Inner Work


Inner work is the psychological and spiritual practice of diving deep within oneself, to understand, heal and transform our patterns. Those patterns are often hidden in a part of our psyche, and manifest themselves in ways, which we might not be conscious of. We develop patterns to help us fend our way through life and to protect us. However, those patterns are not useful in all stages of our lives, and need to be released, to implement healthier ones.

Inner work can be categorised as:
• Ego Work, which can be defined as defense mechanisms that we adopted to protect us. While they worked at certain moments in our lives, when we move towards healing, we need to question their relevance in our paths, and adopt healthier ways of self preservation, like implementing boundaries.

• Inner child work refers to the process of identifying our unmet needs from childhood. Those could be not being validated by our parents, not having felt the emotional connection with out family, not being understood by our family or being impacted by our environment's toxic behaviour.
We heal the inner child wound by reparenting ourselves, by tending to our own needs, expressing ourselves, and allowing ourselves to be childlike and playful.

• Shadow work refers to our repressed side. It is comprised of behaviours, habits and feelings branded as "negative" by society. We shun that part of ourselves for fear of being rejected. By doing so, we fragment our being into duality. To heal ourselves, we need to fully integrate our shadow side into our selves, and build a proper support mechanism to ensure that we have a healthy relationship with ourselves and others.

When we have not done our inner work, we tend to be defensive and cause ourselves more pain by seeking comfort in unhealthy habits such as addictions or being in abusive situations.

As Carl Jung said "people will do anything, no matter how absurd, to avoid facing their own souls".

With grace,
D 🙏💙



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