Hello, my loves. Welcome back to Unf*ck Your Relationships.

This space is about unf*cking your relationships with all things…not just your romantic relationships. It’s about unf*cking your relationship with money, with love, with sex, with your friends, with partners…but most of all, more than anything, it’s about unf*cking your relationship with yourself.

And it all started with my signature program, The Connected Woman.

Happy Connected Woman Season!

I’ve been running this program since 2020, right around when COVID hit. And over the years, it has developed into a massive course for shadow work in relationships.

This course is about you connecting to you first and foremost—the romantic relationship is just a bonus on top of that.

Whether you’re coming into this program single, married, divorced, dating, or anything in between, transforming your current or future relationship with a partner into something healthy and fulfilling comes as a result of you connecting to you. And the vehicle that I use to get you there is embodied shadow work.

(If you have not gone through my free three-day course, Shadowhunter, I highly, highly, highly recommend that you do. It’s actually a prerequisite for The Connected Woman. It goes over what shadows are, what shadow work is, why it’s important, etcetera.)

But for today, I’ll just give you a quick rundown:

Shadow Work Basics

Shadow work, for me, is the process of finding the parts of ourselves that we repress, shame, and/or deny. It is a process of self-inquiry, contemplation, and embodiment of restoring those parts of ourselves so we can achieve wholeness.

When we don’t do that, we end up looking for ourselves in another person.  But what happens is we end up attracting partners who reflect our shadows back to us so that we can restore wholeness. It’s like we get to meet a part of ourselves through another.

For example, if you have a tendency to be very anxious in relationships—you have anxious attachment and you have a tendency to attract avoidant partners—what’s actually going on is that you are getting to meet your own avoidance through another person. Same thing if you fall more avoidant and attract very anxious partners—you’re meeting your anxiety in another person.

So before we can have a secure, healthy relationship, we have to do the shadow work to integrate those pieces of ourselves into a whole.

Why The Focus on Embodiment?

With that said, here’s why I specifically focus on embodied shadow work.

When I first started doing the work, including shadow work, I started developing this slight superiority complex. I got all holier than thou because I was “doing the work” and my partners weren’t.

 Upon reflection, I actually wasn’t doing much work. I was doing courses. I was reading books. I was listening to podcasts. But I wasn’t embodying anything. I had the knowledge, but when push came to shove, I was incredibly emotionally unintelligent in relationships.

I had this feeling that I’m sure many of you resonate with: “I’m doing all the things. I’m doing the work. I’m reading the books. I’m listening to the podcasts. Why do I keep attracting the same fucking person? I don’t get it.”

I’m going to be completely honest with you: it wasn’t until I met my current partner, who is the most emotionally available man that I have ever been with, that made me realize up until then, I’d had a vested interest  in being with someone who was very cut off from their emotions, because then I didn’t have to connect with my emotions.

As long as my partner was emotionally unavailable, I didn’t have to be vulnerable. I didn’t have to experience or lean into emotional intimacy. I got to hide behind being sexy and being fun…and I also got to hide behind the fact that I was “doing the work.” I was doing shadow work. I was taking courses. I was a successful coach who’d done all the things. What the fuck was my partner doing?

Well, my current partner is also a coach. He doesn’t do shadow work, but we both help people restore wholeness within themselves. So it wasn’t until I met him that I was confronted with the fact that I was actually incredibly avoidant.

Once I was with someone who was secure.  I no longer got to experience my avoidance through another person. I had to take ownership for my own avoidance.

Embodiment vs Intellectualization

All of that to say, the reason I specify embodied shadow work is because the knowledge alone is not enough. I had all the knowledge about shadow work—it still didn’t do shit until I embodied that knowledge and alchemized it into wisdom.

Many, many people teach shadow work these days—which is fantastic, because I really believe it is the greatest tool for relationships, business, your relationship to money, your relationship with your body, etcetera. It’s the tits. But what I often see is people teaching it on an intellectual level.

It’s great for you to understand shadow work. But if you don’t then carry that understanding into the body, it’s just knowledge. It’s not wisdom.

It’s great for you to know on an intellectual level that your partner is reflecting your avoidance. But then what do you do?

If we were working together, I would ask you how that feels in your body. But we would be working on it from sensation-based language, not evaluative language.

If I were to ask you, “You’ve recognized your own avoidance. How do you feel?” then evaluative language would say, “I’m embarrassed. I feel ashamed.”

But those are not sensations—those are feelings. Those are things you’ve identified by reading the signs your body is giving you. We want to lean a different way.

Sensation-based language would be, “I feel a lump in my throat. I feel like it’s difficult to swallow. My breath is very shallow and it’s up in my chest. I can feel contraction in my belly. My whole pelvic floor feels tense. My back and my shoulders want to hunch forward. I feel like I want to get smaller.

People really tend to struggle with this. Because yes, you’re feeling embarrassment, but by describing it that way instead of focusing on the sensations, it’s still intellectualizing  the sensations.

The reason this is so important is because it’s difficult to change a behavior solely from the mind.

My slogan is “Clock it, own it, clean it up, repeat.” Clock your behavior, own it and take responsibility for it, then clean it up by choosing a different behavior.

But here’s the thing: people will take that and intellectualize it. They’ll say, “Okay, cool. I’m I’m just going to change my behavior.” But without attuning to the sensations in your body when that thing is happening, it’s difficult to recognize when and how to change the behavior.

If you’re being triggered by your partner and they’re hitting on a core wound of yours, most people tend to go into telling themselves a story about it. “I’m enraged. I’m scared. I’m freaking out. I want to run.”

But what we need to do is connect to the sensations. Here’s an example:

When I am full of rage, I get this rush of heat through my heart, spreading out to my hands. Everything in my body starts to get tense. I feel like I need to do something with my body.

In the past, this has presented with me being very, very cutting with my words, because there’s so much tension in my body that I just want to release it by snapping. That’s a fight response.

If you have a flight response, it might be more like, “Oh my god, I have to get the fuck out of here. I need to leave.” And you end up fleeing the situation.

You could even go into a freeze response and you shut down; it feels like you’re immobilized and you can’t speak.

By doing embodied shadow work, we start to connect with these pieces of ourselves. We connect with the sensations. So now, when I feel that sensation of heat rushing through my body, I don’t have to tell a story about it. I can connect the sensations instead and go, “Okay. I know what’s on the other side of this. I know that if I continue down this path, if I don’t allow myself to feel it, if I deny this part of me that is angry, it’s going to end in an explosion. But if I actually acknowledge the anger and acknowledge the trigger, if I sit with it, that explosion won’t happen.”

I teach you how to be with the sensation, because that’s all it is: a sensation. That’s all you’re afraid of.

When we are afraid of abandonment, abandonment is just a sensation. It’s a story that’s creating sensation in the body.

People will spend years going to therapy and intellectualizing these feelings and trying to identify where they came from. But the truth is…it doesn’t matter where the wound was created. If it comes to you, that can be valuable information. But it is far more beneficial and healing for us to learn how to change the behavior, how to integrate these pieces of ourselves, and learn how to restore wholeness.

Join The Connected Woman!

That is really the premise of the work that I do. Whether you’re learning from my podcast, you’re in my programs, you’re learning from me on TikTok or Instagram or whatever it is, I want you to feel so fucking whole within yourself.

When you feel whole within yourself, your relationships thrive, your friendships thrive, your business thrives, your bank account thrives, your health thrives, etcetera, because you’re not looking outside of yourself for someone to complete you or something to fulfill you. And I’m speaking from experience.

But the knowledge isn’t enough. You need to embody this shit, and embodied shadow work is the way to go.

Do the Connected Woman. I’d love to have you. We’re going to start the calls in October, but there’s some pre-work for you to get to…and as always, the price increases the closer we get to the start date. So the earlier the better!

WORK WITH MICHELLE: 

Join THE CONNECTED WOMAN, a shadow-work course for women who want to go from feeling anxious AF about their love lives to feeling confident, secure and having unfuckwithable self-worth: https://michellepanning.com/the-connected-woman

Join The EXPERIENCE, a year-long mentorship for the woman who wants to play in the frequency of big love, epic sex and mind-blowing relationships with men…and herself: https://michellepanning.com/the-experience 

Take my FREE 3-day shadow work course, SHADOW HUNTER: https://michellepanning.thrivecart.com/shadow-hunter/

CONNECT WITH MICHELLE:

Instagram: http://www.instagram.com/michellepanning

Website: http://www.michellepanning.com