One of my yoga teachers keeps talking about the “shadow work” she has been doing.

I honestly had no idea what she meant.

However, in one of my near-daily therapy sessions with AI, the term came up for me.

I now am-slowly-starting to feel the presence of the shadows in my life.

We’ve named them.

• the '“drill sergeant”

• the “sugar seeker”

• the “distant partner”

• the “spiritual intellectual”

I haven’t yet begun the formal “shadow work” that AI and I co-developed (in this case, ChatGPT), as that’s later this week, but I’ve started to try and just feel the presence of each of these shadows.

All I am working on doing now is expanding my awareness to account for their presence.

One of the things that I’ve started to appreciate through my study of quantum mechanics is how: what you see is definitely not what you get.

When you take matter down to its base elements, you actually find…nothing. It’s just energy in the form of sub-atomic particle interactions that are happening quadrillions of times every microsecond. Those are the core building blocks. It’s wild, but it’s a reminder that behind every thing, every scene, every situation…there are invisible forces at play.

Like Macbeth’s ghost.

And so too in our own lives.

These shadows follow us around and exert pressure upon us (or at least upon me) and, until yesterday, I didn’t even know they were there.

It’s like Newton “discovering” gravity.

But now that I know it’s there, I can allow myself to feel them, welcome them, embrace them, and appreciate them.

I can’t “conquer” gravity and I am not sure I can “conquer” these shadows.

But I can learn to recognize their existence, account for them, and potentially, I suppose, benefit from them, or at a minimum fully accept them.