But this comes at a cost. Because we are constantly doing increasingly more things now, sometimes mindlessly, we are in danger of giving up our morals, our values, and all the pieces of ourselves that make us who we are. We are constantly looking outwards, thinking that we have freedom, but it’s just the opposite. We enclose ourselves in a prison of the mindset that we no longer have to work on ourselves as long as we are doing our daily tasks. Forgetting who we are is the price we pay, and people are way too ready to pay it. That’s why we feel empty and unfulfilled.
Ikigai is the opposite of that prison, and shadow work is a tool that can help you find your Ikigai. Shadow work takes away the cages that imprison parts of ourselves that we have hidden, whether deliberately or not, and finally recognize and honor them as valuable parts of our full selves.
I grew up with an unhealthy mindset about money and the value of time. I was working hard and putting energy into man-hours that I thought mattered, but I never really achieved what I wanted, I could not move forward. Instead of working on myself, I ended up blaming other things and other people instead of the real source of the problem, which was that I have lost touch with who I really was and what I wanted my life’s work to be. Shadow work helped clear that up.
When parts of ourselves remain suppressed, when we ignore our shadow, we are actually weaker. We live in constant fear of judgment by others, we also judge ourselves, we hesitate a lot in making timely decisions, we are frightened to leave our comfort zones, we are intimidated by change, we become unwilling to grow. We are adult men, but we are, to a major degree, just scared little boys, cowering in the darkness. The fully-grown adult man cannot walk into the light.
We need to confront our shadow, have an honest dialogue with it, show it compassion, and work on releasing what should have never been suppressed to begin with. That way these parts of us need never feel the need to break out and take over what we have so painstakingly built. This is how we can begin living our lives more fully. We are all works in progress.