Remember Who You Are
Why you might feel stuck in crossing your next threshold
Every struggle, every cycle, every descent into the dark night of your soul is moving you toward a threshold. You will recognize it as a point of breakthrough. But reaching it isn’t the same as crossing it. At some point, you have to deliberately step to the other side.
The other side could be:
Entering a new phase, career, or relationship in your life.
Carrying yourself with a new energy that serves you more fully.
Letting go of archetypal patterns that you’ve grown, integrated, and shed.
A change of lifestyle that honors your well-being.
Your inner work is doing its job when it moves you closer to understanding, growth, and wholeness…not when it keeps you circling the same pain, rehearsing the same patterns, or identifying with the same wounds.
It might very well be the feeling of coming back to yourself. The relief of remembering, “Ah, this is who I am.” It is knowing how to stay connected to Self while honoring the contractions and expansions that cramp your soul as you evolve in life.
I want to exist from my own force, like the sun, which gives light and does not suck light.”
— C.G Jung, The Red Book
Meet your light self with this guided visualization meditation.
One of the most common reasons people feel stuck in cycles of self-work is that, over time, they begin to organize their world around their wounds. This can be draining and disorienting, not only for you but also for the people around you.
The beauty of healing is that we can choose to change in response to the information that comes up for us during the process. However, when they become the only lens you use to relate to yourself, you narrow.
Your sense of self becomes rooted in what is unresolved.
When Awareness Turns Into Attachment
Healing requires awareness, but awareness without integration can turn into attachment. The mind starts to build familiarity around:
Your wounds
Your emotional patterns
Your past experiences
Familiarity feels safe, even when it’s painful. So instead of healing being something you move through, it becomes something you stay inside of. This is where many people unknowingly get stuck.
The Role of the Nervous System
From a psychological and physiological perspective, this makes sense. If your system has been conditioned by stress, emotional intensity, or unpredictability, it learns to associate those states with normal.
When you begin to experience calm, peace, ease, and joy…your system may not immediately register them as safe.
Instead, it may:
Look for what’s wrong
Anticipate disruption
Minimize the experience
Or pull you back into familiar patterns
This is why people can do deep healing work and still feel uncomfortable in moments of joy and happiness.
The Missing Half of Healing
There is another half of the work that is often overlooked. It involves learning how to experience what is good and grounding.
Like:
Sit in peace without needing to analyze everything
Feel joy without waiting for it to end
Receive love without questioning it
Allow ease without believing it has to be earned
It is the practice of becoming available for an expansive, whole, and even spiritual internal experience.
Light Work as a form of living in this integration
This is where Light Work begins, and invites you to explore:
Who am I when I’m enriched in life?
What does it feel like to be at ease in my own skin?
Can I experience wholeness without needing to earn it through struggle?
Learn how to practice and explore this in The Light Work Journal.
Get closer to your Self and try these meditations:
Light Work Is the Balance
Healing begins with awareness, and the goal is to alchemize fear/pain into wisdom/embodied change through integration and light work.
With love,
Keila Shaheen
🖤 Thanks for reading Shadow Work to Expand Awareness: a space where inner work meets the outer world through shared prompts, writings, and livestream conversations with Dr. Connie Zweig, Ph.D and Keila Shaheen.
Go Deeper into Light & Shadow Work:
WATCH 7 SIGNS YOU ARE A LIGHT WORKER HERE
IT’S TIME TO GET YOUR SPARK BACK. WATCH HERE
UNDERSTAND THE BASICS OF LIGHT WORK HERE.
THIS IS WHAT LIGHT LED LIVING LOOKS LIKE
TALK TO YOUR INNER SHADOW WITH THIS FREE GUIDED EXERCISE
CLAIM YOUR SOCIAL RESPONSIBILITY
DON’T STAY STUCK IN YOUR HEALING
Connect with me and Practice:
www.keilashaheen.com (free meditations available here)
Join the Conversation!
Be part of our Substack community chat for ongoing discussions, Q&As, and shared insights.
Support our work:
– Get the Zenfulnote App to make inner work part of your daily life.
– Keila’s books: The Shadow Work Journal, The Lucky Girl Journal, The 369 Journal, The Book of Shadow Work, The Light Work Journal (NEW! pre-order).
– Dr. Connie’s books: Meeting the Shadow, Romancing the Shadow, Meeting the Shadow on the Spiritual Path, The Inner Work of Age.
– Keila’s website: www.keilashaheen.com (free meditations available here!).