“Everyone carries a shadow,” Carl Jung wrote, “and the less it is embodied in the individual’s conscious life, the blacker and denser it is.”

Shadow work is the process of becoming familiar and embracing with the aspects of ourselves that we don’t acknowledge exist. Our shadows can include anything we are unconscious about, but most often it includes aspects of ourselves that we consider undesirable. Robert Bly calls it “the long bag we drag behind ourselves” where we have stuffed parts of our psyches that for one reason or another made us feel uncomfortable.