Shadow Work and the Body, Mind, and Soul

The work is finding how and where feelings and memories are lodged in the body, and learning to decode what your body is continually reporting about what is happening right now. The research term for this is interoception, and the capacity to do it is trainable.

When something happened before language, the mind cannot fully explain it. That part is not controversial—explicit memory depends on brain structures that are not yet online in early childhood, while the body registers the experience anyway. Somatic awareness is the way in.

Developing that awareness is like tuning a radio. Sensations are calling for your attention, but the static is loud enough that it is hard to tell what is being said. Somatic awareness is tuning the dial to the signal, and building the skill to regulate mood and physical reaction from there.

Because most of us were never taught to attend to this part of experience, it is remarkable what surfaces and clears when a little attention goes here.

Working with the mind means examining thought and behavior patterns, family histories, and the narratives we build about who we are and what the future holds.

Much of this is cognitive restructuring—reexamining how we were taught to think. What we believe about our own worth. What safety is supposed to feel like. Which emotions were allowed. Whether obedience was called respect. The right-and-wrong binaries we inherited, and the unexamined meanings of the words we use about our own lives.

This part of the work rests on well-established ground. Cognitive restructuring and core belief work come out of cognitive behavioral therapy, among the most extensively researched interventions in the field, with decades of controlled trials behind it for anxiety, depression, and trauma. We are not running a CBT protocol. We use what it established and keep going.

Because unearthing a negative core belief is where the work starts, not where it ends. When the narrative changes, the choices that follow from it change too—and the change that actually holds tends to arrive in the body. The mind gets us there, and lets us conceive of something larger than ourselves.

Soul means different things to different people, and some people have an allergic reaction to the word. That is fair. It has been used and misused in ways that caused real harm. What matters is less the word than what it points at.

We use it to mean that which connects. What connects us to each other, to our ancestry, to the collective experience present in the world right now, and to our own bodies on a subtle level.

Prevailing schools of psychology focus on the self. When the frame widens—to deep-time ancestry, to unprocessed collective grief—there is more to the story. Transpersonal therapy covers some of this ground, and Jung offered one way of understanding it.

Highly sensitive people tend to arrive here first. If you have spent your life picking up more than the people around you—moods, atmospheres, grief that isn't yours—the soul frame is where that stops being pathologized and starts being information.

Soul grounds us in the multiplicity of things. It ties the physical body to what is sometimes called the energy body or the subtle body, and connects past, present, and future to today's collective experience. Where spirit lifts and lightens toward oneness, soul brings us down into experience. It is the gravity of interconnection. There is room for both.

This is not a faith-based approach, and all faiths are welcome.

There is a historic duality that ranks light above shadow. Light stands for goodness, purity, holiness. Shadow stands for evil, dirt, sin. That hierarchy has been used to justify racism, war, and unthinkable violence, and it has fractured society along those lines.

It fractures the inner psyche the same way. We are told, and then tell ourselves, that some parts of us are better than other parts. That some feelings are permitted and others are not.

Our work is a de-stigmatization of shadow. It is a reclamation of what has been devalued in ourselves—a practice of self-reunion.

Aspects of this follow the lineage of Carl Jung. We are not exclusively Jungian, and we draw from many models.

The shamed or rejected parts are usually the ones driving behavior.

Consider someone with social anxiety who drinks to manage it. The drinking accumulates consequences over years. Looked at directly, what sits underneath the anxiety is a feeling of low self-worth. As that feeling is welcomed and integrated, the anxiety diminishes, and the need to mask it goes with it.

The same thing happens with our light—the part of us we can see, our hopes, what we believe we want. Light gets mixed with other people's light and we lose the thread. Someone's family always wanted them to be a doctor. They always wanted to help, so they went along with it, and years later found themselves trapped in a life that was never their dream. The work distinguished their light from their parents' light. What they had actually wanted was to teach.

Shadow integration is how we reconnect with the parts that got pushed out. It recovers the wisdom in them, which is usually considerable.

We are permeable creatures. We absorb the unexamined shadow and light of our families and our societies, and over time we get clouded by other people's beliefs and other people's energy. It becomes convincing enough that we mistake what is not ours for who we are, and then wonder why we cannot relate to ourselves. Why the career does not fit. Why the relationship leaves us lost.

Alongside what is not ours, we carry unprocessed grief. For people and pets. For opportunities and ideas. For the shamed parts of ourselves. For the ongoing mistreatment of the earth, and for our ancestry. Then we feel directionless in the size of it.

Sorting out what is yours from what is not is a great deal of the work. It is a relief when it starts to happen.

Energy work is a guided visualization practice we learned from Susan Feinbloom, who trained in the clairvoyant schools of New York and the Bay Area.

You settle into a meditative state, bring attention to somewhere in the body that is holding—the chest, the throat, the gut—and are prompted to picture what is there. Most people can. Often what surfaces turns out not to be entirely theirs, and the work becomes understanding why it is there and what it takes to set it down. It also connects people to the energy of earth and cosmos, and to the experience of being part of something larger than a single life.

It runs through our supervision, so the clinicians here work with it too.

Available to clients in New York and Maine, and on its own through Holistic Help wherever you are.

Evidence-based approaches and Depth and meaning-making approaches.

No single model accounts for a person. These are the ones we work with most.

Body: somatic psychotherapy, Somatic Experiencing, polyvagal-informed practice, somatic movement therapy, Hakomi-informed practice, trauma-sensitive yoga and yoga therapy, breath practice, mindfulness and MBSR

Mind: Gestalt, cognitive restructuring, Internal Family Systems, psychoanalytic and depth psychology, Transformational Chairwork, Nonviolent Communication

Couples: the Gottman Method, Emotionally Focused Couples Therapy, Nonviolent Communication

Soul: Jungian and transpersonal psychology, ancestral and lineage work, ritual and ceremony, clairvoyant grounding meditation and energy work, dream work

Creative: art therapy, dance and movement therapy, improvisation, nature-based practice, herbalism

Not every clinician here works in every one of these. Each of our pages says what that person actually practices.

We are committed to deconstructing systemic trauma, and to the work of decolonizing mind and body—breaking down the structures inside us that take the shape of judgment, bias, and disconnection. That colonization has put people in conflict not only with themselves but with each other, and in opposition to the natural world.

Honoring nature, indigenous ancestors, and the keepers of indigenous wisdom are cornerstones of that work.

We see this fundamentally as soul-activism. Doing the inner work gives a person the ground to help others do the same, and that moves outward into homes, workplaces, and communities.

Psychotherapy is clinical work provided by licensed clinicians. We are licensed in New York and Maine, and psychotherapy is available only to clients located in those states.

Holistic Help is our non-clinical offering—one-to-one sessions, groups, ritual and ceremony, and body-mind practice. It is available wherever you are, and it is not psychotherapy or a substitute for it.

Sessions run 50 to 60 minutes. A sliding scale is available.