyone except myself. I couldn’t force anyone to do the work, but I could choose it for myself. If I wanted my kids to have a healthy parent, I could only do that for myself. I, of course, hoped my choices would inspire Brian to heal as well, but I no longer saw that as my responsibility. If I saw it as my job to save him, we were both going down with the ship.

But if I could get to my best self, I could be the best for all the people in my life that I loved and the people who I love deserve my best. I deserve my best. So I prepared myself to be alone for truly the first time in my life.

And for me, that's exactly what I needed.

So I paused everything to do a different kind of work: going into the darkness so that I could find my light

I say all this to say, choosing to go into the darkness, to meet yourself there, might very well be the hardest thing you ever do. I know it was for me. And for this reason, you may experience physical and mental side effects you’ve never experienced before.

It’s ok. You’re ok. Your body is releasing a lifetime’s worth of pain, trauma, and energy that’s been trapped.

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Energy releasing from your body is a very real thing, and it can’t be done overnight. It’s a process. Just like you can’t wake up on Saturday and run a marathon without any training. And you certainly can’t do it without being sore as hell the next day. Your body has to work out that lactic acid.

You can’t wake up tomorrow a new, healed you. Your body is working. It’s slowly but surely releasing what you no longer need. It doesn’t always feel good physically. You may feel extremely exhausted. Like you need to take three naps a day. Allow yourself to do what your body is asking you to do as much as you possibly can. This is key.

And know that just like training for a marathon, this is temporary. It won’t always be this way. The finish line will come and you will cross it. Your body will recover, and you’ll be left with a medal of valor, confidence for days, and the knowledge that you are a warrior. You have faced the darkest parts of yourself and you have walked through the deepest shadows.

You are on your way. Don’t stop now. Don’t turn back. It is just about to get really good.

I’m so glad you’ve been keeping up with us on The Path Back to You. As you face your shadows, you– like me– will find such clarity about what you need to let go of in your life. But knowing you need to let go is so much easier than actually releasing what isn’t meant for you anymore.

I would know. I had to lose a lot to find more. So come back next week to find out what I’ve had to let go of, and how you can learn to give up those old parts of yourself that your soul is so ready to shed.

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