You’re fighting yourself, and your anguish tastes like ashes. I see you shooting at your shadow, wrestling with your worries, and it’s starting to feel like shadow work is a war against yourself?
Your inner world is conflict, more combat than curiosity.
Sure, you remember what you’ve read sometimes - you start the process of calm and steady inquiry towards a shadow part or shadow behaviour that troubles you - and sure, it works, for a while: you succeed in your sincere attempt at auto-educational, auto-therapeutic inner work and how wonderful to feel the reward of fear subsiding into a respite from the battle within…
But the pain always returns, doesn’t it?
Minutes, hours, days, or weeks - it doesn’t matter.
Another wave of doubt, another wave of confusion.
Another wave of shame, another wave of self criticism.
Your shadows are marching, your shadows are charging, and I’m watching you bolster yourself against the sweat and strain of confronting your bruised, rejected, and undiscovered self time after time.
I see you in the mud.
You’re fighting in the trenches.
Firing from your foxhole, screaming at your shadows, you’re trapped in a defensive war as if your inner children were an undead army advancing from the darkness of your yet-to-be reconciled family trauma.
Screaming. Searching. Cowering.
You’ll do what it takes to survive.
My language is war-like in this post because this is what I’m seeing, it’s literally what I’ve been seeing because I’ve just woken from an onslaught of fractured sleep and half-dazed active imagination.
I’m writing these words in the middle of the night on five hours sleep after a series of back-to-back dreams on the theme of war and self confrontation, and the truth is that they didn’t feel like my own dreams - they felt like they were your dreams.
I wasn’t the one fighting in the foxholes, I was the officer moving between and behind the trenches. It wasn’t my fight - these ‘enemies’ didn’t feel like my ‘enemies’ - but I saw you struggling, and I tried my best to offer guidance and encouragement about how to best defeat your shadow self.
It’s true that I know what you need for victory, but it’s also true that you’re going about your shadow work in the wrong way.
The victory you seek cannot be found in the filth of the churned earth.
Your victory will be drafted through discussion, and your serenity will be secured in the citadel of your soul.
It is by diplomacy, not violence, that you will reconcile your internal conflicts and find peace within yourself.
Truthfully, I had forgotten what it feels like to be at war with myself.
I no longer suffer from the crippling addictions and shame attacks of my youth. I have a general sense of clarity about who I am and my role in the world, but I wasn’t born this way.
It took hundreds of books, dozens of authors read, re-read and patiently applied, and a series of patient and practical shifts towards sobriety and consciousness in order to stop fighting myself.
Ninety-five percent of the time, I’m not at war with myself - I used to suffer with angst, depression and apathy but it seems that my inner work ultimately worked - the majority of my ‘problems’ are appropriately on the outside rather than inappropriately on the inside in 2025 - but my heart remembers your pain, and this recent series of combat dreams reminds me that the collective unconscious is defined by a feeling of conflict, not a feeling of play.
In summary: Jordan might be safe and playful, but most people aren’t, and it shames me to forget that shadow pain is the default state for most people, even aspirational individuals.
It feels like hell. It’s so unnecessary.
Maybe it’s not gunshots and explosions, maybe your style of self conflict is sabotage and espionage, little words of self criticism that erode your confidence in subtle poison, or maybe you want to dismiss my perhaps low vibe use of warring metaphors, but I am nonetheless reminded that damage and conflict is the defining tone of how most people relate to themselves… they’re always at war with themselves, but it seems that they’ve learned to keep it secret.
Violence is the texture, and I see my people suffering upon themselves.
You’re struggling with shame, addiction, confusion, and all manner of inner conflicts.
My client’s, students and audience don't need saving - I can’t do that for them and I’m not trying to win their battles either - but we appear to have found ourselves trapped in an internal war, and I see no alternative but to fight at your side until you grow tired of the violence.
Maybe one day you will be ready for peace talks.
In the meantime, if you insist on internal conflict, then I will teach you how to fire your weapon and ruthlessly destroy the enemy with psychological tricks and tactics… I will teach you how to wage psychological warfare until the sobering moment when you recognise your own eyes reflected in the shadow you despise.
You were fighting yourself the whole damn time.
When will the white dove fly?
Jordan
P.S. These photos are significant: this is the car where Archduke Franz Ferdinand was assassinated in June, 1914, a monumental event which triggered the eruption of World War 1. You can see the famous bullet hole in the final photo. I stood in this room in Vienna’s military museum for a long time, reflecting on the immensity of history, and the violence we do to ourselves and others…
Jordan Thornton - Inner Work
You’re fighting yourself, and your anguish tastes like ashes. I see you shooting at your shadow, wrestling with your worries, and it’s starting to feel like shadow work is a war against yourself?
Your inner world is conflict, more combat than curiosity.
Sure, you remember what you’ve read sometimes - you start the process of calm and steady inquiry towards a shadow part or shadow behaviour that troubles you - and sure, it works, for a while: you succeed in your sincere attempt at auto-educational, auto-therapeutic inner work and how wonderful to feel the reward of fear subsiding into a respite from the battle within…
But the pain always returns, doesn’t it?
Minutes, hours, days, or weeks - it doesn’t matter.
Another wave of doubt, another wave of confusion.
Another wave of shame, another wave of self criticism.
Your shadows are marching, your shadows are charging, and I’m watching you bolster yourself against the sweat and strain of confronting your bruised, rejected, and undiscovered self time after time.
I see you in the mud.
You’re fighting in the trenches.
Firing from your foxhole, screaming at your shadows, you’re trapped in a defensive war as if your inner children were an undead army advancing from the darkness of your yet-to-be reconciled family trauma.
Screaming. Searching. Cowering.
You’ll do what it takes to survive.
My language is war-like in this post because this is what I’m seeing, it’s literally what I’ve been seeing because I’ve just woken from an onslaught of fractured sleep and half-dazed active imagination.
I’m writing these words in the middle of the night on five hours sleep after a series of back-to-back dreams on the theme of war and self confrontation, and the truth is that they didn’t feel like my own dreams - they felt like they were your dreams.
I wasn’t the one fighting in the foxholes, I was the officer moving between and behind the trenches. It wasn’t my fight - these ‘enemies’ didn’t feel like my ‘enemies’ - but I saw you struggling, and I tried my best to offer guidance and encouragement about how to best defeat your shadow self.
It’s true that I know what you need for victory, but it’s also true that you’re going about your shadow work in the wrong way.
The victory you seek cannot be found in the filth of the churned earth.
Your victory will be drafted through discussion, and your serenity will be secured in the citadel of your soul.
It is by diplomacy, not violence, that you will reconcile your internal conflicts and find peace within yourself.
Truthfully, I had forgotten what it feels like to be at war with myself.
I no longer suffer from the crippling addictions and shame attacks of my youth. I have a general sense of clarity about who I am and my role in the world, but I wasn’t born this way.
It took hundreds of books, dozens of authors read, re-read and patiently applied, and a series of patient and practical shifts towards sobriety and consciousness in order to stop fighting myself.
Ninety-five percent of the time, I’m not at war with myself - I used to suffer with angst, depression and apathy but it seems that my inner work ultimately worked - the majority of my ‘problems’ are appropriately on the outside rather than inappropriately on the inside in 2025 - but my heart remembers your pain, and this recent series of combat dreams reminds me that the collective unconscious is defined by a feeling of conflict, not a feeling of play.
In summary: Jordan might be safe and playful, but most people aren’t, and it shames me to forget that shadow pain is the default state for most people, even aspirational individuals.
It feels like hell. It’s so unnecessary.
Maybe it’s not gunshots and explosions, maybe your style of self conflict is sabotage and espionage, little words of self criticism that erode your confidence in subtle poison, or maybe you want to dismiss my perhaps low vibe use of warring metaphors, but I am nonetheless reminded that damage and conflict is the defining tone of how most people relate to themselves… they’re always at war with themselves, but it seems that they’ve learned to keep it secret.
Violence is the texture, and I see my people suffering upon themselves.
You’re struggling with shame, addiction, confusion, and all manner of inner conflicts.
My client’s, students and audience don't need saving - I can’t do that for them and I’m not trying to win their battles either - but we appear to have found ourselves trapped in an internal war, and I see no alternative but to fight at your side until you grow tired of the violence.
Maybe one day you will be ready for peace talks.
In the meantime, if you insist on internal conflict, then I will teach you how to fire your weapon and ruthlessly destroy the enemy with psychological tricks and tactics… I will teach you how to wage psychological warfare until the sobering moment when you recognise your own eyes reflected in the shadow you despise.
You were fighting yourself the whole damn time.
When will the white dove fly?
Jordan
P.S. These photos are significant: this is the car where Archduke Franz Ferdinand was assassinated in June, 1914, a monumental event which triggered the eruption of World War 1. You can see the famous bullet hole in the final photo. I stood in this room in Vienna’s military museum for a long time, reflecting on the immensity of history, and the violence we do to ourselves and others…
3 weeks ago | [YT] | 251