Yearly Archives: 2021

Embrace Your Dark Side With Shadow Work: Techniques, How-To, Benefits, And More!

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Carl Jung shadow work

Where there is yin, there is yang and where there is light, there will be darkness. That’s what psychology believes too. Do you feel that there are parts of you that you want to hide from the world?

In psychology, this hidden part of you is referred to as the “dark side”. Many experts believe that getting in touch with your dark side can help improve self-awareness, overall growth, and development.

This process of embracing and accepting your dark side is called shadow work. Shadow work helps in the exploration of your feelings that you would rather hide from the world. You can practice this technique under professional supervision or by yourself as well.

Let’s take a look at what shadow work means, shadow work techniques, how to practice it, and the many benefits of embracing your shadow self.

What Is Shadow Work?

What Is Shadow Work

In psychology, the shadow is the hidden parts that you’ve hidden or chosen to hide from others. The Swiss psychologist, Carl Jung developed shadow work. According to this concept, a shadow is created from childhood experiences that eventually develop and affect adulthood.

Childhood experiences can be anything ranging from childhood trauma, envy, anger, social values, etc. Carl Jung’s shadow work theory highlights that when you constantly avoid your “shadow”, it can eventually create havoc later in life. Suppressing your negative feelings can lead you to develop mental health troubles.

With shadow work exercises, you can easily face the experiences you want to avoid. This theory helps you accept your repressed side and eventually heal you from within.

What Is Shadow Self?

The Shadow self is the subconscious side that keeps bothering us but it is not clear if this side is helping us or distracting us because it is hidden deep within us. Our shadow self can also play a big role in influencing our decision in our life. Engaging in a conversation with your shadow self can also help in bringing a positive change in your life.

Interacting with your shadow self can help explore many positive traits of your personality. It can help you become more self-compassionate, improve the relationship you have with yourself and others, and it can help heal yourself from within by finding peace of mind.

How To Do Shadow Work?

Shadow work techniques can include:

1. Avoid Self-Pity

The first step is to avoid self-pity. You need to embrace your self-worth and acceptance. When negative experiences happen, we keep thinking about them. We lose focus on what’s important and begin to question our worth. You are worthy of love so instead of self-pity focus on how much you are worthy of love!

2. Accept Your Emotions

To avoid getting hurt, we tend to suppress our emotions. What you don’t realize is that once you accept your wayward emotions, it becomes easier to move through life. Remember not all emotions are bad. Accepting your emotions (all of them) can help you embrace all of you.

3. Meet Your Shadow

It’s time for your light to meet your dark. It can be hard to find your shadow as it is in your subconscious mind so to bring forth your shadow you need to focus on all of your emotions, feelings, and thoughts. If you’re stuck with self-doubt or unworthiness, don’t worry. Just let every emotion out.

4. Stay Compassionate

To keep our negative self at bay, we tend to blame others. Well, it might not work if you truly want to embrace yourself. Remember to forgive and forget, as that’s the way you can move forward and heal. Try to stay compassionate towards others as well as yourself. If you keep drowning in guilt, how would you embrace your shadow self?

5. Hug Your Inner Child

Your childhood experiences are the ones that give birth to your shadow self. Childhood trauma or other negative experiences can hold us back from fully embracing ourselves. So, go and give a big hug to your inner child and let them know that it’s not their fault. They are loved, if not by others than by themselves.

6. Engage In De-Stressing

Sometimes, we can’t express our feelings – positive or negative – with words. One of the best ways to express and understand your dark side can be through your hobbies. When you create something, you pour your emotions into it. Engaging in de-stressing activities can also help you explore your shadow self.

More Shadow Work Exercises

1. Have A Conversation With Yourself

Well, talking to yourself may sound crazy but it’s not! There are so many layers of your personality that you haven’t yet explored. And if you continue to ignore them then they may unconsciously influence your actions.

An example of this can be; when you say something and then wonder what or why you say what you said. To avoid this, it’s always best to talk to yourself – either with the help of journaling, imagining, or by looking in a mirror.

2. Become Friends With Your Dark Side

Many times, people assume that they are naturally “good”. And this perception of oneself stays while one keeps ignoring their negative side. To embrace your shadow, start by listing your positive sides as well as negative sides too.

An example; you can call yourself a polite and kind person but somewhere you are hiding your unkind or impolite side. Please remember that it’s OK to have negative sides, they are what makes us human. It’s important to accept them and move on.

3. Get To Know Yourself

Start to get to know yourself. You can start by noticing your behaviors for a week or so. For example, when you’re angry at someone, note what they did to make you angry. What feelings do you hold for them?

If a piece of advice pops up in your head, write it down. You can direct this advice towards others and yourself too. When you advise others, always remember to remind yourself too.

How Does Shadow Work Help?

Practicing shadow work can have many benefits such as:

  • You become better focused and grounded.
  • Your relationship with yourself as well as others improves.
  • You learn to accept others as they are while accepting yourself.
  • You get a clear understanding of the world around you.
  • You learn how to handle dark and negative thoughts better without compromising your mental, emotional, or physical health.
  • You learn how to balance your life and handle certain situations better.
  • Your communication skills improve.
  • You learn to avoid self-sabotage, self-blame, and improve your overall well-being.

Shadow work, while beneficial, is not easy as it requires you to accept your dark side without any bias. However, once you embrace your dark side, your shadow, you can lead a journey towards self-discovery and self-acceptance.

Shadow work can help you gain the freedom to accept and embrace all of you as you are. I hope the above-mentioned shadow work techniques and shadow work exercises help you embrace your shadow self and improve your overall health and well-being.

 

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Sustaining Happiness For Better Mental Well-Being

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What does it mean to sustain something —- To nourish? To support? or to stand by? Do we stand by ourselves? Do we nourish our happiness, do we cherish our bonds, relationships and do we at all focus on our mental health equally or somewhere near to our physical health?

In this blog, let us discuss the importance and a few ways of sustaining happiness for better mental well-being. Let us try to adopt a few life-altering habits to nourish what is already ours.

Sustaining Happiness For Better Mental Well-being

This is my last blog post for the year 2021, and I am definitely looking forward to the super productive year 2022. I have a lot of new things to share with you all, but I am holding my horses until everything is done.

How is it to live for better mental health? Honestly, it is not easy and for some people, it is not even on their priority list. But, when you hit the rock bottom in your life and face all your fears, looking them in eye yet having the courage to move with your life, you already know how does it feel going in that zone.

Somehow you become familiar with the pain and the suffering, the whole process of getting wounded, the time you take to heal and eventually come out of it, and then you no longer fear that pain, you just take care of it, protect yourself from all the painful areas. That’s how you learn to preserve your peace and sustain your happiness.

Nurturing and nourishing your mental health is an ongoing process, you just cannot help yourself if you are not aware of your unhappiness, your struggle, your failures, your triggers, and your pain areas in life, which is very much a quintessential part of life. Sustaining happiness for better mental well-being because health is wealth and mental health is health.

Sustaining Happiness For Better Mental Well-Being

Here are a few ways you can sustain happiness in your life:

1.) Find or create your stress-busters

Accept it or not, stress is a dominant part of everyone’s life. No one can get away without facing stressful events. It is not only the stress that creates havoc in our lives but also our inability to deal with it adds a lot of emotional turmoil, leading to an unhealthy mindset.

Hence, building or developing a few resilient coping skills will help us anti-combat such events, and work towards sustaining happiness for better mental well-being. It will not completely eradicate the problem but prepare us to face it with full strength and bounce back.

I have been in a severely stressful situation this year, probably one of the worst years of my life, but a part of me helped me to keep moving ahead. My willpower and the desire to live my life were way stronger than giving up on it. So, I create my own space and dedicated all my energy, it worked.

2.) Understand the patterns and stick to them

By the time you reach your 30’s, you start understanding yourself, isn’t it? You have already experienced a lot in your life, and your life becomes a complete package of good, bad, distasteful, disgusting, and most precious moments.

These exact moments also help you to discover a few things about yourself, understand those patterns, and try to break some of the negative patterns limiting yourself.

Never ever be afraid to learn or unlearn, I have been precisely unlearning a lot of things and keeping me open to receive more.

3.) Learn to deal with your feelings

Never dismiss your feeling, you need time to understand your feelings take time but never live in denial. Your happiness depends a lot more on your mental health aspect, if you feel happy from the inside, it radiates outside.

A lot depends upon how you feel from inside, some of the major life events leave you bruised and damaged internally and the worst part is these are like some invisible wounds, they leave no mark but only a deep ache in your heart. You cry in pain and suffer in silence, ultimately leading to deteriorating mental health and no one cares.

So, start caring for yourself. No one is going to come for you, no one is waiting for you, your first responsibility is you. And, by any chance, in this journey of yours, if you find someone who is ready to accept you the way you are, damaged, flawed, imperfect… you know what to do.

Happiness is a beautiful state of mind, do not try to fix everything just try to be a part of the process. Trust your path and eventually everything will start falling at place. You cant have it all at the same time, but you can have it, one thing at a time. You will overcome this, you will thrive and survive, you just got to believe in yourself other than anybody else.

Love and light

……………………………………………………………………………

Sustaining Happiness

Priyanka is a published author of 26 Days 26 Ways for a Happier you, Ardhaviram and Broken & Beautiful. An NLP practitioner and Founder of Sanity Daily, helping you prioritize your mental health. Let’s build a happy community.

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How to Help Your Kids Deal with Anxiety

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Helping Your Anxious Child

Childhood anxiety is now widely considered by experts to be amongst the most important mental health issues of our time. As a matter of fact, many child psychologists believe that 20 out of every 100 kids will almost certainly experience at least some kind of high-level anxiety around the time they hit their adolescence. While many, if not most kids tend to outlast these feelings but not all of them are able to do so, as such. If left untreated it can cause a lot of problems later on in life. However, it doesn’t have to be this way at all. Not when you take control of the situation and start helping your kids deal with their anxiety-related challenges. Let us see how you can go about doing that:

Anxiety is basically a fear of an uncertain future

The main thing about childhood anxiety is that it almost inevitably involves a certain level of fear and perception about danger. It thrives on the intrinsic unpredictability of an undefined future. The mind of most high-strung and anxious children is more often than not, on a continuous lookout for some vaguely defined future threat. This means that it is perennially locked in a state of unceasing and exhausting vigilance. 

Anxiety Disorder or Just Anxiety

It is perfectly normal for just about everyone to feel a bit anxious at some point in time. Anxiety and fear are primarily protective reflexes that stop us from doing something really rash. It can also act as a form of motivation. For example, a child may be concerned about doing well in an examination. In this case, such a child may become motivated to perform well. Alternately, such children might become so scared they lose their concentration and could not even function properly. Here, the differentiating factor is the fear that hinders the child from performing at his or her best.

If your child starts actively avoiding exams and pretends to become sick on exam days or throws a tantrum or just plain refuses to go to school for no conceivable reason, this means only one thing. Their anxiety has started interfering with their day-to-day life. In fact, avoidance is a classic hallmark of most childhood anxiety disorders. This is why it is very important to separate healthy fear (that might keep the child away from behaving like superman by trying to fly out of a second-story window) from anxiety. 

1. Calm the child down

If the child is having a full-on anxiety-induced panic attack, no amount of shouting and screaming will solve the issue. Anxious children can become cold and clammy and they might even start throwing up. At this point in time their body has taken over and they are not listening to you at all. You should ask them to take deep breaths until they are able to regain control. 

2. Listen to them

Once they have calmed down sufficiently enough to listen to you, talk to them softly and gently. Under no account should you belittle their fears. This is extremely important. If you start ridiculing them, they will never trust you again.  If they say there is a big hairy monster under the closet, believe them. In fact, take a flashlight and turn the closet upside down so that they can see there is no monster. This way, they will know you believe them and they will trust you and call you whenever they feel anxious. Best of all, you have shown them that there really is nothing to fear but fear itself. 

3. Express positive and realistic expectations

The way you can help your child is by being confident in what they are capable of doing. You don’t need to promise that their fears won’t be an issue, but it’s important for a parent or teacher alike -to have realistic expectations with kids so those anxieties aren’t too overwhelming when faced head-on. By letting them know that as time goes on the anxiety levels might feel less intense and things get easier- this gives children confidence.

4. Taking care of other factors

A child’s health is their wealth. If you want them to be happy and relaxed then it’s important that they have a healthy everyday life! More time spent on sleep for example will help soothe the anxiousness in your little one which would lead him/her into spending less energy worrying about all sorts of things, while simultaneously sleep might improve their focus overall. 

Sometimes there are physiological reasons behind their anxiety and panic attacks. This means that you can also use vitamins to help your kids in feeling better and calmer. For example, magnesium gummies promote health and also have many nutritious benefits. You can use them to take care of any deficiencies in their diet.

Don’t forget to let them know the importance of keeping hydrated and drinking water as much as possible. Water is one of the crucial elements to keep healthy. Regular physical exercise can also help to reduce the symptoms of anxiety, however, they don’t need a rigorous workout routine, just walking or gentle yoga works too!

5. Encourage them to do something that helps them to feel calmer

Encourage them to do something that helps ease their stress. This could be running, walking, or listening to music; painting a picture, and coloring! You can also encourage them to write in their journal about what they are feeling. They can also spend time with their friends and people that make them feel safe and comfortable.

A soothing environment is important for children who are feeling anxious. It could be their own room, their grandparent’s place, or a favorite place in nature. Identifying these specific places could make it possible for you to know more about how exactly you can help, especially in situations when the anxiety gets the worst of them.

Conclusion

Childhood anxiety is very real and very painful for both parents and their kids. However, you can control it by calming the kid down and listening patiently to anything they might have to say. You might give them magnesium gummies to supplement their diet.

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Understanding Sibling Grief? Here’s How To Deal With The Loss Of A Sibling

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how-to-deal-with-loss-of-a-sibling

Dealing with grief is very, very difficult but having to bear the loss of a sibling is especially extremely difficult. It feels like you have lost a companion. A sibling is like a part of you and dealing with sibling grief is extremely painful.

Some of us are close to our siblings and some aren’t, in spite of the kind of relationship you share with them, a sibling loss is just so different. There is fear, there is grief, there is disbelief, there are so many emotions that hit us at that point of time.

In this article, we will cover all about sibling grief and how you can deal with the loss of a sibling…

Shall we begin?

Why Does Sibling Grief Hit Differently?

Why Does Sibling Grief Hit Differently

The bond that you share with your sibling is very, very different from all other kinds of relationships. You didn’t choose to be together but the universe made that choice for you. You grew up together, troubling and supporting each other in every phase of your life.

You always share an extra relationship with your sibling. Other than being your sibling, they are also a friend, confidant, teacher, sometimes a parent as well. They are literally 50% of our memories and that’s what hits differently when you lose them.

They are the branches of the same tree. Sometimes it scares the hell out of you that if one branch can fall that other might soon have to face the same fate too.

Is Sibling Grief Not Being Given The Importance It Needs?

Is Sibling Grief Not Being Given

Everyone deals with grief differently, that’s understood but sometimes we forget to give siblings the time to process their feelings. When someone loses a sibling, their patients lose a child. The focus completely shifts to the parents because of course losing is a child is extremely painful.

All the friends and family members ask you to be strong for your parents. You are responsible for all the arrangements and taking care of all the people, attending to them, and making them comfortable. In all this hustle you don’t find the time to peacefully grieve your loss.

Siblings are usually expected to support the grieving family members. It’s either the parents or children or spouse of your sibling whom you are supposed to support and take care of. Siblings also require time too. I hope we begin focusing on sibling grief too, will you?

Also read: Familial Love: What Is It, Why It Is Important, And More

How To Cope With Sibling Grief?

How To Cope With Sibling Grief

Losing a sibling hits you deep in the depth of your heart. An older person’s death is somehow expected but a sibling is a peer. You’re almost the same age, you’ve grown up together and lived a similar life. It’s just different.

Here are a few things you can do for yourself…

  • Be compassionate: show some compassion for yourself. Being kind to yourself is all you need right now. Don’t beat yours;f up for the call you didn’t answer and the silly fight you had.
  • Rest: you can’t do everything at once, sit down, take a deep breath and rest for some time. You need sleep and rest. The responsibilities you are shouldering will not go anywhere, so just relax and switch your brain off for some time (not literally).
  • Express your feelings: skipping the feeling of grief is not the way to be. You have to acknowledge your pain and express your pain.
  • Spend time with people who really matter: This is not the time to attend people. If they really care about your feelings they will understand. Be with you friends and family, they will give you the strength you need.
  • Laugh if something’s funny: enjoy your life, laugh, be happy. Don’t be guilty or enjoy the little joys of life. I know you are grieving but who said you have to kill your inner self to do that?
  • Do something that both of you enjoyed: make a ritual, plant a tree every year or donate to the needy or spend time in an orphanage/old age home. Go on a vacation to their favorite place, do weird things they would have done.
  • Join a support group: listening to stories of people who have been through a similar pain will give you strength. Joining a support group is always a better option and you can always make new friends.

Final thoughts…

Losing a sibling is difficult. The bond is just so special and losing a sibling is like losing a part of you. You need the time to grieve your loss, you deserve it. Life’s falling apart? You will gather yourself back together, just give yourself some time.

 

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What is MDMA Therapy: All You Need to Know

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MDMA Therapy is a treatment that optimizes the benefits of psychotherapy through supplementation with MDMA.

When ingested under safe, controlled circumstances by someone who has been given explicit instructions on how much should be taken, MDMA can produce an extremely beneficial effect such as alleviating symptoms associated with PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder), anxiety disorders, including social phobia and OCD (obsessive-compulsive disorder), and depression.

Clinical trials also show that MDMA-assisted therapy is beneficial for autistic adults who suffer from PTSD, depression and social anxiety.

MDMA gained popularity as a street drug in the 1980s and remains listed as a Schedule 1 narcotic according to the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) due to its high potential for abuse, harm, or addiction. That said, MDMA therapy has been designated as a “breakthrough therapy” by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in the United States.

Currently, MDMA-assisted therapy is being tested in large randomized controlled trials sponsored by the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies, or MAPS.

But because MDMA shows significant promise as a supplement to psychotherapy, particularly in individuals with PTSD, in 2018, it was predicted that MDMA would be approved by the FDA this year. However, due to clinical trials slowing down because of COVID-19, MDMA’s approval by the FDA for therapy has been pushed back to 2023.

Apart from clinical trials demonstrating significant improvement in the PTSD of individuals after only three sessions, one reason why this approval is so likely to occur is that there has only been one serious adverse reaction among thousands of human subjects.

Plus, MDMA only needs to be administered a handful of times in a therapeutic context, whereas the only FDA-approved treatments for PTSD – SSRIs sertraline and paroxetine – require patients to take them for the rest of their lives!

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