How To Start Using Shadow Work For Absolute Beginners

Today, we’re going to clear up all the confusion around these shadow work techniques so that you can understand what it is, why we do it, and how to get started doing it in your own practice.

What Is Shadow Work?

Shadow work is a concept and practice that stems from the field of psychology. Swiss psychoanalyst Carl Jung referred to the subconscious and the dark side of self that often hide there as the human “shadow” or shadow self. When we work with our shadow side as witches, we are blending our spiritual and magical practice with techniques for psychological self-exploration and self-improvement. This has many benefits, not only for our magic and its effectiveness but as a powerful tool for improving our overall happiness and helping us to relate to the world around us in a healthier way.

The shadow itself is many things. It’s the culmination of every experience we’ve ever had, every thought we’ve ever had, every belief that we hold about ourselves and the world. Much of the shadow is created and set very early in life. Our formative years help to encode into our subconscious what we view as “normal”. That version of normal is what many of us then go on to judge the rest of our experiences by for the rest of our lives. For example, if you grow up in a household where your parents are very busy and rarely have time for you, it will feel normal as an adult when your romantic partners never have time for you. More than that, a partner who actually has time for you will feel abnormal and you may sabotage these good relationships without really knowing why. This may be what your subconscious thinks is “normal”, but it’s far from ideal! By identifying these kinds of patterns, unresolved trauma, and underlying assumptions, we can rewrite them to allow ourselves to be happy and comfortable in a new normal of our choosing, say, with a partner who is caring and attentive!

Magic connects to this process deeply. We can use magic both in identifying, collaborating with, and shifting these shadow parts of ourselves and in enhancing our magic with the use of this work. Within many magic traditions, the pursuit of self-knowledge is a vital part of becoming an effective magician. Witchcraft is no different.

Make no mistake, while shadow work may sound like boring therapy nonsense to some, this is powerful stuff! I very rarely make statements about things ALL witches should do because witches and their craft are an incredibly diverse bunch but I firmly believe that all witches should practice shadow work in some form or fashion. There’s simply no better way to understand yourself and the interactions between you and the magic that you work.

Why Shadow Work Is Essential In Witchcraft

The reasons why we do shadow work as individuals vary widely. They all boil down to the same simple goal though: To be better. To be better in our craft. To be better for the people we love. To be better as human beings. This is a process of finding the dark, hidden parts of yourself, the parts that are ignored, and unwanted, and corroded, and learning to not only look at them and change them but also accept them fully as a part of you. This is self-love at its most radical. Love not just for the lovable parts of yourself but also for those parts that the world does not want you to love. 

This is no crusade against the darker aspects of self. We are not here to cut off pieces of ourselves or smother our emotional reactions to try to match some idealized image of who we should be. Our aim is to uncover all the forgotten and hurting parts of ourselves and tend them until they flourish. In this way, we achieve the freedom to be who we are entirely, to create the life we want without restraint, and to release any shame in doing so. 

When we do magic, our beliefs are key to the effects that we receive. Have you ever cast a spell for something you desperately wanted or needed only to have it fall flat and do nothing? Do you have a particular kind of spellwork that it seems like you cannot hack for no apparent reason? These kinds of blockages are, more often than not, a result of beliefs that we hold on a subconscious level. 

For example, if you feel stuck in your dead-end job, barely making enough to scrape by and you find that every money spell you cast turns up nothing while the rest of your magic works fine, you likely have a belief about money or self-worth limiting you. Perhaps you believe deep down that you don’t deserve money, that you aren’t capable of making money, or that money is the source of all evil in the world. 

With beliefs like these, it’s no wonder that the magic doesn’t work! While you may be pouring tons of energy into your money spell consciously, you can only do that for so much time out of your day. Meanwhile, your subconscious can dump energy into that “Money is evil and corrupting” belief all day, every day. Which do you think is going to win out? 99 times out of 100, it’ll be our shadow selves.

This is why we as witches do this kind of inner work. Yes, it is great for us to know ourselves and cultivate self-awareness and self-acceptance as people, but in our magic, this shit is rocket fuel. Rather than trying to climb a mountain, fighting against the underlying convictions of your subconscious to get your magic to work, you can simply start the ball rolling and watch momentum carry your magic to fruition with glorious ease.

4 Ways To Start Using Shadow Work In Your Craft

Hopefully, by this point, you are more than ready to jump in feet first and start trying shadow work out for yourself. There are so many ways to begin your shadow work journey. I could easily write a book on the subject and never even come close to exhausting the sheer mountain of ways that shadow work can be done. To start with, we’re going to discuss three ways that you can begin using shadow work in your craft and one ritual that you can try out today.

1. Make room for your unpleasant emotions

The first and most important part of shadow work is making room for the parts of yourself that are unpleasant or uncomfortable. This can be really hard to do. We’ve been taught our entire lives that we have to hide, ignore, and repress the parts of ourselves that are unpleasant, difficult, or unsavory. This step may seem arbitrary or too easy, but it is by far the most important and potentially the most difficult step in shadow work. You have to learn to be with yourself even when it feels bad and even when you don’t like yourself very much. Because let’s be honest, we all have pieces of ourselves that we don’t like very much. It’s those pieces, the ones that we’ve rejected and that we wish didn’t exist that are most in need of our love and attention. I want you to start thinking about those unpleasant or difficult aspects of yourself as small children.

If you saw a child or small animal having a problem, crying, upset, or displaying behavior that indicated something was wrong, you’re not likely to jump immediately to vilifying that child or animal. We understand intuitively that small children and animals haven’t yet learned how to handle intense emotions and the difficulties of the world. It’s too big for them, it’s too scary and it makes sense why they would be having these difficult reactions. This is the mindset I want you to take toward your own negative emotions. These difficult emotions are essentially parts of you that never learned how to manage and understand the world around them. They are confused, frightened, hurt, and just generally freaking out. Your job is to approach that emotion or that part of yourself with compassion and understanding and allow it to be where it is.

This means that if you’re sad, let yourself cry. Don’t try to bottle up the tears, don’t try to muscle through the emotional pain, don’t try to hold it back so that you don’t make other people uncomfortable. If this means you have to take yourself to another room or go home or whatever you need to do, do that, but let yourself cry. If a part of yourself hates someone else or something else, you need to allow that hate to rip free in a context where it cannot hurt other people. That last part is very important. Shadow work is not about just unleashing your every emotion onto the people around you. People can absolutely help you process your emotions, but you shouldn’t be taking your emotions out on other people. If you’re experiencing strong emotions like hatred or anger, let that anger and hatred out on paper or record yourself speaking stream of consciousness about that aspect of yourself. The best way to do this is to find a safe space where you can move and let the anger and hatred out of your body by shaking, thrashing, and moving with whatever it is you’re feeling. If you need to break things, you can go to a secondhand store and buy a bunch of cheap dishes, take them somewhere that you can easily clean up like an unfinished basement, and go nuts. Break shit!

The idea here is just to let the emotions be expressed. We are so used to repressing our emotions, trying to change the way we feel, and trying to be someone we’re not that many of us haven’t genuinely felt our emotions since we were very small children. Again, it’s important that you set this up so that you can do it in a healthy way that will not hurt other people. This is the entire reason why we’ve been taught to repress these emotions in the first place, rather than being taught how to let them out in a constructive way. It’s easier to just teach us to bottle it up inside even though this does huge amounts of damage to each of us as individuals. When you let your unpleasant emotions out, do it in such a way that isn’t going to damage the people around you. Don’t scream at people, don’t make huge confessions that are going to ruin other people’s lives, don’t hit things, don’t break other people’s stuff. If you need to express something, express it to yourself out loud or on paper first so that you can come back to it with a clear mind and decide whether that is something that you need to say to the other person. If you need to express yourself physically or break things, do that in such a way that doesn’t hurt other people and doesn’t break anything that’s important to anyone else. As I said, you can just buy some $0.50 dishes from the thrift store! I cannot tell you how gratifying it is to break a bunch of dishes and know that there are no consequences for doing so.

Finally, when it comes to expressing these unpleasant emotions, don’t be surprised if memories, unexpected thoughts, past trauma, or physical movement such as shaking comes up. Often, when we’ve been repressing emotions for a long time, we’re repressing a lot of other things as well. We’re repressing the memories and thoughts that created those uncomfortable feelings and often we’ve stored all of this repressed energy in our bodies. This is one of the reasons why I encourage people to express their emotions physically in whatever way feels good to them. The body stores a huge amount of emotion and trauma, and moving the body is a very good way to move those stored emotions and traumas out of the body so they can be expressed, experienced, and resolved. The body’s most natural way to process physically is to shake, so if your body starts shaking, let it! This is often a sign that deep healing is occurring.

2. Journal

The next thing that you want to do is begin expressing your emotions and learning to dialogue with those emotions so that you can begin to understand them. There are so many ways that you can go about expressing your emotions and you can use any method that you like as long as it allows you to express yourself.

Journaling is, of course, the standard. Journaling allows you to get your thoughts down on paper in a way that is private and allows you to look back on what you’ve written to get a better understanding of what’s happening for you internally. It allows you to see your unconscious patterns and shadow traits that you might not be able to see in the heat of the moment. I recommend that pretty much everyone pick up journaling, but you need to journal in the way that works best for you. A lot of people think that if you’re not journaling every single day, then you might as well not be journaling at all, and that’s bullshit. I’ve been journaling since I was 13 and my journaling is very spotty. There are some months when I journal almost every day and then there are some months where I don’t have a single journal entry for that entire time period. I journal when I need it. You might find that journaling when you need it works well for you or you might find that having some kind of schedule helps you keep up with it. It doesn’t have to be every day if that’s too much for you at first, but even a once weekly journaling session can be massively useful. Additionally, your journal does not have to be a notebook with a pen. I’m partial to my moleskin journals but you might prefer to keep a journal digitally or even use voice to text or simply a voice recorder for your journaling. It doesn’t matter how you’re journaling as long as it works for you. If you don’t know where to start, you can use shadow work journal prompts to get the ball rolling.

3. Express yourself through art therapy

Most of us are fairly verbal but not everyone is and not everyone expresses their emotions verbally as well as they might express a rational idea or a logical thought process. Art journaling is an excellent alternative if you find that expressing part of your unconscious mind visually with imagery works better for you. You can do this with any medium, in any way you choose. It doesn’t have to look good, it doesn’t have to follow any artistic principles, your only goal is to express whatever it is that you are feeling. Your art journaling does not have to be done in a physical book. You can create your art on canvas, large pieces of paper, butcher paper, using photography, digitally, whatever you like. And you can use any medium you like. Collage, painting, drawing, cut-out poetry, sculpture, videography, it’s entirely up to you.

4. Movement

We touched on this a bit in a previous section but movement is an excellent way to express ourselves and it’s one of the forms of expression that is fairly repressed in Western society. As children, we’re taught to sit still and not run around and not fidget and this takes a lot of the natural expression of movement out of our lives. Movement expression can be anything you need it to be. You can dance, you can flail and thrash, you can run until you’re exhausted, you can do gentle yoga stretches, you can pause and take a deep breath, you can incorporate vocalizations and sounds into your movement. Don’t worry about making it look good or presentable for other people. I would suggest doing this in a place where absolutely no one is going to see you because you want to be able to express whatever your body needs to express without worrying about how it looks to other people. You can put on music and I would suggest picking music that matches the mood that you’re trying to express. If you’re angry, put on music that sounds angry. If you’re sad, put on sad music. For me, I find that there’s usually music that really fits whatever it is that I’m trying to express through movement and I’ll take my time to find that music before I get started. Don’t be afraid to just put a song on repeat as well. If you find a song that is exactly what you need, just play it over and over and over again. No one else is watching, remember?

The important part of this is that you can release and express your emotions in a way that leads you to a new understanding of yourself. That’s what you’re aiming to do in this exercise, you’re trying to gain a better understanding of what’s really going on underneath your conscious awareness. If you journal, you can read back what you wrote and gain new insights into what’s going on in your mind. If you create art, you’re able to look at your emotions visually outside of yourself and gain new understanding that way. If you decide to use movement to express your emotions, you’re likely to get a very visceral understanding of how these emotions and thoughts are coming up in your body and affecting you physically in your day-to-day life.

Again, you might get thoughts, memories, or unexpected physical movement with any of these methods of expressing yourself. If you think of a way to express yourself that we haven’t talked about here, try it! There are tons of ways that you can go about expressing your emotions and learning about your emotions, and the goal is to find the ones that work for you.

Taking Things A Step Further

So far, we talked a lot about letting your emotions out. This is a vitally important  step since pretty much every single one of us has been socialized into rejecting, repressing, and ignoring our emotions. You have to be able to feel the emotion and express the emotion before you can do anything useful with that emotion. That is not where the realm of shadow work ends though.

If shadow work were just about letting your emotions out and being able to express yourself, we wouldn’t need the incredible diversity of shadow work practices that we have today. Letting your emotions out and learning to express them is only one half of the equation. If all we do is express the emotions, then we do end up with far fewer emotions bottled up, which is good, but we never really transcend beyond that simple feel and express process. There’s no resolution, no real change, no real learning taking place. We would end up stuck in a cycle of feeling and expressing forever, never finding the root cause or the path that leads out of our suffering and to a place of inner peace. This is where shadow work gets good.

The Goal Of Shadow Work

The true goal of shadow work is to take your emotions, your pain, and all of your worst thoughts and personality traits and help you turn them into something new. Learning to feel and express sorrow and anger and anxiety is all well and good but if you never do anything with those emotions, you will simply stay in the cycles that led you to feel those emotions in the first place. The point of your shadow work practice should be personal development and greater self-awareness. I’ve said it before and I’m sure I’ll say it a million times more, but witchcraft is all about action. We come to the craft because we want to change our lives. We don’t come to the craft just to feel better. We become witches because we want our real tangible lives to be different. This is the real goal of the shadow work process as well.

Feeling your emotions and learning to express them is a good thing but unless you are actually doing something with that, you’re just running in circles. Shadow work is a powerful way to take those emotions, help you understand them, integrate them fully, and transform them into something that makes your life truly, tangibly better. This is the real goal of shadow work. It is taking the worst parts of yourself, the painful parts, the parts that you’ve been told you shouldn’t have, the parts you hate, and finding a way to turn that pain into growth and happiness. We are taking the unwanted and using it to create something that is wanted in our lives.

The Alchemy Of Your Emotions

Alchemy, in a very basic sense, is turning one thing into something else. In popular consciousness, it’s turning lead into gold but for our purposes, we’re going to be using this term to discuss transmuting and changing our emotions from something unwanted into something that is wanted. This is a very large subject that we are going to touch on briefly so please know that if this topic interests you, you can go way deeper into it.

In order to alchemize your emotions you have to do what we call “going into the feeling”. This is essentially what I’ve been teaching you to do so far in this article. Feeling your emotions and expressing your emotions is what people mean when they say you need to “turn into the feeling” or “go into the feeling”. Essentially this just means that you are being present with the emotion rather than repressing it or running away from it or being impatient wishing it would just end. We cannot change what we do not acknowledge and understand, so acknowledging and understanding our emotions is the first step to changing them into something more pleasant to experience.

After this, how we proceed with alchemizing our emotions depends on the emotion that we’re dealing with. For example, if you’re experiencing anger, you’ll want to express that anger and let it out of your body, figure out what is causing that anger, and find a way to use that emotion to move forward into a state of being that feels better. Anger is always a response to having your boundaries crossed. This means that if you’re going to alchemize anger, you need to first learn what boundary has been crossed and then use that anger as a way to change the circumstances that created the emotion in the first place. Perhaps you didn’t set strong enough boundaries with someone. Perhaps you have someone in your life who doesn’t respect your boundaries, even when you set them. Perhaps you don’t know how to set boundaries. You would then take your anger and use that energy to find solutions to these problems and then apply them to your day-to-day life. Anger is excellent for making real change because it is a very active energy, it can give you the courage and momentum that you need to make a real change in your life.

If you are dealing with something like heartbreak, you would want to fully express that heartbreak, really let it out in every way that felt right to you, and then use that emotion to lead you into something that feels better. In this case, it might be digging down into your heartbreak to discover what it is that is causing this deep sense of loss. Often we will get hung up on a particular person but the heartbreak is not just about an individual, it is about some deeper need that they met. Did they meet your need for human connection? Physical contact? Understanding? Validation? Pick through the relationship and think about all the good things that you miss from that lost relationship. This is your road map forward. If you can find these qualities in other people, not necessarily romantic partners if you’re not ready for that yet, but perhaps in friends, then that feeling of loss is gradually replaced with wholeness.

This is the real key to shadow work. Every single unpleasant emotion, unwanted part of yourself, every bad thought, or crappy belief is a flashing neon sign telling you what you do not want to experience in this world. And if you learn to read the signs correctly, it gives you the road map that leads you to what you do want. Alchemizing your emotions is all about allowing your emotions to transcend the limitations that we’ve placed on them to become the very thing that will lead us into greater happiness, greater connection, and greater abundance.

Alchemizing Your Regrets

To finish off today, this shadow alchemy ritual will help you to begin to experience what this process can truly do for you and your craft. This ritual is designed to help you process and release old stories that are holding you back in your life. These can be old sorrows, anger, ways that you wish your life had been, and things that you wish people hadn’t done. We’re going to be processing all of this in today’s ritual.

You will need:

• Loose Paper
• A pen or pencil
• Somewhere safe to burn your pages

Find somewhere quiet and private to do this ritual. Take a few deep breaths to center yourself. You don’t need to clear your mind of thought. Just come into the room and be present with yourself. When you’re ready, begin to think about all the parts of your past that you wish had been different. Let the images and memories of these past regrets come to the surface. Feel them in your body. Think about the ways that you wish your childhood had been different. The ways you wish your parents had raised you. The things you wish your parents had not done. Think about the ways you wish your education has been different. The college you wish you’d gone to or the degrees you wish you’d gotten. Think about the friends that you wish you’d kept or that you wish you’d gotten rid of sooner. Think about the lovers that you regret leaving and lovers that you wish you’d never met. Think about the experiences that you wish you’d had, the travel you wish you’d done, the risks you wish you’d taken. Think about the hobbies that you wish you hadn’t neglected and the opportunities that you wish you hadn’t let pass you by. Think about how you wish your health would have been. The things you wish you’ve done to take care of yourself and the things that you wish you hadn’t done that hurt your health. Think about that skill that you wish you learned, that instrument you wish you learned to play, or that book you always intended to write. Think about how you wish you’d raised your kids differently, words you wish you hadn’t said, or words that you wish you had said more often. Let all of these past regrets fill you up and wash over you. When you’re ready, open your eyes and write down everything you can remember from this exercise.

What you’ve just written down is a list of your stories. These are the stories of how you wish your past had gone, but the reality is that your past did not go this way. None of these things happen the way you wish they had and holding onto this fictional past, the grief and anger that accompanies these stories, is holding you back. You’ve allowed these stories to build up in your body and your mind and tell you that you are not living the life that you’re supposed to be living. We cannot build a better life from this state. The only way to make real change in our lives is by being fully and completely in reality, and these stories are warping your reality and draining away your power to create a life that you truly love living. It’s time to let go of these stories.

Take your sheets of paper somewhere that you can safely burn them. Take a moment to thank these stories for all that they’ve done for you, and then consciously make the decision to release them and burn the pages. As you watch the pages being consumed by flames, feel the weight of these stories falling away from you. Feel the energy of these regrets peeling off of your body, leaving you lighter, brighter, and ready to move forward.

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Updated on February 5, 2025 by Avery Hart