Welcome to Tuff Love with Rob Kandell. The guest today is Kat from Afterlife Coach. She’s here to talk about the concept of your shadow, your darkness and the importance of loving it to be able to love others. To love the other you must love all parts of yourself and that includes the parts you don’t quite agree with and the skeletons in the corner.

In this episode, Kat and Rob discuss:

Kat’s story going from a stressed out, bipolar Disney executive to an apprentice shaman to afterlife coach and messenger

Her experiences with the psychotropic South American plant brew Ayahuasca and how the medicine helped her learn to love the parts of herself that are her shadow

Why lack of self-worth had her believing a white girl from Montanna couldn’t be a shaman

That shadow is just that part of us that is unconscious, and it’s also the space where the things that we don’t love about ourselves dwell. Anytime we react from anger, we’re coming from shadow. It’s essentially darkness.

We are taught in our culture for the most part to push shadow away and assume all of that is bad, that we’d rather not feel any of that and rather not even acknowledge we have that.

Why Kat believes there’s a Mother Theresa and a Hitler in all of us, and that the more we refuse to look at the Hitler, the more it has ownership and power over us.

How Kat helps educate people and shows them how to make friends with that shadow part of themselves by looking at the results and resistance in their life.

Any space of resistance creates more conflict with that energy which gives it power. If we have resistance to our anger and we push it down, it’s going to show up in our lives somewhere, whether it’s in our job, our relationship with ourselves or others. Somewhere, if not everywhere, in our lives, that resistance to shadow is going to be causing conflict, not creating the life that we want.

With anger, most of us do one of two things with that shadow energy. We either stuff it down and resist it, or we vent and blow up. Those are two sides of the same coin. Venting is not an honest feeling of it. It’s blaming somebody else, it’s defensiveness, it’s victim consciousness, it’s actually more shadow energy.

Instead, you flip that venting process, receive the anger, feel it and express it. That doesn’t come across as defensive or accusatory. You say ‘I feel angry, I’m feeling this’ and you open yourself up to the opportunity to feel and process it, and then it doesn’t get stuck. It’s allowed to move.

Emotions are energy in motion. If we’re doing it in a conscious way then we can take those shadow things that we feel are our flaws and make them part of the toolkit of the things that make us really strong.

What happened to Kat in her 2nd ceremony that was unusual, but was necessary to experience in order for her to change her life and heal.

When you’re on an airplane, they say in the event of a cabin crash, put on your own mask before helping others. Even though it feels selfish it’s actually the best thing that we can do for humanity.

The reason Kat needed to learn from experience rather than having people tell her that she needed to change

Kat’s perspective on the Westernization of Ayahuasca, why she is loyal to the tradition and why she believes our culture is in a dark night of the soul

You won’t do the medicine until the medicine calls you. Rob is a strong believer in that. Kat believes the medicine knows what it’s doing, it’s the medicine’s business.

The process is either through inflation or contraction. We learn our lessons from stepping into ego. While Kat is choosy in advising people where to sit, she recognizes that there are people who are in their own ego and she tries not to judge that.

Why Kat decided to stop taking the medicine and how the new call was the toughest surrender y...