Shadow Work Stages: from Awakening to Ascension Mastery

On the spiritual journey, we go through different stages of healing and evolution.

Plenty of spiritual workers and influencers, as well as regular practitioners on social media and in person, speak about shadow work, so you may have heard about this practice and concept.

There are many different approaches to shadow work. There’s what we may call the Jungian shadow being the unconscious being made conscious. Those are pretty neutral terms, therefore it isn’t necessarily about negative things. There’s what we may call a more self-help new age version where the shadow has more to do with things perceived as negative, not necessarily things that are unconscious or subconscious.

In some of our spiritual communities, the collective energies are often approached as the collective unconscious, and it’s often about the collective shadow, what’s underneath the surface on a global level. In this area, there can even be social causes or conspiracy theories involved.

What many people have not discussed, however, is how there are different stages to shadow work, different levels, different grades, so to speak. Like there are different stages of healing, different stages of spiritual awakening, different stages of alchemy and different stages of Ascension and DNA activation, there are different stages of shadow work.

This blog post is a brief overview to those stages, so that this conversation will be started and we can go deeper in regards to this. A lot of this is what I recognised on my own journey as someone who’s on a mastery path and ascending in form.

Note that to some extent these stages can overlap as well as happen simultaneously in different stages in different areas of our lives. For example, you relationships may go through stage 3 and your career stage 4 at the same time. This depends on our path and where we have and haven’t explored our lives to the fullest. A person can be gifted in their career path, but have a hard time with relationships vice versa. A person might be highly spiritual, but have challenges with finances. Therefore it’s important to have grace for each stage and allow growth and healing for each area of our lives.

Another sidenote, is that you may also go through these stages again if something happens that requires you to do so – in which you would start from the First Stage again and move your way up to the Second Stage and so on and so forth.

And the final sidenote – the first five stages can be approached as mental level shadow work, where the Soul is still very well present in each stage. However, stage 6 and 7 are beyond the mind. They are the stages of shadow work that you won’t be able to think yourself into. You have to be able to experience Oneness in order to understand what the 6th Stage is about, and you have to be able to feel what it’s like to have no shadow in order to be at the 7th Stage. These are the levels of spiritual, multidimensional consciousness and non-duality, that transcend the mental levels. Let go of the grips of your mind, your limiting beliefs and mental clouds in order to get closer to those stages.

First stage: Awakening

Sound familiar? The reason why I’ve titled the first one awakening is because usually, whether we’re spiritual or not, we start to do shadow work when we awaken to something. Something may be off and there’s a need to uncover the uncomfortable parts of our lives. And for those of us that are spiritual, we may go through a very sticky awakening blues pretty early on in our journey. For some of us it can even show up in the form of a depressive dark night of the soul. And especially when you look at things from that very psycho-spiritual perspective, you may notice the pattern of unveiling repressed or suppressed things coming to surface, things we ignored and avoided before, things we didn’t want to look at. Facing these things and bringing them to light, to the up front of our consciousness is basically the rookie shadow work. It’s the grade 1, first level we often take.

Second stage: Processing

After we see it, we’ll have to feel it. The first stage can be a bit of a shock, a bit of a “Tower-moment”. After the Tower card in tarot, comes the star, and while the Star speaks about hope, the element of water in the traditional imagery can be interpreted as the flow of energy between realms and spaces. The processing is a moving stage – at this moment we may not have all answers yet, and we’re not supposed to. We’re focused on the healing and feeling things. At this stage there can be purging as well – these things are coming out of us so that we can become lighter. There are other stages, however, where this can happen as well. In this stage we learn to work with our emotions, rather than repressing them.

Third stage: Acceptance

This stage I refer to as the part where we accept the shadow self, where we accept our unpleasantness, and we accept our low emotions as a part of life. When it comes to collective themes, we accept those things as what’s going on on this planet and in the collective. We start to validate our own emotions, realising that each of them serves a purpose. This is a part where I’ve noticed many people being stuck, sort of looping here, and not moving forward. This is not something to be judged, because none of us knows everything, therefore we don’t know the reasonings behind such stuckness or their whole story to begin with. Once we’ve moved out of this stage, we can start to really advance on our path. The healing will become so much deeper, and we’ll start to unlock the doors to Ascension and mastery.

Fourth stage: Amplification

This stage is when we start to strengthen ourselves, using even those negative states to our advantage, albeit in a positive way. We no longer enable shitty behaviour or even behaviour that we used to be ok with, because we’re becoming a new version of ourselves. This is where once the light comes in, it will reveal anything in our consciousness that no longer serves. This is why I call it the amplification – it amplifies all aspects of our consciousness in order to bring it to the surface. At this point we’ve already learned the basic emotional regulation and emotional processing skills, we can easily validate our emotions and go through the healing process. Therefore, once these things come up, we don’t necessarily feel so triggered – and I don’t use that word lightly, because I’ve been there, trauma is no joke, folks – or agitated by those experiences and emotions. To some extent, some of that may still happen, and we may need a little bit of separation between ourselves and the source of that trigger or impulse to feel validated. At times, there may be inflammation, but it isn’t to the same degree as before, as our biggest baggage is behind us. We may experience more healing crises at this stage in order to purge the remaining pieces of those shadows that may still be lurking. Some of us may experience psychic attacks, and in this stage we’re learning to defend ourselves from it. This is due to the Light within us growing brighter and brighter, which may actually trigger others to attack and react.

Fifth stage: Sovereignty

This stage is when we start to embrace our sovereignty and taking more responsibility of our creations and our path. We recognise that our actions ground things into this human realm, and we’re becoming more responsible in the co-creation process. We’ve realised that blaming others is no longer useful to our energetic state and we start to create from a more self-realised state. In this stage we’re able to see things from a more objective and neutral state, which benefits our shadow work by allowing detachment. We also recognise that it’s not our business to be doing other people’s work unless we get permission and it’s aligned to each one’s paths. This means we stay detached from other people’s problems and we give them space to be in their full power. The integration process here has more to do with understanding where some level fo duality and separation might still be necessary for our growth and sovereignty. In this stage, we start to address collective issues from more of a leader perspective. We’ll start to show the way to a different reality on this planet.

Sixth stage: Onenness

This stage is explored in the membership, and the upcoming Shadow Work Mini-Course. In short, as we start to embody Unconditional Love and embark upon Oneness and Unity Consciousness, we recognise the deeper lessons around the shadowy elements in our reality. We’re able to also recognise the part these elements are playing in the Divine Plan, the bigger picture so to speak. This is a very advanced stage of shadow work, because these things have to be looked at very neutral perspective and objective eyes. We have to be emotionally and spiritually mature and responsible co-creators at this stage. We have to be willing to accept that All is One and there’s no way around it, and that is because we experience that consistently. The Oneness cannot be realised with our mind alone – it has to be a first hand experience in order to truly be Oneness. This is where the last bits of integration happen, as we understand the deeper lessons and release stories from our consciousness. Collective shadows are addressed as a part of the story on Earth.

Seventh stage: Transcendence

This stage is the Pure Observer stage. At this point, shadow work may not even be so relevant to us. This is because everything is created through the Zero Point awareness and the Void Space. Therefore, any shadows are also “self”-created. You may interpret this as similar to the Fifth Stage: Sovereignty, but this goes beyond that. In this stage we may not even feel our ego that much, in the Fifth Stage we still recognise the “I” or “I AM”. It’s almost as if we’re just walking this realm as Source, totally transcending the human constraints. Even the stories around lessons and such seem to dissolve to the background, because we experience Source Embodiment (or something close to it, at least). That’s what differentiates this stage from the Sixth Stage: Onenness, which we discuss in the Membership.

You can dive deeper into the Sixth Stage: Onenness by joining the Home Planet Membership.

Here’s some relevant content about the Love & Light, Source & Deconditioning and the Vibrational scale.

Dive into these videos for deeper understanding.