Yesterday, I found myself back inside Debbie Ford’s The Dark Side of the Light Chasers.
I first came across the book years ago when I was doing my Insights Discovery certification. It was part of the reading list, but I quickly became a fan and have been using it in my personal development workshops ever since.
I’m rereading it now because I’m doing a bit of shadow work on myself this week. Some thoughts surfaced after reading Sean Manseau’s book about Spotify the Gnostics, Here’s the First Church of David Bowie: Adventures in DIY Shamanism, and I could feel that familiar inner critic: the little judgements, resistances, envies, irritations, and defensive manoeuvres that usually prefer to linger just below the surface of consciousness unnamed.
That is the doorway into shadow work. Not some dramatic descent into the underworld, though it can feel like that sometimes. More often, it begins with a small disturbance. The sentence that catches in your throat. The person who irritates you more than they reasonably should. The idea you reject a little too quickly. The part of yourself you are certain belongs to someone else.