The Inner Wealth Podcast

Ep224. Shadow Work — How to Feel, Release, and Free the Emotions Running Your Life.

• Mike Kitko

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In this episode, Mike breaks open the truth behind emotional storage, nervous system release, and the real work of personal freedom: Shadow Work. This isn’t about coping. It’s about healing the unprocessed emotions that are still running your life from the inside. If you’re ready to stop reacting, stop holding it all in, and start releasing what’s not yours to carry — this episode is your how.

Key Takeaways

  1. Shadow Work Is About Releasing What’s Stored, Not What’s New
    Most emotions aren’t new — they’re old wounds triggered again. Shadow work clears the internal pressure.
  2. You Can’t Think Your Way Out of Stored Emotion
    You have to feel it. Amplify it. Breathe through it. And release it with presence.
  3. The Nervous System Stores Emotional Residue
    Unprocessed experiences live in the body until they're moved through consciously.
  4. The Drill Method Is the Tool
    Drop into the body. Recognize. Inquire. Listen. Let go. It works because it goes beyond mindset.
  5. Letting Go of Low-Level Energy Raises Your Reality
    Peace, power, and overflow are on the other side of clearing shame, guilt, fear, and grief.

Notable Quotes

  • “Shadow work will help you do that. You put yourself into the experience that you're trying to avoid. You visualize the experience. You feel the experience. And then as you feel and amplify, you begin to breathe and release all the emotion that you've just dredged up.”
  • “Emotion is like an orange and a knife. The knife doesn't create the juice. The knife just reveals it.”
  • “You don't reach for the higher levels. You let go of the lower levels.”
  • “You just allow yourself to go deeper into it and explore and allow yourself to let it go.”
  • “Every single time I do shadow work, something amazing happens.”

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Music Credit: "What's Left of Me" by Wes Hoffman & Friends

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Mike Kitko is an executive self-mastery coach, speaker and author. He found external success through powerful titles, incomes, and material possessions. He ultimately fell into depression, toxic abuse of alcohol, and the near collapse of his family before he began a journey of internal happiness and success.

SPEAKER_00:

Do you ever wake up feeling like there's something missing in your life? You ever feel the need to escape your business? Are you running your life or is your life running new? I'm like here and I'll help you design and create a life so authentic and aligned with who you really are. You'll get excited just to wake up. I'll help you create real wealth, success, and freedom from the inside out. Welcome to the Inner Wealth Podcast, where we learn and choose to live inspired each and every day. There's a powerful tool, uh mindfulness tool, that when you add it to your repertoire, it will it will help you create more freedom in your life, create more freedom in your in your body, bring more peace, bring more inner wealth to your your nervous system, and help you release like all of this pent up, raw, toxic, lower level energy, emotion that you know is anxious and fearful and angry and regretful. And it's so this tool is so so valuable in the work to raise our level of consciousness. And today I want to introduce shadow work to you. And I've talked about shadow work from time to time, but I really want to dive deeper into what shadow work is and why we do it. And we we do shadow work for a variety of reasons. And you know, one of them in our physical experiences because it helps us feel more free in our body, and it helps us feel more energized and helps us see life through a more optimistic and positive and expansive lens in our body. But also, also, it helps us raise our level of consciousness and raise our level of frequency and our raise our vibration. So spiritually, we evolve and we are more connected, we become over time more connected with our divinity than our the animal nature and the animal instinct that we have uh that we've been born into in a lot of cases. And shadow work has absolutely changed my life. So the story of shadow work for me started in 2016. And I had a uh I had a coach, and I use I use the word coach, and and I I do something very, very similar. I'm very similar in nature to the work uh that I'm getting ready to or the teacher that I'm getting ready to describe. But I hired him as a coach and and a life coach, if you will. And if you remember back in 2016, if you've listened to this episode, you you uh you've heard me talk about 2016 a lot. That's the year that my transformation started. And I was moving from executive Fortune 500 leadership to, you know, this entrepreneurial journey. But I was also trying to put the pieces of my life back together. My marriage had fallen apart, I had fallen apart, my career had fallen apart, my income stream had fallen apart, my kids were living in a freaking toxic household that was abusive and just a just a nasty environment. And I was looking to put the heel all of this stuff and to put my life back together. And one of the biggest issues that I had is I I had always seen life through the lens of the lower level beliefs that I had been exposed to. And nobody taught me how, you know, emotional intelligence when I was a kid. My parents weren't emotionally intelligent, so they didn't, they couldn't teach me emotional intelligence. And, you know, the beliefs that I had grown up in, you got to work hard, and you know, making money is hard, and the the world's a you know a dangerous place, and people are uh the rich people are out to get you, and rich people are greedy and slimy, and money is the root of all evil. And I heard all this, and like I was living through this lens, and I was trying to fit myself in a religious box that I didn't belong, and just I was I was not a very nice guy, and uh I was very unkind and not nice, but inside of me was just a freaking ticking time bomb. And I was 300 pounds, I was suicidal, I was I was blocking out drunk regularly, and my life just wasn't there, was nothing good about it. So when I started putting the pieces together, I I hired a life coach. Uh, and and I didn't even know what a life coach was at the time. I I learned when I needed some support and uh I didn't want to go to therapy because you know I I watched therapists, the the wrong, not the not good ones, not the super talented therapists, but I've watched them take somebody's life around in a circle for years and years and years, and they got no progress. So I knew I knew a therapist wasn't for me. If that works for you, then then get after it. For me, I just didn't want to just talk about my problems. I knew that there was some deeply embedded issues in me and I needed to extract them and I needed to get them out quickly and aggressively. And that's the kind of that's why you joined a Marine Corps too. So now I'm a marine vet. But when I when I had this coach, I he said, basically asked me a question, what are you most scared of right now? And I to get realistic, it wasn't losing my family, it wasn't losing my house or my money, it wasn't losing whatever. It was losing my house for whatever reason, my house had become a very deep part of my identity. And I grew up in you know, lower middle class uh city uh of Baltimore, or the lower middle class section in the city of Baltimore, and it was a row home, it was very small. There was a bunch of us packed into a pretty small house, and we, you know, we didn't have we didn't have extra. We we just had enough and and we always had what we needed, but we never had a you know extra. And there was there was no margin in our lives. But anyway, when you know Angie and I bought our first town home in in Germantown, Maryland, and it was a it was a a row house and corner, corner lot, and we we rehabbed the inside, and when we sold it, uh we sold it for a lot more than we made it, and we moved to uh we moved right outside of Portland, Oregon, to uh Hillsboro, Oregon, and we bought a uh an even better house and a bigger house. And we kind of did the same thing. We lived there for 10 years and uh a couple years before we moved, we rehabbed it and we sold it for a lot of money, and and then we we moved to St. Louis, Missouri, and we bought this house that I never thought in a million years when I grew up in that that lower middle class area of Baltimore. I'd never thought I'd have this this house and not not just not just the size, it's not the it's not a mansion, but it's just way more than I ever thought that I would have. And and I love the comfort and I love the spaciousness and I loved the complexity and I loved all of it of my home. And I had fallen in love and it became intertwined and entangled with my identity. And when I told him I'm I'm afraid of losing my house, that was the thing I worried about the most with this transformation or with this transition. And he said, Okay, here's what I want you to do. He said, I want I was already actively meditating. I had a good meditation practice going. And he said, Here's what I want you to do. I want you to sit on a meditation pillow or sit down, doesn't matter if you're on a meditation pillow, but sit in meditation, and I want you to get really, really comfortable in your body and bring to mind, bring in your visualization, you being on a street corner with us with ripped up jeans, with holy shirt, with dirty, you have you have nothing, you have a sign that says, I have nothing, anything will help. And picture yourself there and uh put yourself in this the circumstance and and the the experience that you have no family, that you have no house, that you have no money, and that you've basically lost it all. And I was like, Holy shit, what the fuck am I doing that for? Like, that didn't make any sense whatsoever. And in in this process, he also invited me to feel what that guy would feel, what that version of Mike would feel on that street corner. And I was like, this sounds delusional. And he said, and then as you as you feel this and you amplify all of this, all of this emotion, wants you to begin to release it. And as you release it, find some love for that version of Mike. Find some love for that version of Mike. And at this point, I was like, man, what am I doing this for? That doesn't make any fucking sense. I'll at that point I was so desperate, I would have done anything for relief. But I'm like, what am I doing that for? It doesn't make any sense. Explain it to me. And he said, your identity is built on your house and your money, and your identity is built in the material world, and these emotions are buried within you. He didn't say in your nervous system, and we've been talking about the nervous system a lot over the last few episodes. He didn't say that your these emotions are buried in your nervous system, but that's essentially what what he was saying and what he was pointing to. And he said these all this toxic, raw, pent up emotion, all the fear, all the anxiety, all the garbage energy, emotion is energy and motion, is stored inside of you. And the only way to start to get it out of you is to find it, feel it, amplify it, and release it. And shadow work, which is what he was describing, shadow work will help you do that. But you you put yourself in shadow work, you put yourself into the experience that you're trying to avoid. You visualize the experience, you feel the experience, and then as you feel and amplify, you begin to breathe and release all the emotion that you've just dredged up. Now, what I didn't understand at the time is the reason the visualization and the embodiment work, the feeling work, this deep somatic work, the reason that it's it's valuable and important is because emotion is like an orange and a knife. If you take a knife and stick it in an orange and you wiggle the knife blade around and you pull the knife blade out, the juice from the orange starts to come out of the orange, right? The knife didn't create the juice, the knife just revealed it. The orange juice was already in there. The knife didn't create it. And we like to think that you know, our bank account goes down and we get scared that the bank account going down caused us to get scared, but that's not the case. The experience is the experience, but it triggered emotion that was already in you. This is why nobody can make you angry, nobody can make you sad, nobody can make you feel anything. They're just they're just saying the thing, doing the thing, or you're experiencing the thing that's triggering the pain, it's already inside of you, and you're feeling it because it exists in there, because it's stored, it's been stored through trauma and experiences and and life and this energy in motion, emotion, which at one point was flowing through you, got stored and stuck. And and the the Sanskrit word for this is samskaras, and I write about samskaras and and shadow work in the inner world, outer world. Now, when he did this, uh when he told me to do this, I really didn't like understand. And I thought it was kind of delusional. But my experience of this is when I went into shadow work and I saw myself, I started freaking grieving and I started crying, and I started feeling all of this pent-up emotion and this guilt and shame and anger and hopelessness. And I started feeling all of this stuff inside, inside me. And I started sitting with it. I already started a meditation practice, so I understood how to sit with emotion. And and as I was feeling it, it I amplified, I amplified the emotion and dove dug down deeper into it instead of shutting it off or running from it, because that's what most people do. As soon as they feel something that's uncomfortable, they they look for a way to shut it off. And that's just avoidance, and that's not healing. That's just that's just avoidance, it's just shoving it back down, and it's gonna live in there as long as you keep shoving it down. And when I did this work, as I felt it and amplified it, and as I sat with it, and then when it was at a crescendo, I started releasing it and letting letting it go. And what I mean by that is I started breathing, and I with each breath, I started releasing some of this emotion. And my my the intention was to let this emotion go and let this energy go the way my coach had described. And and I I started, and what I didn't know is my coach, did I say, he was more of a spiritual teacher and a spiritual healer than he was a coach. So ultimately that's what I've become as well, because this is the same work that I do with people that I've I've done for years with people in my mastermind and in my coaching. And as I as I sat with this emotion, and as I as I breathed and released and breathed and released and breathed and released, and the tears were were flowing, and the the the emotion was there, my face was red, and the pain was there. As I breathed and released and breathed and released, I started to feel a level of freedom that I hadn't felt in a very long time. And that single session of shadow work changed my life because it taught me to stop running from lower level emotions and to start really getting into your body to harvest them, to extract them and to release them to find higher levels of freedom and and to elevate my level of consciousness. And since then, I regularly do shadow work. In fact, a couple episodes ago, well a little bit, a little bit back on on the podcast, probably a couple months now, there's an episode called the drill method. And and I I I've come up with a with a process for for teaching this and describing this. And the drill method is is very simple to understand. It's not always easy to do because it's uncomfortable, but drill method stands for drop into the body when you feel something, right? When you feel a lower level emotion, drop into the body, recognize what you're feeling, inquire into it. Why am I feeling this? What am I feeling? What is it trying to teach me? Listen to it, let it speak to you because it will, and then let it go. And that's the release method. That's that's releasing. And when you you can do the drill method in shadow work, or just when life cuts you, when you're just going about your daily, you know, your daily uh activities and you feel that rush of lower level emotion, you can immediately stop, drop into your body, recognize what you feel, inquire into it, listen to it, and then let it go. And if you do this over time, because these emotions aren't brand new, they're stored in the body. And as you do this, you will begin to empty out the toxic, stored up, pent up lower level emotion that's in your nervous system that's got control of you. And and you're here to operate as the awareness and not the meat suit. You're here to operate as an awareness with a meat suit as your vehicle. And when there's so much stored up, pent up, toxic lower level emotion in our bodies, we operate as the meat suit because it's so heavy and so uncomfortable. And when we start to release this stuff, we elevate and begin to raise our level of consciousness. And as we begin to elevate and raise our level of consciousness, we begin to see life at a higher level. And when we begin to see life at a higher level, life begins to rearrange outside of us at a higher level, and new circumstances start to open up and you start to experience life in a more liberating, freeing method fashion. And that's the value and the benefit of shadow work. Now listen, in I've got a choose your destiny live intensive coming up in a couple days. I've also announced the next one, March 6th and 7th, 2026. So if you can't get to this one, I'll put the links for both of these in the uh in this podcast episode in the body. I'm also going to put the the uh a free link for my meditation bundle in this podcast episode because if you go and do meditation number one in my in my meditation bundle, there is an element, the middle part is shadow work and it'll help you get into this. And then I've already in prior episodes, I've already taught about and talked about uh my installing future you uh meditation. And in meditation number one, in my meditation bundle, which is a 45-minute meditation, it might sound long, but just follow my voice and it'll be short. It it has an element of shadow work, and then it has an element of installing a higher level future. And with this, we can completely rearrange and completely elevate and upgrade the level of your nervous system. And as you do that, you you elevate your the freedom you'll experience, the quality of life you'll experience, and your level of consciousness and the circumstances in your life. Now, I'm gonna bring this together with a really cool uh other teaching that I connected with a long time ago. And that one of my favorite authors, his name is Dr. David Hawkins. And Dr. David Hawkins died a couple decades ago. But Dr. David Hawkins wrote first wrote a uh introduced this concept, this uh a scale. He called it the scale of consciousness, the the emotional scale of consciousness. And he he he introduced this concept in uh a book called Power versus Force. And it's a very dense read. It's very, very dense, it's very heavy, it's very meaty, but it's it's amazing. It's like a metaphysical Bible. Explains it's it explains like the law of attraction and and magnet magnetization. Boy, that word. It explains the uh the path and the emotional path and the emotional journey from shame to enlightenment. And the emotional scale of consciousness, as we do shadow work and as we release this lower level of emotion, we we rise on the emotional scale of consciousness. And as we rise on the emotional scale of consciousness, this is how we experience uh higher levels and and upgraded levels of life. And the the emotional scale of consciousness that he laid out, I'm gonna read it for you. The bottom, the the the lowest level state that a human being can can experience is shame. And shame is when you feel broken, shame when you is when you believe that there is something wrong with you, that you are defective, all right? When you reject yourself because you feel like you are broken, defective, and flawed, fatally flawed. That's shame. The next level is guilt, the next level is apathy, the next level is grief, the next level is fear, the next level is desire, the next level is anger, and the next level is pride. And any level from pride all the way down to shame is they're very disempowering. And this energy, the energy of these levels of consciousness actually repel energy, repel things in the world, repel higher level circumstance or higher level qualities of qualities of life. It's these are repelling forces. These these levels of consciousness do not magnetize goodness to them, they actually push them away. Because like attracts like the first level of of consciousness that's actually an attractive level, and it's actually empowering is courage. This is this is where theirs is where we move from force, the lower level, to power. Okay. Courage begins the the journey to power. Courage, then neutrality, then willingness, then acceptance, then reason, then love, then joy, then peace, and enlightenment. And Dr. Hawkins has laid this scale out in many different books, and he be but he begun with Power versus Force, which is an awesome book. The book that I would encourage you to read, if if you're not gonna, if you're not, if you don't like really heavy, dense reads, the book that I of his that I would encourage you to read is a book called Letting Go. And I'm holding it up to the camera. If you can, if you're watching on YouTube, you can see it. But it's called Letting Go, The Pathway of Surrender. All right. And it lays out the levels of consciousness, but it helps you understand each level, and then it invites you to let go of whatever lower level emotions you feel. And as you let go of shame, you move to guilt. As you let go of guilt, you move to apathy. As you let go of apathy, you move to grief. And that's how we move up this the scale of consciousness by letting go of the lower levels. You don't reach for the higher levels, you let go of the lower levels. We can experience the higher levels, but that's not how our baseline is built. Our baseline is built by letting go of the lower levels. And as we let go of whatever lower level energy is building in us, has been built, has been stored. As we let go of these, we ascend the scale of consciousness. And we rise, as we rise up the scale, we experience life at a higher level from a higher state of awareness and consciousness. And this is called the spiritual journey. And that's why my coach was more of a spiritual teacher and spiritual healer, because he was introducing the spiritual path to me that no one had ever taught me. And now in my workshops, I I teach I teach shadow work, I teach emotional intelligence, I teach emotional courage, I teach letting go, I teach future embodiment work, I teach uh consciousness. This is the work that will absolutely set you free. This is the work that if you really like getting deep, if you really like getting deep within yourself, if you really like getting deep in the experience of life and the spiritual journey, it this isn't superficial level work and it's not mind work, it's body work. We got to get into the body to start to scrape some of this lower level stuff out. And if you experience life, if you repeatedly experience life from anxiety or or depression or fear or grief or anger or jealousy or envy, if you experience life from any of these states, then it's time to dive deep into shadow work, get into your body and get that lower level energy out there out of there, because that is what's controlling your life. And you do control what's happening inside your body when you pause and start to do the work of getting deep within yourself to understand what's in there to release it. And one of my one of my favorite ways of navigating life or teaching people how to navigate life is to control what you control, influence what you influence, but never try to control what you only influence. And you do control what's inside of your body, you do control the meat suit, you do have authority to rearrange energy and emotion inside of yourself. But if you're not doing that, then you're just being a victim of circumstance because I guarantee you you're trying to rearrange the external world to feel okay inside. Control what you can control, influence what you can influence, and don't try to control what you can, what you can only influence. And if you're not controlling what you can control, then then you're in some way, shape, or form, you're you're showing up in a victim as a victim of your what you can control instead of instead of owning it. And you do own what's in your body, and it's the it's your most valuable asset. And what's happening inside of you is either an asset in your desire to increase your circumstance, or it's a liability. And if you're if you're constantly showing up in states of disempowerment, disempowered emotions, disempowered uh thoughts, disempowered beliefs, these are stored in your nervous system. And you're the what's happening inside of you is a liability. Your nervous system is a liability in your experience, and we get to release all of that stored up, top stored up, stale, toxic, lower level stuff in you so that you can experience life from a higher, higher plane, higher dimension. All right, guys, I hope this is helpful. In the show notes, I'm gonna drop, uh, I'm gonna drop the link to the Choose Your Destiny Live Intensive, which in right outside of St. Louis, Missouri, which launches Friday. We've got a couple more seats available. I'm gonna I'm gonna drop the the registration for the next one in March 2026, and I'm gonna drop the link for my my meditation bundle. I'm gonna give you a free link for my meditation bundle, and I would invite you to register for that, get into it, and demonstrate and execute meditation number one. Yeah, you just, if you do so, you just might get to start experiencing a little internal freedom. And trust me, when I say that it's the internal freedom and the emotional payoff that you've always been looking for, because that's the only place that peace exists within you. Your peace is in your body, not your business or your bank account. If you enjoyed what you heard and you want to learn more, go to www.innerwealthglobal.com for more tools and resources.