Shadow work is an extremely popular term in the spirituality community.
What is a shadow? It’s parts of the psyche that is difficult to accept, to acknowledge. It’s what you don’t understand about yourself, but affects your life in strange ways, especially from the external. To me, shadow work is about understanding the karmas embedded deep in the psyche, that keeps one trapped in the physical realm.
In my opinion, the shadow is represented by the 4th, 8th, and 12th house, the karma houses. In what ways?
The 4th house is what you learn from your family, things that you saw your parents do, and things that you internalized that may not be the healthiest or the most normal.
The 8th house is how you reacted to personal trauma in your life. The losses you incurred, the shitty emotions that you faced, and what impact that made in your psyche.
The 12th house is what you come across when you’re all alone, with no distractions from others. 12th house is isolation, and the collective. It’s the collective unconscious, because when you are alone, the things you imagine are not just about you, but also about others. This is an imaginative house, and the images in this house are conjured up without external stimulus
Why is it important to care about healing the psyche? Well, because it affects the material world. Specifically, the houses opposite to these house, the 2nd house, the 6th house, and the 10 house.
When the 8th house is sick, the 2nd house suffers. Not just that, but 8th house sickness often comes from the 2nd house being affected. The second house is what you own, your possessions, your self esteem, what you value. If your values are questioned, if your possessions are taken away, your self worth is ruined, these are matters of the 8th house. When that happens, you deal with the 8th house issues by delving into the 2nd house, either hoarding possessions, by giving them up entirely, or just reacting with an imbalance.
When the 12th house is sick, the 6th house suffers. When someone is alone a lot, their daily life, their daily routine suffers, as we saw during the pandemic. Not just that, 12th house issues often come from 6th house issues. Chronic illness, sickness, pandemics are 6th house health issues. Plus, employment, work, etc are 6th house matters, so unemployment can lead to 12th house issues. And, all these things make the 12th house sickness worse, and the reaction makes the 6th house worse.
6th house issues come across as being unable to follow routines, sometimes having issues with health due to lack of hygiene, not being able to participate in the work force because of your lack of discipline.
Lastly, sickness of the 4th house leads to 10th house problems. 4th house is your family dynamics, and the things you learn from your family. When your family works outside the norm, it shows outside, and it affects your reputation. Not just that, your upbringing is also affected by the 10th house, or, how your family is seen. The class of the family, the status, the wealth, are often 10th house matters, and these are things that affect your upbringing, the schools you go to, the behaviour of the parents, etc.
The fourth house also represents comfort, and how you unwind when you are alone. When something is wrong with the 4th house, you run towards the outside society to fix it. This could mean many things. Interaction with people outside of the family is what creates someone’s reputation. So, a 4th house issue can show up as someone who is a workaholic, someone who has a bad reputation, someone who is disliked for no reason by larger society.
These interactions represent how the houses opposite to one another impact each other, and furthermore, how opposite houses can be used to manipulate one another, from the perspective of remediation. The remediation can take the form of meditating on a house, and often, the opposite house is overlooked, in terms of why a particular problem is being created in a native’s life.
This particular post also highlights the importance of spirituality, and how spirituality can bring about material abundance in the life of a practitioner.
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