Last week I was interviewed by Simon Ree from the Tao Of Trading to give a talk to his community on ‘Mindfulness for Traders: Flow State, Emotional Control & Life Mastery.’
It was a pleasure to be on the show, I’ve done a lot of coaching with traders over the years, & this video captures some major aspects of the sort of mindful processes I go through with them in the sessions.
Even if you are not particularly interested in trading, there are a lot of mindful life-themes that you might enjoy. The section beneath the video gives you the option to just click on the segments you are interested in!
Here is a summary of the key subjects of the talk, with added links to related articles of mine.
Key principles covered include:
The McLaren Problem: why reaching your financial goals doesn’t automatically mean peace of mind, and the psychological work most successful traders never anticipated. Related article: Wanting what you like, or liking what happens?
Wu Wei (Non-Doing): when you’re in a hole, stop digging. When you stop forcing, you start noticing what actually opens up. Related article: Effortless effort – Making everything workable
Optimistic Stoicism: face the worst-case scenario. Inhabit it. Discover you can endure it. Then open the door to genuine optimism. Related article: Optimistic stoicism
“Could be good, could be bad”: the equanimity of the Chinese horse farmer. Probabilities, not certainties. Managing risk without catastrophising about outcomes.
Also the Wednesday & Saturday Inner smile meditations are also focused on energy and emotional stress transformation, you might enjoy these as well!
In the spirit of transformation,
Toby
Rats, meadows, & the World doing Itself (Stress tolerance & transformation)
Undergoing an expansion of capacity more gently
These last few weeks I have been going through a bit of a life change. I’ve felt an urge to take on a few new projects, and the combination of them, in tandem with my existing commitments has left me feeling somewhat dis-oriented and overwhelmed. The interesting thing about the overwhelm in this case is that I don’t feel ‘overwhelmed by the overwhelm’. What I mean by this is that, previously in a similar situation I would be incapacitated by the overwhelm, and then have to cut back on what I am doing in order to get back into balance. In this situation however, I feel more like what I am doing is something that I can do, and I just need to figure out how to relax into it, and my capacity will expand to the size of the challenge.
How to meditate when your mind is too busy, and you feel overwhelmed
I did a coaching session with a client last week, where he had been facing a similar challenge to me; too many things going on on all fronts. As he sat down to meditate, his mind just would not settle; things he had to do kept jumping into his mind. He was sometimes left feeling that he may as well have not meditated!
The positions we explored to help make his meditation time more productive were:
Noticing – That when we feel over-busy, our field of awareness can feel small, like we are stuck in our head. In our head are a bunch of ‘rats in a bag’ all bumping into each other and creating claustrophobia and friction.
Expanding – I suggested that, rather than trying to control his thoughts in this ‘small-mind’ environment, he could try making his awareness big. I mentioned the Zen expression ‘If you want to control your cow or your sheep, put it in a big meadow. To quote from a previous article on the subject: “When sitting with the thoughts in your mind, rather than trying to control them, stop them or ‘fix’ them, you simply make your mind and awareness bigger, like a large open meadow …. In such an environment an animal will tend to simply wonder off, find its place in the field and be content. So, when you make your awareness big, you can sit there watching the thoughts without being so bothered by them, and they in turn tend to gradually return to equilibrium, without you having to work that hard to control or fix them.”
I am the Word doing Itself – In addition to making our mind ‘big’ in this way, I suggested a non-dual perceptual shift. Rather than seeing himself as in the world, struggling to make his way amongst all of the busyness and activity, he should see himself as the ‘World doing Itself’. This perceptual shift means expanding your sense of your body-mind to be the Whole World, way beyond just your small body and individual life. Everything around you is you, you are the World, and the World is doing itself.
This third position keeps your awareness big, and all your little struggles feel correspondingly much more manageable. Because everything feels less stressful and more manageable, dealing with challenges in your life, on multiple-levels becomes much more manageable. We discover that we can take on more, whilst using less energy, and as a result we find our overall capacity increases.
My client liked these three positions, and we did a meditation on them before concluding. Of course, these three positions are equally useful for me in my life, as I expand into the next chapter and explore the limits of my own capacity!
“How can you start co-creating a greater sense of both safety & excitement in your life today?”
Dear Integral Meditators,
This week’s article looks at how to transform conflicting desires into complementary desires. Its a topic that comes up quite often in my Life-fullness life coaching, and in my executive coaching, and getting a hang for it can open up lots of positive possibilties.
This week’s Wednesday & Saturday class continue our inner-smile meditation, with the focus being on ‘Meditating on the lungs & on transforming sadness/depression, cultivating courage.’ All welcome!
In the spirit of integration,
Toby
The quest for both safety and excitement
Our contradictory desires
One of the challenges that we face to our sense of even-mindedness in life is that we have desires. Not just desires, but conflicting desires that actively seem to be pulling against each other!
We want safety and excitement in life
We want money but also plenty of free time
We want our body to look good, but don’t want to suffer from exertion
The list could go on, but I want to just double click on the safety and excitement and look at that as a primary example. One of our most feared emotions is, well, fear itself! Many of us feel uncomfortable about fear, and act to avoid it, and its subsidiaries, insecurity and anxiety. We desire safety, physically, psychologically, spiritually, and take out the element of risk, uncertainty, and danger (real or perceived). In an attempt to experience safety:
We choose to trade the hours of our day for work that pays a salary
We settle into a predictable romantic relationship
We stay with known patterns and activities in our life
The issue with this then becomes that our life feels boring, predictable, unexciting. This then blocks another common desire, the desire for excitement in life, for variety, change, growth, adventure! To get excitement in our life we have to create a degree of risk, an encountering of the unknown, a place where the result is not guaranteed.
If we aren’t careful, we find ourself locked between the horns of these two desires. Our desire for safety stifles the excitement we crave. The excitement we crave threatens our sense of safety and stability. Either way we are unhappy, or feel unhappy because it looks like a loose-loose paradigm, we feel condemned by the contradiction.
From contradictory to complementary – Both and, not either or
In my Life-fullness life coaching, and in my executive coaching, quite a lot of what I do is help people spot contradictions or conflicts in their life, and work on balancing them out, turning them into mutually enhancing polarities that can propel them toward a better experience. In the case of safety and excitement, I can create a greater sense of safety by:
Recognizing that I am physically safe almost all the time, and that the illusion of danger on the biological level is often merely an imbalance in my nervous system
I can create psychological safety by choosing to be mindful of my inner narrative, supporting myself, not attacking myself
I can articulate my vision of a greater intelligence in the universe that is benevolent toward me, thus learning to recognize and rest in a sense of spiritual safety
By cultivating in this way, I can feel more secure in life, satisfying my desire for safety. Having done this, I can then use that sense of safety to take more positive risk, and court excitement in my life! With my broader sense of safety, I can:
Be a bit more socially daring/entertaining, without being afraid of judgments
I can assert my wishes and desires for a fulfilling work life, not just staying silent and keeping on keeping on for fear of change
I can take up activities I am not yet good at but want to be, and not be so afraid of looking foolish as I do so
With my healthy sense of safety, I can cultivate MORE excitement in my life, and my desire for both becomes a mutually supporting, virtuous cycle. How can you start co-creating a greater sense of safety and excitement in your life today?
“What are the areas of your life that you tend to get stuck in self-alienation? How can you start using self-acceptance in these situations, strengthening your self-esteem in the process?”
Dear Integral Meditators,
In this week’s article I look at self-alienation as an object of mindful enquiry. In my view self-alienation is a common, pervasive issue for many people. If we can start to see it, we can start to deal with it! It is a topic that comes up with regularity in both my shadow coaching work, and my therpeutic mindfulness coaching.
One way of thinking about self esteem is as having two parts:
The part that considers ourself to be worthy of happiness and to have value
The part of us that feels capable and effective in the face of life and life’s challenges
If you have self-esteem as a foundational building block of your psychological experience of life, it will affect almost everything else in a positive way.
Self-alienation is
Self-Alienation happens whenever we turn away from, reject, or repress awareness of an aspect of ourself. We literally cut ourselves off from a part of who we are, and this part becomes a stranger to, or alienated from our conscious self. Nathaniel Branden wrote a book ‘The disowned self’ on the subject of all the different ways in which we alienate ourself from ourself. It mostly does not happen consciously, very few people wake up saying to themselves “Today I am going to practice self-alienation, and dis-own different parts of myself.” Nevertheless, without knowing it many of us do exactly this, without understanding that it is happening, or how we are doing it.
Why & how we create self-alienation when trying to create self-esteem
Let’s say I am deeply disappointed about not getting a job opportunity that I had interviewed for and had a good chance of getting. To protect myself from the difficult feelings and ‘lowness’ of feeling disappointed (and like a ‘loser’) I repress them, banishing them from my consciousness. By doing this I am trying to protect my self-esteem, but what I am really doing is alienating myself from the part of me that feels disappointed. This ‘disappointed self’ is the very part of me needing support and acknowledgement in that moment. Instead, I turn away from him and disown him. In this example my instinctive efforts to protect my self-esteem actually sabotage it, and make me weaker by cutting myself off from a part of me. Secondarily, and just as importantly, sub-consciously a part of me will know that I have done this, and will know that we have ‘betrayed ourself’ on some fundamental level. This further lowers our REAL self-esteem, but tragically it has been done to protect the very self-esteem that we are damaging.
Self-acceptance as a route to genuine self-esteem
Let us say that, in the face of my disappointment over the job opportunity, instead of repressing and alienating my disappointment I turn towards it, acknowledging and accepting it. I allow myself to feel and experience my emotions, expressing a degree of understanding and care toward the part of me in pain. By bringing into consciousness the wounded part, and choosing to accept and look after it I:
Increase my self-esteem by displaying both courage and competency in the face of a challenge
I keep my personality from being divided against itself, it remains interconnected and in integrity
I actually pass through the disappointment much more quickly, feeling much more resilient and adaptable as a result
Self-acceptance becomes a route to higher self-confidence and self-esteem, preventing the disastrous (and often unconscious) results of self-alienation and dis-association.
What are the areas of your life that you tend to get stuck in self-alienation? How can you start using self-acceptance in these situations, strengthening your self-esteem in the process?
“Rather than trying to focus on your breathing, simply try & experience the breathing doing itself, just BE the breathing. This often results in better focus, without having to try so hard.”
Dear Integral Meditators,
How much will power do you need to exert in meditation, and in life? This week’s article explores what happens when you take your ‘I’ out of your efforts to meditate, and instead let it ‘do itself’.
If you enjoy the article, we will be exploring these subjects in both the weekday (Tues&Weds) and Saturday sessions this week.
In the spirit of the singing door,
Toby
The swinging door – when the breathing does itself
“What we call ‘I’ is just a swinging door that moves when we inhale and when we exhale” – Shunryu Suzuki, from Zen Mind, Beginners Mind
Making your meditation focus more ergonomic
When we try and focus in meditation, or in a daily task, often we try in a particular way, where the feeling is ‘I’ am trying to focus on ‘it’. So as the ‘I’ in meditation we exert effort to focus on the breathing and cut out distractions as an act of will. You can try an interesting experiment; rather than trying to focus on your breathing, simply try and experience the breathing doing itself, just BE the breathing. You can be the breathing doing itself, or, alternatively ‘do’ the breathing doing itself. The proposition here is that our ‘I’ or the idea of our I is actually surplus to requirements, unnecessary. A side effect of this is that you may find that your attention to the breathing starts to become free-er, more relaxed, effortless. You find your focus becomes better quality, but you don’t have to try so hard.
The breathing as a swinging door
In Zen meditation the image of a swinging door is used; you focus on your breathing in the throat as if it were a swinging door; swinging in as you inhale, out as you exhale. With the technique of the breathing doing itself, you simply watch that swing in and swing out, attuning to the rhythm and as far as feels possible leaving your I out of the equation. Put another way you could relate to your ‘I’ as being nothing more than the swing-door of the breath.
Bringing your inner and outer worlds together
Continuing with the Zen image, you can then imagine the breath flowing from your outer world to your inner world as you breathe in, and from your inner world to your outer world as you breathe out. You can then develop this in the way described by Shunryu Suzuki in the same passage as the first quote at the top of the article:
“The inner world is limitless, and the outer world is also limitless. We say “inner world” and outer world,” but in reality there is just one whole world, our throat is like a swinging door. The air comes in and goes out like someone passing through a swinging door. If you think “I breathe,” the I is extra.”
Using the breathing in this way we can go from the breath moving from our “inner” to out “outer” world and back again, to simply the movement of the breath to and from a single world, a unified world. It is just the movement of the breath in a unified world, in a state of one-ness with the world, with no “I” necessary.
A heart union
I also like to do this practice down at the heart level. At the heart level we connect with our feeling nature, so the meditation takes on a more emotive dimension when I go down there. As I breathe in, I feel a soft light and energy expanding out into the world, as I breathe in I feel the light and life from the outer world flowing back into my heart. This then simply becomes the one-world, the one being expanding and contacting as I breathe. You can try it and see if you like it, or work with the traditional Zen techniques outlined above.
“The most important conversations you are having are the inner ones that you are having with yourself. Has what you have been saying today inwardly helped or hindered you?”
Dear Toby,
This week’s article looks at the inner conversation that we all have with ourselves, and how to start working with it mindfully…
A couple of free seasonal meditations coming up, the Winter solstice & new year online sessions, you are all invited!
In the spirit of self-talk,
Toby
Article: Mindfully talking, & not talking to yourself
Most of the time you are talking to yourself
For almost all people, there is an internal conversation we are having with ourself all the time. It is probably the most important conversation you are having because:
As mentioned, it is going on almost all the time, whether someone else is around or not
If it is working for you, it can be an almost constant source of support, encouragement, and resilience
If it is working against you, it is an almost constant source of discouragement, conflict, and weakness
You can’t escape it by running away. Unlike other people, the voice follows you wherever you go!
Noticing the conversation & making adjustments
Step one then could be to recognize the inner conversation and acknowledge its importance. This can then be a motivator to start working with it. To start working with it, we need to start to watch it and notice what’s going on as we talk to ourselves! As in all mindfulness practice just becoming aware of it, and starting to study it as an object of consciousness can be profoundly transformative. Based on your observation, you can then practice making small, skilful interventions in the conversation that make it more balanced and useful for you. For example, there is a tremendous difference between “You’ve just wasted half an hour procrastinating, you idiot, why do you always do that” And: “Its normal for me to take half an hour or so to settle into my work, lets see if I can make it just twenty minutes today!” It’s not rocket science, but it can make a big impact, particularly if we do it regularly, and start to get the compound effect going!
Learning to suspend the conversation
Part of the joy of meditation of course, is to learn that you can actually switch the conversation off, what a relief! Ways to begin the conversation suspension include:
Watching the spaces between the words in your inner conversation, dropping into them and gradually extending them
Placing short pauses between your inbreath and out breath, practising suspending the conversation just for those pauses
Exercises such as there help to build familiarity with the state of silence, even when our mind is still quite active
Being pro-active about the conversation
A final method that I can’t recommend highly enough is to activate your ‘inner life-coach’. This means you are taking charge of your inner conversation and saying things to yourself that are encouraging, supportive, balanced, and wise as you go through your day. Being pro-active about this conversation when I play sport is the single best and most consistent tool I have found to bring my best performance out. But, and more importantly, if life is the sport, and today, right now is ‘game day,’ then the time to activate this capacity within yourself is now! Sometimes it may feel like being pro-active like this takes a lot of work. But then its a lot more work living with a miserable, oppressive inner voice. So you may as well engage in the inner work that is taking you somewhere, rather than just being miserable and running round in circles!
Practicum
Set aside time to watch your inner conversation with a degree of curious objectivity
Practice making small skilful interventions
Practice ceasing the conversation for short periods
“What of you could re-model the story of your life into one you look forward to engaging with, that energises both your experience of the moment, & your visions for the future?”
Dear Integral Meditators,
This week’s article is something of a sequel to last week’s on creativity with our self-concept. What they both offer are creative ways of using mindful observation & imagination to live a fuller, more dynamic & vibrant life. If you enjoy the articles, then do have a look at the Bright shadow weekday & Saturday series, which explore this type of creative mindfulness extensively. They can be participated in in-person, online or via the recordings.
In the spirit of mindful storytelling,
Toby
Re-working the story you tell yourself (about yourself)
Your story
The story you tell yourself about you is one that emerges substantially from your self-concept, or your idea of who you are. Here is a quote from a past article of mine on ‘the story’:
“The heavy bag of our story: For many of us our ‘story’, our past, our history is something that we are carrying around with us all the time. Unless we are careful it can end up like a heavy bag that we never put down, sapping our energy. It can define what we believe we are capable of; filling out mind with what could have been, what we did wrong, what we wish we could change and so on…”
How your story turns up in your daily life
Often our story doesn’t turn up as a literal voice in our head narrating away. Most often it turns up more subtly in our body and daily actions. It turns up as instinctive feelings and emotions arising in response to the events of the day. If you listen to yourself talking to people, you will hear it in the things that you say, perhaps more importantly in the tone of voice that you use, and the body language that you adopt when saying it. So, what I am saying here is that, although our story is active within us all the time, mostly it turns up implicitly and unconsciously, without our being fully aware of it.
Listening to and observing your story
If you can start picking up cues about your story from your feelings, behavioral reactions and so forth, you can then start to find out the ‘narratives’ behind them. For example, if I notice that often avoid or shy away from confrontations, I can be curious about why that is. I can then enquire within myself about why that is. Listening to the responses I might get answers such as:
“I don’t like being disapproved of, it reminds me of being powerless in the face of stern adults when I was a child”
“I already often find life overwhelming, to confront would only make things worse”
“I hate feeling disliked and judged by others, to confront would risk experiencing this”
I’m afraid that I will be violent if I really express how I feel in a confrontational situation
Simply becoming aware of, accepting, and observing this inner narrative, making it into an object, rather than a subject of awareness can be a powerful step in itself toward becoming free from it.
Putting it down
Having recognised it and observed this aspect of our story, we can than practice dropping it for periods of time. We do this simply by entering into the present moment without the burden of our story, experiencing the freedom of becoming a person without a story, a man or woman of no rank.
Re-telling it
Putting your story down also gives you a space where you can introduce a new story, a new narrative that liberates you from the prison or limitations of the old one. It opens doors rather than closes them. For example, in the case of confrontation, you can look for people who are good with confrontation and model them in your approach. You can rework the wording of your narrative
“Disapproval from others isn’t such a big deal, in fact sometimes it can be a good sign…”
“Confrontations in the present are not linked to my past childhood experiences. I can choose a new way of asserting myself as an adult”
“I can use this experience to build confidence around non-violent ways to deal with confronters and bullies”
“We can learn to relate creatively to our self-concept in a way that opens doors, rather than closes them. The older we get, the more important this creative capacity becomes”
Dear Integral Meditators,
This week’s article explores a creative & psycho-dynamic meditation form. The stages of it form the basis of my upcoming weekday & Saturday series on ‘how to work with your bright shadow’. If you enjoy the article, then do consider attending one program, or even both of them!
In the spirit of opening to possibilities,
Toby
Change your idea, change yourself – (Five stages to) Working creatively with your self-concept
By the time you get to adulthood, your dominant sense of self, at least for most people, is an idea. This idea is called your ‘self-concept.’ It is a dynamic collection of conditioned beliefs, assimilated past experiences, habitual emotional states, absorbed philosophies, learned behaviour and so on that you identify as ‘me’.
“I am an extrovert”/introvert
“I am an Asian/European/African and therefore I can/can’t….”
“I’m an optimist/pessimist”
“I am good at/not good at…”
You get the idea. Your self-concept is just an idea of who you are, but it is an idea that you are completely or at least very closely identified with. It defines most of how you turn up, how you behave and what you feel yourself to be capable of. Furthermore, your self-concept has two parts, conscious and unconscious. The conscious part of yourself concept is your self-image. The unconscious part is the part that is not acceptable to your self-image, and that you repress and reject. Any part of your self-concept that you don’t like or feel threatened by, you can push into your unconscious, where it becomes a part of your shadow, or dis-owned self.
What I outline below is a way of working creatively with your self-concept, to open possibilities, rather than close them. By doing so it becomes possible to relate to our idea of ourself in a way that opens doors, rather than closes them particularly, but not only as we find ourselves getting older.
For this work, it is a good idea to take a specific area of your life and self-concept, bearing it in mind as you work your way though the five stages below…
Step one, observing – noticing the narrative, conceptual and non-conceptual
Firstly, take the position of the observer in your field of awareness, and practice, observing, listening to and accepting this part of your self-concept, and your close identification with it. For example, if you are taking your idea of self-as-parent:
Notice the commentary within you about what a parent should or shouldn’t be, and how you are measuring up
Observe the emotional range coming up within you, and your judgements about those emotions
Accept whatever arises as fully as you can
At this stage I find working on accepting and observing with the qualities of curiosity, courage and care to be particularly useful.
Step two, dis-identifying – dropping the labels, badges, and roles
Secondly, practice putting down, or dis-identifying with all the labels, roles and badges that are involved in this part or aspect of your self-concept. Practice becoming a man or woman. A person of no-rank, no position in life. Practice just being a being, and enjoying the freedom of that space.
Step three, imagining – exploring new ideas of self-in-role
From your position as a person of no-rank, explore new ideas, and possibilities of yourself in the role you are working on (parenting, romantic partner, professional, etc…). Connect to new ideas and possibilities that you might integrate into this area of yourself in this role.
Step four encountering – meeting and communicating with your new self
Visualize the self that you have imagined in step three as a person in front of you. S/he looks very much like you, but embodies the qualities that you have been imagining. As you see this person in front of you, invite a communication. Ask them a question such as:
What are you asking of me right now?
How can I integrate you more fully into my daily life?
What is your perspective on this situation/problem that I am facing right now??
Have a chat and see what transpires!
Step five role-playing – developing yourself in your new role
Imagine the ‘self’ in front of you steps toward you. Imagine you step toward them. Another step and you step into each other, and merge. Experience yourself AS this newly imagined self, BE them.
Once you have finished the meditation, work on role-playing this new self into your daily life. Meet your challenges AS them, particularly with regard to the specific roles you identified in step 2 above.
“What are the ways in which I have been underestimating myself? And what is one small thing I can do today to grow into my strengths and true capability?”
Dear Integral Meditators,
This week’s article looks at different reasons that we repress our strengths, and invites awareness of how we might start to step into these hidden capacities within us. If you enjoy the article, then do check out the upcoming Tuesday & Wednesday series, as well as the Saturday Deep-dive sessions on bright shadow meditation practice starting mid-November.
Also, I have a Special coaching offer: 15% off of all 1:1 shadow coaching sessionswith Toby up until End November 2025. You can click the link for more details.
In the spirit of growing our capacity,
Toby
Why we may repress our strengths – six reasons
In shadow meditation we may hear quite a lot about why we would repress the ‘dark’ side of ourself, parts of us that we are afraid of or that we loathe. Look slightly deeper into shadow work and we start to see that we repress our strengths, good qualities, and talents equally strongly. Why is that? Here are six reasons:
They may cause us pain – for example if we open to the power of our compassion, it may make us ‘vulnerable’ to or overwhelmed by the sufferings of the world.
They are associated with our fears or perceived ‘bad’ qualities – For example we may associate our sense of personal power and leadership capability with being angry or dominating
We are simply unfamiliar with them – For example if we have a creative talent, but come from a non-creative family, it may be beyond our idea of what we think we can or could be
They run counter to our instincts or habits – For example if we are an introvert, but are potentially witty and entertaining, we may admire others with those skills, but not consider it something that we could be
We associate the quality with a negative figure from our past – For example we may repress our potential for emotional care due to having had a smothering mother
If we fully own and express this quality, we will stand out – or be mocked, or thought of as unconventional, or be judged in some way
From these six examples we start to see that it is very easy, and understandable to underestimate ourself and what we are capable. Sometimes it can be as scary or even scarier to open to how ‘big and bright’ we can be as it is to confront the dark monsters within. A further point that shadow work helps us to understand is that sometimes the dark shadows within us hides or conceal bright secrets. As with point 2 above, its easy to label something within us mistakenly, and unwittingly pay the price!
A short mindful question to conclude: What are the ways in which I have been underestimating myself? And what is one small thing I can do today to grow into my strengths and true capability?
Special coaching offer: 15% off of all 1:1 shadow coaching sessionswith Toby up until End November 2025
In a sentence: Shadow coaching shows you how to spot your shadow self. It offers practical and accessible methods for helping to release the energy within you that has been trapped in your shadow self, so that you can live your life at its fullest, deepest potential.
After beneath these are the details of four upcoming shadow workshops & meditation session series’ that I will be doing, starting with my ‘finding freedom from what holds you back‘ shadow workshop this Saturday 25th October.
There are also details of a special offer on my shadow coaching services.
As you may be aware, it was Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung who first coined the term ‘shadow’ as an aspect of their theories of the conscious and unconscious minds. They indicated the split that can occur between the two when parts of our personality/psychological self are repressed and banished to the unconscious mind, with the resulting phenomenon of the shadow self being a part of the result…read full article
Special coaching offer: 15% off of all 1:1 shadow coaching sessionswith Toby up until End November 2025
In a sentence: Shadow coaching shows you how to spot your shadow self. It offers practical and accessible methods for helping to release the energy within you that has been trapped in your shadow self, so that you can live your life at its fullest, deepest potential.
