In Good Light: A 30-Day Guided Shadow Work Journal

Many shadow work journals hand you several hundred prompts and leave you alone with them. This one takes you through thirty days in a deliberate order, tells you how deep each day goes before you start it, and shows you what to do if it gets to be too much.

How the thirty days run

The book is laid out as one day in a single room, and each part has its own color so you always know where you are.

• Ground (Days 1 to 6). Why you are here, what steadies you, the face you show the world, and the unwritten rules of the house you grew up in.
• Notice (Days 7 to 12). The people who get under your skin, envy, the people you admire, and reactions that are bigger than their cause.
• Meet (Days 13 to 18). Anger, need, wanting, shame and the life you did not live, one at a time.
• Speak (Days 19 to 24). Choose one part of yourself, give it a shape, write it a letter, let it answer, and find out what it has been guarding.
• Carry (Days 25 to 30). Repair, small real outlets, saying no, and reading the whole month back.

Every day has the same four steps: a short reading, a steadiness check, three to five questions with room to write, and one small physical act to bring you back into the room. Days take fifteen to thirty minutes. Every sixth day is for gathering in, with no new digging.

What makes it different

• You know how deep a day goes before you begin. Each day is marked Gentle, Steady or Deep. The three Deep days each offer a gentler way in.
• Four pages on staying steady, before Day 1. The window of tolerance, six ways to put on the brakes, clear signs for when to stop and when to get help, and crisis and support lines for six countries.
• It gets Jung right. The quotations are real and cited by volume and paragraph. A short table shows two lines he is often credited with that are not in his works.
• It does not tell you that everything you dislike in other people is secretly you. Day 8 gives you three doors to try, and one of them is "I was hurt by this".
• After Day 30: blank copies of five tools to keep using, 200 further questions in ten themes, and a list of books worth reading next.

What you download

Three PDF files of the same 137-page book. The page numbers match in all three.

1. Fillable. Tinted pages with full-page photographs. Type into every writing space and tick the boxes in a PDF reader such as Adobe Acrobat Reader (free), Preview on a Mac or a desktop browser, then save the file. On a tablet you can handwrite on it in GoodNotes or Notability.
2. Print, US Letter. White pages with ruled lines and small photographs, to save ink.
3. Print, A4. The same, for A4 paper.

Some phone and tablet PDF viewers show the boxes but do not save what you type. The book explains how to check yours before you rely on it.

Please read before you buy

This is a journal for self-reflection. It is not therapy, diagnosis or treatment, and it was not written by a clinician. If you are in crisis, have been through something traumatic recently, or live with PTSD, dissociation or psychosis, this kind of work is best done with a professional beside you. The book says so on its first page of text.

The text was researched and written with the help of AI, and the quotations were checked against the text of the books they come from; the sources are listed at the back. The photographs were made with an image generator and show no real person or place.

For your own use. Print as many copies of the pages as you need for yourself.