Shadow Work for the Soul

A comprehensive guide to identifying and reclaiming your shadow

2025 Coalition of Visionary Resources Silver Award

Explains how your shadow develops and how your reactivity to specific people and situations reflects the ways you project your shadow onto others.

Presents a wide variety of shadow work tools, emotional intelligence exercises, and self-inquiry practices to help you identify your shadow and heal and release any shadow-related traumas.

Explores the concept of collective shadows, including online shadows and relationship shadows, and reveals how to free yourself from shadow projections.

Throughout our lives we deny the parts of our authentic selves that our families, peers, and the world told us were wrong or unlovable, and from this repression our shadow is born. By the time we reach adulthood, much of our authentic self is shadow, and we no longer feel vibrant and enthusiastic about life. Yet the shadow is composed not only of the trauma and darkness we have experienced but also the light we have yet to absorb.

In this practical and trauma-informed guide to deep shadow work, Mary Mueller Shutan explains how to find compassion for your dark side, reconnect with the repressed and abandoned parts of yourself, and reclaim the resiliency and joy of your authentic, whole self. A wide variety of intuitive, emotional intelligence, and self-expression exercises support you in identifying your shadow projections and teach you how to safely and skillfully work with the difficult emotions that may arise in the process of exploring the less illuminated places within.

Learn how to acknowledge and free yourself from society’s collective shadows, such as online or relationship shadows, in order to promote personal as well as collective well-being.

Offering a self-directed process for healing trauma and reclaiming the eclipsed light of your shadow, this guide shows how shadow work allows you to move beyond the restrictions you have placed on yourself and others and see the beauty inherent in the dark places of your soul.