Shadow Work Mindfulness Exercise

An exercise to learn more about yourself

I want to share a mindfulness exercise with you today and I’ll discuss my thoughts on a few of my own qualities.

List Your Best Qualities

Take some time to list things about yourself that other people would call great qualities. You can even ask people in your life what they consider your best qualities. List them out on paper.

Some of mine might include:

1. An ability to calm situations and people down.

2. Very logical (not prone to being very emotional or having emotional outbursts)

3. Independent - Capable of Taking Care of Oneself

You can list more than that. Consider making that list now before reading on.

List The Opposite of Your Best Qualities

Next, make a list of the opposite of those qualities from the first list. They should be the same amount of qualities. So mine would be:

1. Being a disruption, supposedly making other people’s days worse or increasing tensions.

2. Having emotional outbursts

3. Being emotionally or financially needy

Although my numbers 1 and 2 may have seemed like different issues, by looking at the opposite qualities, I can see they’re very similar.

The next step is to ask yourself if you have noticed a part of yourself (no matter how small) that may have fit the “negative” qualities. You may have rejected or disowned these parts of yourself because others disapproved of them when you were younger. Maybe people in your current life would highly disapprove of these qualities as well. Perhaps these are some of your very own “pet peeves!”

Do you think you ever appeared (to others) to embody these “negative” qualities? Even if you don’t think you had these “negative” qualities, in your early life, do you think someone perceived that you did?

I’ll discuss my results below.