Integrating the Shadow:
a 12-Month Journey to Meet the Unconscious
Do you want to truly integrate the world of resonance and unconscious contracts? To be able to bring compassion, understanding, support and radical self-love to the hardest places within us to love? Join Sarah for an on-going exploration of this life-changing work throughout 2023.
Integrating the Shadow:
A 12-Month Journey to Meet the Unconscious
What do we do when we realize that our self-compassion is lacking, we take actions that we don’t want to take, and that our judgments of ourselves are not actually helping us, but are harming us? We all live in and out of our own shadow – what can we do to make ourselves more conscious and to bring more integration and wholeness into our lives?
The Shadow is the part of ourselves that we don’t see easily unless we turn our heads to look at it. It’s the part of ourselves that is responsible for our contempt, bitterness, envy, pettiness, jealousy, implicit bias and arrogance. Many people live without ever knowing that they have a shadow, let alone knowing that we can bring compassion, understanding, support and a radical self-love to these experiences and to themself, no matter how they feel. When we begin to understand that these experiences are an essential part of being a human being and when we do bring this compassion to ourselves, our lives and hearts soften, we create connections across differences, we become more aware of how much we love the people in our lives, and we begin to enjoy the moment.
In this 29-week beyond-the-book course, we will look at the different kinds of unconscious contracts we make in the aftermath of difficult experiences in an attempt to keep ourselves safe, keep our sense of belonging, and save those we love the most, in the context of the shadow. Join Sarah Peyton for a year of radical, life-changing, self-love and love of others.
Participants will have opportunities to work as a group and in smaller breakout groups to begin to name, disentangle and release the unknown agreements we have with ourselves which keep us from being our fullest, most liberated, selves.
Sign up for each chapter individually, or sign up for all sessions for a discount. Plus get access to all course bonuses, including access to Sarah’s monthly webinars, optional practice groups & resonance partner practice, a bonus Q&A session and the closing session!
CEUs are available for this course
This Online Series Includes Twenty-Nine Sessions:
Meeting for 29 sessions on Thursdays, 10:30am-12:00pm Pacific time, December 8, 2022 – November 2, 2023.
convert to your time zone here
Integrating the Shadow: Chapter 1 – Are You Willing to Like Your Shadow?
These two classes investigate the blocks to self-kindness that arise from unconscious contracts against the humanness of having a shadow, and their effect on the Default Mode Network. We will spend some time with resonant language, noticing what it’s like to use it with the critical voice of the DMN as regards self-judgments, and introducing the Resonating Self-Witness. We will take a look at the way unconscious contract work can reveal the roots of self-criticism, and clear some objections to addressing ourselves with affection
Integrating the Shadow: Chapter 2 – The Shadow is Not Truth, it’s Trauma – and it’s Life Energy
In these two classes, we bring our learning about unconscious contracts as a tool into relationship with the resonance skill of time travel empathy, demonstrating the integration of these two approaches to healing. We will explore the connection between trauma and contracts against having a shadow, and continue our investigation of the importance of resonant language to loosen the amygdala’s hold on memory, with a comparison of resonance and reassurance.
Integrating the Shadow: Chapter 3 – From Self-Sabotage to Self-Care, Where We Go Astray
These two classes address unconscious contracts that have negative results on our daily lives in simple ways. We learn about the instrumental brain and the relational brain and their relationship with the shadow. Links between the shadow and self-sabotage will be explored. Body sensations give us our resonant skills practice for this chapter.
Integrating the Shadow: Chapter 4 – Healing Shame and Schadenfreude
These two classes introduce Beatrice Beebe’s work in detail, integrating it with Jaak Panksepp’s Circuits of Emotion and Motivation, which help us understand the nervous system’s drop into shame when we inadvertently break a contract. We learn about some of the most common contracts people make with themselves to prevent shame and disappointment from ever happening again. We’ll also learn why some take pleasure from others’ pain. We discover the interrelationship of shame and shadow, how they fuel one another, and we further our resonance practice with metaphors.
Integrating the Shadow: Chapter 5 – Soothing Anxiety and Addressing Pettiness
These two classes explore the connection between anxiety and the emotional circuits of both FEAR and PANIC/GRIEF, and how anxiety can be rooted in the non-acceptance of our shadows. We will start a practice of embracing our pettiness and learning to be bigger than it, and how to bring affection to the experience of self-acceptance. We will experience resonance remedies for anxiety. We will also work with the resonance skill of impossible dream guesses which can support the movement out of anxiety and into self-supported calm.
Integrating the Shadow: Chapter 6 – How Anger is Different from Predatory Aggression, and How to Have Self-Compassion With Both
In these two classes, we trace the development of contracts that can be made during traumatic moments to either never be angry, or to punish ourselves or others for getting angry, and learn how to release them. We also learn that when others’ actions cause us to break our own contracts, this can bring about rage. We connect our work with Stephen Porges’ Polyvagal Theory and practice resonant language skills to support self-connection in sympathetic activation.
Integrating the Shadow: Chapter 7 – Self-Warmth for Dissociation and Thoughtlessness
In these two classes, we continue integrating Porges’ Polyvagal Theory with the unconscious contract tool to uncover and transform patterns of dissociation, including contracts that keep us from fully entering or inhabiting the body, both in terms of classic dissociation and in terms of the left shift into the instrumental brain and out of relationship. We look at the contracts we make not to feel anything, or to hide from real participation in life. We bring our resonance skills to support exquisite gentleness in the face of immobilization, and track the journey from collapse to immobilization without fear, and we learn to rejoin the real life of relationships.
Integrating the Shadow: Chapter 8 – Claiming Secure Attachment Even When We’ve Done Things We Wish We Hadn’t
These three classes take us into the contracts we make to maximize well-being in response to our parents’ ways of being with us and being with emotion. These contracts are our foundations for every bit of relating that we do. As well as reviewing the basics of attachment, we discover a resonant language practice that holds our connection patterns as “just right,” which is a radical move into secure attachment with ourselves, no matter what contracts we are dealing with, and no matter how much regret we have for our pasts. We look at avoidant patterns and contracts, we have the delight of looking at ambivalent patterns and contracts with special guest teacher Jaya Manske, and we enjoy the signs of the movement into secure attachment.
Integrating the Shadow: Chapter 9 – Away From Hurt, Disgust and Contempt
The use of self-hate, disgust and contempt to manage emotions is an aftereffect of traumatic attachment, and so makes sense in the context of our lives. As we understand this, the root causes of the contracts made in disorganized attachment start to become clear. We learn how we can turn predatory aggression against ourselves and others as a distortion of our SEEKING circuit, and this illuminates an avenue for work. The dissolution of trauma-based contracts is supportive in working with outbreaks of violence and recurrent fights in partnership and parenting. The work we have done to this point in this series supports us in looking at these knots of trauma, and untangling them to move us toward well-being.
Integrating the Shadow: Chapter 10 – The Path Out of Depression: Understanding “Laziness”
Contracts that limit our life energy can lead to hopelessness and depression. Without an understanding of the nervous system, people often think these conditions are “laziness.” When this is combined with negative self-talk, it can be toxic. The release of these contracts in these two classes supports the reclamation of movement and agency. Both contract work and resonance skills are needed in this life-changing journey. We also take a look at the attachment contracts that can prevent connection in order to support a movement away from the life-long loneliness that can also be a contributing factor in depression.
Integrating the Shadow: Chapter 11 – Working with Layers of Addiction, Greed and Hunger
It has taken a long time for the world to begin to understand that “greed” and addictions are related to trauma. Our deepest hungers are for relationship, and when we can’t have relationship, our emotional starvation leads us to our addictions. Just as our brain makes contracts with us to keep us safe, our brains can be said to make contracts with us on behalf of our addictions. These two classes explore what happens to us in relationship to our addictions and addictive strategies when these contracts are dissolved. Resonance skills will be practiced to support self-compassion during this process.
Integrating the Shadow: Chapter 12 – Reclaiming Sexuality and Self from the Definitions of Shadow
The delight of the SEXUALITY circuit is that it carries us from childhood into our full individuation, maturity and authenticity. No matter the level of our sexual interest or activity, this circuit is important for well-being and growth. There are many shadow entanglements that stop us from becoming who we really are, and many of them are connected with our sexuality and our emergence. The contracts that diminish this circuit diminish our life energy and our sense of potential contribution. We will work with these contracts in these two classes and practice supportive resonance skills to help with both personal issues and internalized oppression from the way that society judges and ranks bodies in terms of mattering.
Integrating the Shadow: Chapter 13 – Reclaiming Joy with the Inclusion of the Shadow
In these two classes examining the final chapter of the workbook, we will look at what supports the development and expression of joy, and how the experience of joy becomes deeper and richer when we fully accept and have affection for our shadow selves. We will learn how joy is a dyadic experience (we co-create joy!) and that contracts that block trust and connection also stop joy from happening. We will dissolve these contracts and celebrate and practice the resonance skills which support the feeling and expression of joy. These classes include a look at false Bodhisattva vows, contracts made when children first perceive that there is pain in the world and commit their whole beings to a better world, no matter the cost. Commitment and contribution are very important and life-serving when they do not cost us everything.
“We can only transform those patterns we are conscious of. Unconscious contract work helps us bring the hidden, subconscious programming into the light so we can truly shift our ways of being.” – Sarah Peyton
This Course Comes with 4 Free Bonuses:
Access to Sarah’s Neuroscience and Resonance Webinar Series for the duration of the Workbook Study (December 2022 – October 2023).
Each month Sarah offers a thematic, research-based webinar about relational neuroscience and how to use empathy and resonance and other trauma-informed processes to heal.
Each webinar is approximately 90 minutes, including slides and presentation, then plenty of room for questions. Registration includes free access to Sarah’s Neuroscience and Resonance Webinar Series for the duration of the Workbook Study (December 2022 – October 2023). A $200 value. Topics will be: December 13, 2021 – Sarah’s 2021 Process Work Exploration January 2023 – October 2023 – 2023 Monthly Neuroscience and Resonance Webinars
Support to practice outside of sessions
Opportunities to work in small practice groups and/or with resonance partners outside of class times to develop your resonance skills, learn and transform in community.
Practice groups will be available for those who join from the start of the series and sign up to be included from the start (deadlines and limitations apply).
Assistant Support during classes
Sarah is delighted to be joined by a team of assistants who have been studying this material for years (in many cases 10 years or longer!) and/or are certified resonance practitioners.
Assistants are available during class time to support you when you need it the most. Sometimes this material can be unexpectedly deep and having accompaniment changes everything!
TWO bonus sessions!
A Bonus Q&A Session with Sarah where you can have an extra opportunity to ask any burning questions you have about resonance, contract work, neuroscience or anything you’ve been wondering about and a Closing Session for those on the year-long journey.
What is Integrating the Shadow All About?
“Practicing resonant language alone is okay, but working with resonance partners is what truly accelerates our practice into a new way of being. We are not meant to heal alone, but in community.” – Sarah Peyton
What People Say About Studying With Sarah
“I have studied with Sarah in a group setting for 4 years. From the very beginning, I experienced whole-heart and whole-brain learning; a holistic-mind/body/brain/spirit where no part of me was left behind. Sarah models depth empathy every time she teaches-for herself, and for every participant. This deep limbic resonance is an emotionally corrective experience which births belonging, peace, and allowance to be oneself.”
~ Sara Kammerzell, M. Ed
More Details
What happens when we find the gifts that relational neuroscience reveals about the emotions we most often try to ignore, push down or pretend we don’t have? What happens when we understand the impact of trauma on our brains? What happens when we release some of the contracts that keep us tied in knots?
During this extended beyond-the-workbook exploration of the Your Resonant Self Workbook, each of the 13 chapters will be covered in two classes, integrating the shadow (the parts of us ourselves that are hardest to see, and hardest to love) in a series of twenty-seven 90-minute classes plus a bonus Q&A session and closing session for a total of 29 sessions. Each class will include lectures, Q&A, discussion of exercises, demos, and personal explorations of the abilities and growth that make our brains good and comfortable places to be. This journey will take us from December of 2022 through to October of 2023, and move participants from removing the blocks to self-warmth to claiming joy, and cultivating radical self-love. The class series also includes the monthly Neuroscience and Resonance webinars during the duration of the course.
As a participant you will:
- Take an extended journey through the brain’s networks and systems
- Integrate shadow work while exploring the fundamental concepts of resonance through the YRS Workbook
- Learn in-depth in community
- Welcome the parts of yourself you’ve never known how to love
- Release the contracts that separate us from self and self-compassion
- Know yourself more fully and compassionately
- Allow for new levels of complexity and paradox in this experience of being human
- Infuse self-care into your everyday life
- Delight in new freedom and access to joy
- Transform your brain into a more comfortable and kind place to live
When?
The 29 classes in this series will take place on Thursdays, 10:30am-12:00pm Pacific time. See above for a detailed list of dates and what you’ll explore during each week of the series, plus a bonus Q&A session on July 13, 2023 and a closing session on November 2, 2023. convert to your time zone here
Classes will meet online via zoom. Each class will be recorded for viewing in different time zones and for review, and for sale after the series is over.
Cost and How to Register
$750
The course can be purchased as a whole for $750, or each individual two-class series can be purchased separately for $70 ($95 for chapter 8, which is 3 sessions long)
We open for inquiry about partial scholarships on December 1, 2022. Purchase of this class does not include the purchase of the Your Resonant Self Workbook. Please purchase the book separately.
We are delighted to offer up to 42 CEU hours for psychologists and social workers for this course ($30 additional fee). Chicago Counseling Associates has been approved by the Illinois Department of Financial and Professional Regulation to sponsor continuing education for social workers and psychologists. CCA maintains responsibility for this program and its content. Live attendance is required to receive CEUs.
*PLEASE NOTE:
- In order to secure the early-bird rates, you must register and pay by the date above.
- Your tuition payment is non-refundable and transferrable.
- Some partial scholarships may be available after December 1. Please write to Sarah to inquire.
- The individual events that make up this series are available to purchase as stand-alone experiences, but signing up for the series allows you a much less expensive rate, and includes bonuses. Some bonuses are only available if you sign up within the first weeks of the course
- This work is not therapy and is not a substitute for therapy. If you have a sense that you would be destabilized by yourself or others speaking about difficult events, then this course may not be for you. While we hope that the processes and information that we share can be of use in your journey, we do not have the resources to support extreme psychological difficulties.
If you have questions, need a payment plan or need help deciding whether this series is right for you, please email [email protected].
About Sarah
Sarah Peyton, Certified Trainer of Nonviolent Communication and neuroscience educator, integrates brain science and the use of resonant language to heal personal and collective trauma with exquisite gentleness.
Sarah is a sought-after expert who brings neuroscience expertise together with depth work, self-compassion, and the transformative potential of language. She works with audiences internationally to create a compassionate understanding of the effects of relational trauma on the brain, and teaches people how words change and heal us.
Sarah teaches and lectures internationally and is the author of three books: Your Resonant Self: Guided Meditations and Exercises to Engage Your Brain’s Capacity for Healing, the companion Your Resonant Self Workbook: From Self-sabotage to Self-care, and Affirmations for Turbulent Times: Resonant Words to Soothe Body and Mind.
