This post on blocks to success will be of great value to anyone who finds that their problems keep coming back, who lives with continuous failure, for example, financially or in their love lives, and to those who feel stuck and can’t make a breakthrough.

The Importance of Shadow Work in Dissolving Blocks to Success

The cause of our most stubborn repeated problems lies in the things we are unwilling to face. Yet, when we understand the mechanisms at work here, it becomes easy to face our inner nature and finally heal. There are a number of mechanisms to look at. Shadow work will be the first thing to get us into the habit of looking within.

Our shadow exists to hold sacred every part of ourselves so that we don’t lose any part; we end up whole. Anything we deny about ourselves will come at us from the outside. This is how our shadows show us what we are missing. This isn’t necessarily negative, as we deny both positive and negative things about ourselves. If we deny our anger, we find ourselves surrounded by angry people. If we deny our creativity, we find ourselves surrounded by creative people. This will usually produce envy. Envy is a manifestation of the light side of shadow.

Now here is an important law you would do well to remember: If you fight your shadow you will always lose. On the other hand, if you make peace with your shadow, you win at everything.

A key to embracing shadow is recognising that both positive and negative have something in common; there is a basic raw power that you need to integrate. For example, you may experience both intense love and intense hate. Your raw power is your intensity of emotion, which can be directed either way. Embracing your intensity unleashes your power.

A second key is to realise you have choice. Once you own your raw power, you have a whole spectrum of expressions of that power, from the most negative to the most positive. It is far more honest to know that you can do bad but choose to do good, rather than think you are not capable of bad. So do away with concepts of being good or bad, and own both your power and choice.

The first exercise you can do to make peace with your shadow is to list all the reflections and projections. Reflections will be the qualities you see in those close to you. Projections are those that you admire or hate, not just in those close to you, but whoever triggers an emotional reaction. List all the qualities you admire and hate, and see if you can find the raw power that is common to both. Then own this. Engage your shadow in meditation. You can personify them in order to talk with them. It is useful to first see all the people you have listed as reflections and projections, then see the shadow as the sum of all those qualities. Own it, and make peace with them. This exercise is explained more fully in my previous article ‘The Importance of Shadow Work’

The Dark Law

A second huge block to success that holds many people back is what I call the Dark Law. Laws are deeper than beliefs. Beliefs tend to form in the subconscious. When we suppress it further into the unconscious, it forms a law. When we try to break this law, it punishes us. Beliefs we can break. Laws just punish us for breaking them, and we find they are still operating in our lives. Breaking a Dark Law is much more difficult.

These laws often form in childhood to make sense of the chaos. When we accept something as law, we stop fighting and learn to live with it. We use this to numb the pain. A common example is the law of servitude that I have observed in many healers. The law that you are here to serve others, so never have anything for yourself. This can form in childhood when you are brought up in lack, but are burdened by responsibility, so you accept the fact that others get things that you don’t, and your place is to help others. When this law is healed, people start to fully enjoy life for the first time, and have all the things they didn’t have before: abundance, love, joy etc.

 Psychology doesn’t seem to touch such depths. It takes a magickal process to heal at this level. This is because psychology only deals with the mind, and doesn’t like to talk about the soul, so has no way of understanding the needs or workings of the soul. Magick tends to deal with deeper workings of the unconscious and the soul. There are some things that can’t be healed without magick as they require intervention from higher levels of consciousness. In many cases it is done by developing rapport with your Higher Self. Involving them in your inner journeys allows much healing.

You can go on an inner journey with your Higher Self, into the secret prison, where you can recognise all the emotions that led to the formation of your dark law, and allow your Higher Self to heal it. Creating this secret prison in meditation makes a space where you can feel the oppression, and by allowing the emotion, unlocking the memories behind it. Once you recognise your Dark Law, allow your Higher Self to help you destroy it.

The Nemesis

The next mechanism I will cover is called the Nemesis. This is the part of you that punishes you to right some wrong; i.e. mistakes you have made, debts you owe, failures etc. Nemesis was the Goddess of justice. Originally this was to make people pay their debts, but then became justice through retribution. This gave rise to the idea of a punishing God, and even those who think they are free of old religious ideas have simply replaced it with the Lords of Karma. So this concept of having to be punished for your wrongs has been deeply conditioned into the unconscious. Nemesis is a force in the collective unconscious that won’t go away through affirmations or simple psychology. The energy has to be recognised and transmuted.

Usually people don’t realise how they punish themselves. It is not a case of administering physical punishment; it has become a lot more subtle. The Nemesis has four expressions:

1) Self dilution. This means lessening or devaluing oneself, putting oneself down, playing small, so you never embrace your power.

2) Self hate, exercised through self abandonment or sabotage. Giving up on your own needs, desires and goals.

3) Self condemnation. You are never good enough, then by projection everything around you becomes not good enough.

4) Self delusion, leading to arrogance. This causes one to be sabotaged by ego, so one does not learn from mistakes, and relationships fail.

When you catch yourself playing any of these games, that’s the Nemesis at work. All these games lead to failure and constant restriction. The first step is to realise that this is all self punishment, because you are still trying to right some wrong. Then you can engage your Nemesis in meditation, with your Higher Self, to transmute Her.

Solutions

You may be able to solve much of this from what I have taught above, but this is a very deep area, and you may want some help. I have put together all the solutions into one course; the Darkness Course. This course takes you through initiations to dissolve the Dark Law, transmute the Nemesis, and gives a magickal process for making peace with the shadow.

N.B. I’ve just released the upgraded online version of the Darkness Course – you can hear me speak more about it on my recent live Q&A call.

We also cover the shadow work on the Ultimate Healing Course. The Ultimate Healing course covers a much wider spectrum of healing, but includes shadow work, along with releasing trauma, emotions, memories and beliefs, future causality, creation and dis-creation, and candali attunements for safely raising kundalini.

The Dark Law can also be healed for you through a distant shamanic healing, which is ideal for those who have become aware that a dark law is operating, but don’t feel they want to take the time to work through a course before they are free. In a distant healing session, I can go into your unconscious and dissolve the law for you. Once it is gone, you feel free, restrictions vanish from your life, and transformation is fundamental and permanent.

Focusing on shadow work and releasing ourselves at an individual level from the dark forces holding us back will also have an effect on the collective shadow. It is one of the best things we can all do to help shift global oppression.