Exploring the layers of conditioning that rise to the surface when we slow down and listen.
Shadow work fascinates me, but I’m always struck by how relentless it can feel when you actually meet yourself in those uncomfortable places. We talk about ego, conditioning, personality, but when you begin pulling threads that formed before you even understood language, you realise how deeply embedded these patterns are — and how hard they are to see until one day they surface and you can no longer unsee them.
The strange thing is, the realisation itself isn’t the hard part. Seeing a pattern clearly can almost feel like a moment of relief — a flash of truth. The journey is hard because once you begin this work, that’s it. You can’t unsee what you’ve seen. It’s like taking the red pill: the inner world starts revealing itself, layer by layer, and each layer brings its own emotional charge. These aren’t surface-level insights; they come with depth, history, and feeling. That’s what makes this path so intense — the steady unfolding of everything you’ve carried, everything that has shaped you, rising into awareness one piece at a time.
For me, the most confronting moments come when I realise that something I believed was “just who I am” might not be me at all. It might be something I absorbed so early in life that it became stitched into my identity before I had any awareness or choice in the matter.
We’re not born with these patterns.
We come in as a blank slate — open, receptive, unfiltered.
In those first years, we begin building the operating system we need to survive in the world. Everything around us becomes a code: the emotions in the room, the dynamics between adults, unspoken beliefs, the way our needs are met or not met. And these early experiences form the deepest, most fundamental patterns we carry.
This particular pattern took a long time to surface. I’d had small glimpses of it over the last couple of years, but it’s only in the last six months that it finally revealed itself fully. That’s the thing about this work — our environment is constantly giving us feedback. Our emotional state is shaped by that feedback, and the feedback is shaped by our behaviour, our conditioning, our patterns. It’s all connected.
People often talk about “the red pill” as a kind of awakening, but for me it’s far more subtle. It’s the noticing. It’s the moment you step out of the immersive emotional experience and ask:
What is actually driving this feeling? Where is this coming from?
Most of the time we’re inside the emotion, reacting from it, believing it’s the whole truth. But taking the red pill is that shift — the ability to stand slightly outside yourself and observe the pattern underneath. Some people call it waking up. For me, it’s the recognition that everything — and I mean everything — is programming. Some programming is obvious. Some is deeply hidden. But once you see it, you can’t unsee it.
It’s like finding the one domino that knocks down a whole chain of understanding. Or like sliding the missing piece into a mental Tetris game — suddenly all the layers rearrange themselves, and a part of your inner world finally makes sense.
I’ve also realised something else about this journey: most of us are far too busy to ever notice these hidden patterns. When life is full — caring for family, working, tending to household tasks, keeping up with friends, dealing with the day-to-day — there’s no space for deeper reflection. We stay in motion, and the noise of life drowns out the quieter truths within us.
To see these patterns, you often have to turn the noise down.
You need the kind of stillness that lets your inner world rise to the surface.
For me, that looks like quiet time, swimming in a loch, breathwork, meditation, walking in nature — moments where the mind softens enough for something deeper to be heard.
But here’s the uncomfortable part: sometimes we keep ourselves busy because we’re avoiding the work. The emotional work. The messy work. The work that asks us to meet the parts of ourselves we’d rather not see.
We busy our minds.
We busy our diaries.
We busy ourselves with other people’s problems.
All while quietly avoiding our own.
And yet, this is why the work matters. Because when we finally stop running from ourselves, when we create enough stillness to feel what’s underneath, the patterns begin to reveal their shape — and with that, the possibility of change.
Doing this work isn’t easy.
It’s uncomfortable. It’s confronting. It can be exhausting.
But each time a pattern reveals itself, something softens.
Something opens.
Something lets go.
And on the other side of that release is peace — a deeper, quieter sense of who I actually am beneath all the conditioning.
That’s what keeps me on this path.
Layer by layer, coming home to myself.
