Ask Yourself This

We’ve used maps for so long to navigate our external world. Before there were digital navigation systems, there was folded paper and human cartographers, and before that, cave paintings and etchings. 

There were people with encyclopaedic knowledge of landmarks and short cuts, because they took the time to learn the terrain. They walked everywhere, again and again, until nothing was unfamiliar. When they felt like they understood the landscape, they immediately set their sights on something further than they had ever travelled before. Some did it to take, others to give; some travelled alone and others demanded witnesses. All were on an insatiable quest to experience the best of reality, which is the fundamental natural instinct of all humans.

We can do the same for our inner world. We can consult our inner compass by asking ourselves questions and answering them. We can combine our lived experience, gut feelings, environmental context and best-case scenarios to reveal the best route for us to take. We might take turns that seem ‘right’ but end up ‘wrong’, and sometimes we have to double back the same way we came, but, ultimately, paying attention to the path reveals clues for the ideal approach.

There’s a caveat, though. Many of our answers are hiding in a place that we can’t access without intention and proactive retrieval. We can’t touch or see this place, but we can sense it. Our subconscious mind is responsible for cataloguing every detail – everything we’ve ever experienced, seen, felt, tasted or heard. The true purpose of our subconscious can never be fully known, but I see it as our own internal note-taking system, updated every second,of every moment, for the rest of your life and from the moment you were born. A place where you track and store as much information as possible, so when life’s daily open-book tests appear, you have a reference point to choose your right answer.

If your conscious mind is every-thing you can see yourself doing, and observe yourself thinking and feeling, then your subconscious mind is what’s behind all of that, in your blind spot. It almost always feels like it’s outside your periphery, in a ‘restricted access’ area. It’s not truly ‘other’ from you, but it acts as though it is. It hides itself from you, like a dream you can’t hold on to even though you know it happened. You need to know the secret code to get in: technically, you have it, but you need to find it. It’s all a huge paradox: you are both the password and the one who forgot it.

Shadow work is how we hack and decode the language of the subconscious mind by interpreting its native language of patterns, symbols, sensations and archetypes. Our focus is to understand the riddle within it. What do you feel in the process? What do you struggle to admit? What are the similarities between your answers?

Your subconscious isn’t guarding your memory like a passive gate keeper. Instead, it’s actively concealing what it thinks will be too chaotic for your current identity structure to cope with.

It’s also programmed with its own survival logic, just like you. The deeper riddle reveals itself, a puzzle within a puzzle. You might ask: Why do I have to do anything to access what’s already mine and within me?

Expecting the answer from me is the reason why this book exists. Shadow work is what happens when you reject this constant, frantic negotiation of asking someone else to give you the codes to your truth. It’s creating the path that is most authentic to you, using a combination of what you know but can’t prove, what you feel but can’t validate with others, and what you’ve always wanted for yourself but have never been allowed to claim.

You are going to ask the questions you’ve been too afraid to ask, for fear of what the answers might force you to change about your reality. You’re going to ask yourself: What am I protecting myself from by forgetting who I am?

You’re going to have to reckon with the fact that the story you’ve been living is just one of many, and that in order to live your preferred one . . . you have to let the current one go.

Shadow work can be super heavy but it’s not meant to be self-punishment.You don’t get extra points for performative melancholy. It hits different when you stop curating your pain for an audience (real or imagined). It’s most potent when you refuse to edit out your contradictions, hypocrisy and rage. When you stop trying to be impressive. When you let yourself betruly affected by what you uncover. When you sit in the discomfort for long enough to wonder: HOW AM I SUPPOSED TO KEEP FUNCTIONING WHILE LEARNING ALL OF THIS ABOUT MYSELF?

It’s not about loving yourself from the purest place possible: that will come after. This is about knowing yourself. Start where you are. Don’t get lost in aspirations about ‘arriving’ and ‘belonging’. Where you’re heading is a place where most haven’t been and don’t know how to help you navigate. You are the driver, the map, the direction and the location. You are trying to find your way back home, to yourself. You never imagined you’d forget how to get there so you didn’t think to pay attention to where you actually are. You need to familiarise yourself with your own story of your life so far, as you recall it.

This is self-excavation through automatic writing. I ask, you answer. I crack open the truth, you do more than suspend disbelief. You don’t default to my perspective, you hold it against yours and see how much they look alike.

The hardest part of this is allowing the words to flow through you and resisting the urge to edit before you’ve sat with it. No one is coming to grade you. You don’t have to like, agree with or understand what you’re writing about. You need to allow your inner voice to speak. And to be heard. Uninterrupted.

The more you write, the more you reveal. Remember that your imagination and your perspective are your truth and when you can see your thoughts mirrored back to you, then you understand who you are.