Healing Through the Collective Shadow: A Culturally Informed Approach
Shadow work in the spiritual community is often spoken about as a tool for personal healing. Common areas of focus include clearing the blocks to abundance, confidence, or manifesting a soulmate. But how often do we stop to ask: What shadows are ours and what shadows belong to the culture that shaped us? While shadow work can powerfully support us in living a more aligned and fulfilling life, especially in areas like abundance and confidence, our world is struggling with an overemphasis on separation between self and other. Personal liberation has become prioritized over collective liberation.
The Individual vs. the Collective
If you’re a healer, holistic practitioner, or space holder; you likely came to this work with an innate call to help, to heal, and to support others because of the magic you’ve experienced in how certain healing practices have liberated you in some way on your journey. It’s a beautiful and noble path to take. While holding this, we must also acknowledge that healing work shaped by the individualism rooted in Westernized society can limit our understanding and likely unintentionally perpetuate systemic harm.
There is a lot of talk and buzz about being trauma informed in healing spaces. But to be truly trauma informed requires one to also be culturally informed.
What Culturally Informed Shadow Work Looks Like
To have a culturally informed approach to one’s work and spiritual practice means to have cultural humility and sensitivity. Culturally informed practices in connection to shadow work can look like:
Deeply exploring one’s own cultural roots
Learning about the origins of your healing modalities (especially if they’re outside your cultural background) and acknowledging these roots with clients
Reflecting on and unpacking your own sociocultural and intersectional identities
Creating space for clients to openly share their identities and naming how cultural dynamics between practitioner and client may impact the relationship
Educating yourself on your client’s intersectional experiences
Reflecting on implicit and explicit biases toward cultures we don’t come from or fully understand
Examining where we may be unintentionally appropriating another culture’s spiritual practices
Acknowledging the ways in which our identities grant us privileges regardless of whether we asked for them
Collective Responsibility in Healing Work
No matter what one’s race, ethnicity, age, sexual orientation, religious/spiritual background, gender, or socioeconomic status is, we all have to do the inner work to look at ourselves and understand where we may be contributing to collective pain whether that’s through inaction, judgement, lack of curiosity in learning about the systematic injustices of our world, defensiveness, or choosing self over communal benefit.
Liberation is a Shared Experience
We can’t deny that we are social and cultural beings that need support from each other for us all to experience personal liberation through collective liberation. Our work in the spiritual community is to have cultural sensitivity when we work with clients and to understand that the person or people in front of us each have cultural dynamics at play that contribute to their own inner shadows and strengths for healing. It is essential that we monitor the ways in which our own cultural experiences may prevent us from understanding the layered beauty and pain that comes with the cultural complexity of each person’s lived experience.
True Shadow Work is Relational, Not Just Internal
True shadow work is a relational endeavor. It’s important now more than ever that we as healers think bigger from a sociocultural perspective that will likely stretch us beyond our comfort zones. When we center cultural awareness in our practice, we not only help people in their healing journeys, but we also do our part to create a world where everyone has the personal sovereignty to do so.
If this sparked something Patricia offers, I offer 1:1 sessions that weave cultural awareness and shadow work into healing. You can learn more here or contact patricia@innerpttrn.com
