Shadow Work 🤝 Co-Living

How do they relate? Some thoughts.

I recently posted this tweet.

Alex Wagner (17/100 newsletters) @alexdw5

What is the most valuable inner work/shadow work you've done, and why?

It was because of the next two tweets.

desirepaths @desirepaths_

@alexdw5

❤️‍🔥love in the wilderless @the_wilderless

community is a function of shadow

desirepaths @desirepaths_

@alexdw5 and before you start, do some inner work to try to truly understand where this dream comes from. In my experience, many people who are interested in these ideas, intentional communities, etc, are seeking alternative or new notions of home, village, family

The previous tweet was a response to this tweet, asking “If you were going to buy land with your friends, how would you do it?”

So how do you do the inner work?

I had a short conversation with a Twitter mutual where they shared their story of doing years of inner work and finally making it to the other side, where a positive shift I happened.

Their account is locked, so I won’t post those tweets here, but one thing that seems true about doing inner work is that:

You have to make a commitment to doing it daily, and it will take years to do the work.

I guess what I’m realizing, is that pursuing my dream of joining or starting an intentional community won’t necessarily solve my loneliness problem.

However, I do not like living in NYC, and want to move. I want to live somewhere with one or more preexisting communities that I can plug into.

I’m planning on coming back to NYC after spending two months at CABIN. Really, I just need a “minimum viable” place that provides me enough community and stability to do this inner work.

I want to buy a van to keep costs down, and focus on my writing.

I’m still figuring it out.

This thread below resonated with me. I think because it’s really helpful to hear someone’s story about doing the inner work. It helps to see the paths others have traveled to process these things and integrate their shadow.

I’ll post the first few tweets in the thread and end this post here.

Gas Station Barbie @DarbraDawn

This is long but—I started tugging on something early in the summer that felt rooted really deep. I could feel it more clearly at the periphery in fights with my SO, fights with my family, any moment of great tension/fear. It lurked on the edge of all my thought processes.

Alex Wagner (17/100 newsletters) @alexdw5

What is the most valuable inner work/shadow work you've done, and why?

Gas Station Barbie @DarbraDawn

I think people who have been trying to actively eat their shadow can kinda tell once they start tugging if it’s a big one or a little one. I knew I was onto something really big, like a load-bearing beam. That’s always spooky. I could feel myself tensing just acknowledging it.

Gas Station Barbie @DarbraDawn

Eventually I sat in this gross and expectant place long enough that what I was looking for showed up: I wanted certainty, I wanted a surefire answer. I was asking any authority I could find— my mother, astrology, narrativization, you name it— and trying to figure out who I was