True Love & Light Require Shadow

In media, love and light is often shared as a catchy trend or lifestyle mantra in a way that can leave its deeper meaning to become completely overlooked.

Real love and real light are not about avoiding discomfort, challenging emotions, or the belief systems that keep us comfortable. True growth requires facing the parts of ourselves we have ignored, avoided, or disguised, even from ourselves.

In my sessions, readings, and my own personal experience, the shadow is where we discover the answers and the magic. Acknowledging and bringing awareness into these parts, rather than bypassing them, is what leads to genuine self understanding. Not one that looks good on the outside in specific conditions, but one that is integrated into everyday life.

What I Thought Healing Would Look Like

Spiritual growth for me has not always been gentle, blissful, or easy. I had an idea that once I was healed everything would flow and I would be living in some elevated state of peace and clarity. Instead it was still a challenge, only in a different form.

I began to see everything more clearly. My patterns, wounds, shadows, choices, and the ways I avoided them. This kind of clarity extends into your environment and creates a ripple effect that can feel chaotic at first.

It also asks you to face what you have been ignoring, hold yourself accountable, set boundaries, and stand in your own truth. A truth that not everyone around you can or will choose to meet.

This type of growth is not about escaping. And when you grow in this way, everything around you changes, as does the way you see the world and the people in it. It requires you to choose throughout shifts in your job, relationships, even parts of your Self.

Journal Prompts That Have Helped Me

If you want to begin exploring your own shadows, these are prompts I have used and returned to over the years:

What parts of myself do I hide from others and even from myself?

What qualities or behaviors in others trigger me the most and why? This one is particularly useful for identifying projections and traits in others that may reflect parts of yourself you have not yet accepted. Be honest with yourself here.

What scares me the most? Next to each fear, trace back where it originated and why you feel the way you do about it.

What recurring conflicts or patterns keep showing up in my life? Relationships, choices, boundaries. I often create something similar to a mind map to find the connections between them.

What parts of myself do I criticize and judge? How can I begin to understand them rather than condemn them? How can I turn that judgment into something more honest and compassionate?

What emotions do I resist feeling and why?

Shadow work is not about fixing yourself. It is about uncovering the parts of you that have been hidden, ignored, or rejected. The layers that are just as much a part of you as anything else.

Although it can feel like one of the most difficult things you have done, it is also the most honest and revealing because what you find on the other side of it is not a new version of yourself. But the one that was there before the noise.

Until next time, may you always be evergreen: ever expanding, ever evolving, and ever aligned.

Lisa