Dec 14, 2020
Shadow Business Archetypes with Tara Robin
Once a chemist, today, Tara is spiritual shadow work and leadership mentor who helps conscious souls make a global impact through facilitating spaces for self-healing and starting their own business. At 26, she supports spiritualists and healers full time through her group programs, mentorship, and retreats.
After her mom’s passing in 2018, she realized that while she was part of the spiritual community, she didn’t feel supported in her grieving process. The advice centered around allowing time for healing and to shift into learning something from her loss. Tara’s goal is to inspire a ripple effect by connecting the dark and light within ourselves. This allows us to feel even our dark deeply so we can step into our highest alignment. Through Tara’s grieving process, she developed her intuition and connection with spirit, which led her into reconnecting with her mediumship.
She went on to become Reiki certified which gets lovingly infused into Tara’s sessions. Tara loves creating deep and meaningful relationships with those around her. She honors the individual process and strengths each of her clients possesses. Alongside mentorship, Tara is a 200hr Yoga teacher, a certified integrative nutrition health coach, certified crystal and sound healer, as well as Science of Wellbeing certified through Yale University. Tara speaks about grief, intentional and mindful living, living with and embracing our shadows, and creating big pictures in businesses to inspire global change.
Hi Tara, can you tell us a little bit about yourself?
Hi! My name is Tara and I am a spiritual shadow work and leadership mentor. I help spiritualists make a global impact through the creation of spaces for self-healing and their business.
What inspired you to create your brand? What projects are you currently working on?
After my mom passed away unexpectedly in 2018, I was left with a PTSD diagnosis and crippling depression. I felt extremely alone, dark, and isolated.
At the time I had already started my online business as a health coach, but following my mom’s passing, I closed my practice. I was already in the spiritual community to a degree when I was grieving. I already had a meditation practice. I had daily affirmations and a morning routine. I was eating superfoods and vegan- and yet when I went into this dark place I didn’t feel supported.
It is spoken about how spirituality and these tools are meant to be there when you are having a hard day, but I guess what I was going through was more than that. When I asked the people I looked up to in the community what I should do, or how I can get through this time- as I felt myself slipping away from myself, I was met with advice such as “what can you learn from the situation”, and heard “time will make it better.”
I heard that so much from people in my life that “the first year was the hardest and that it would get better after” that. I felt like a sitting duck just waiting for the year to pass. As my mom’s first death anniversary got closer and closer, and I realized that some magical arbitrary date would make me feel “healed” I began to release myself into my darkness and my grief.
It was only once I sat with my grief and allowed myself to experience it, that I was able to move with it and make progress toward my goals again. Now, I am passionate about allowing people to feel their darkness- their grief, their shame- and just the emotions we try to move through so quickly in our society. As I have supported a lot of souls in this work who want to also service the collective, I have noticed similar questions come up such as “when is the right time for me to start transitioning from my inner work to helping others” and “how can I actually use this work to be a better business owner” and so I also developed a framework called the “Shadow Business Archetypes” that uncovers the four major blocks and shadows that individuals experience in their business. I show them how to also use them as strengths.
How does your brand work?
Shadow’s work was first developed by psychologist Carl Jung in the 1930s. Shadow work is all about uncovering your unconscious or the things that you repress or ignore. This is commonly spoken about as our darkness. But we also repress and ignore our light, specifically in a direct correlation to how much of our darkness we are repressing.
I have depression, and I use the example of emotions a lot. You can’t choose which emotions you have on or off, they are either all on, or you are completely numbing yourself from them. Our dark vs light works the same way. If you are repressing parts of your darkness, you are also repressing your light. It is estimated that about 95% of our brain activity is dictated by our unconscious. So for example, if you touched a hot stove when you were younger, you will naturally stay away from hot stoves without thinking about it.
Think about how this plays into our relationships, how we view ourselves, and how we run our businesses. Shadow work helps break down these instincts and brings to light our unconscious so that we can change our behavior and heal. If you are looking to react differently to situations, understand yourself on a deeper level, have healthier and deeper relationships, and have an authentic spiritual business — shadow work has something to offer you.
With that said, I also use and integrate “light” or intuition building work in my programs and sessions, because it is equally a part of doing the work. Intuition building helps you connect to your soul’s mission, ensures you are on the right path, helps you gain confidence in your unique skill set, and dictates when your shadow work should start or end.
What’s your desired impact?
I hope to inspire people to do their inner work and feel safer navigating their darkness. I believe that if every person impacts at least 5 people around them, I am creating an impact of hundreds of people feeling more comfortable sitting with and expressing their emotions so that they can fully step into their highest self.
I also believe that doing shadow work is the only way to operate a business from a place of authenticity and integrity. Shadow work avoids spiritual bypassing- or trying to use spiritual tools to avoid their emotional trauma and issues. These are the people that pull the same cards but nothing changes in their life, always talk about “love and light”, or that run away from their problems to a spiritual retreat.
This can be harmful because one of the most common ways that shadows express themselves is through the projections onto other people. This means that healers that are being entrusted with someone’s emotional and spiritual well-being are being tainted by the facilitators’ trauma and background instead of being fully present with the client. I also believe that spiritual bypassing is why so many spiritualists don’t do activism work and aren’t making the biggest amount of impact they can in their business.
What core values do you and your business embody?
The biggest core value in my life and business is through the word connection. This is embodied in every aspect of my work. I strive to create deep connections with those I work with as a mentor.
I connect mind, body, and spirit through my yoga teachings, I connect light and shadow in my programs, and I connect people with their loved ones through mediumship. This then gets spread through everything I create, whether it’s an Instagram post, an email, or training. I think, how am I facilitating space for connection today?
My other big core value is authenticity. I believe that we are constantly wearing masks in a society based on our surroundings, and the online business world can seem to have a specific face. I believe through my shadow work I was able to understand what parts of my online presence were me, and what was curated through what I felt like I needed to do and who I needed to be.
Being more of my weird self online empowers other people to do the same, and inevitably comes back to creating the connections I want to help facilitate. I think my other core value is in the word impact. How am I creating an impact in my posts?
What is your future vision? How far do you want to take your business? What is your next level of dream?
I know the vision of the future is always changing, and I trust Source to lead me to where I am intended to go. I have gotten messages that I am intended to create a grief coaching program- to help more people get the tools to help facilitate the type of spaces I try to create with my work. I also have gotten the message to write a book with my story. I get emotional just typing it, but my mom always spoke about writing a book one day, and she’s given me messages to carry that out on her behalf.
What message would you like to give to anybody who has a plan of creating something of their own and making a living through it?
My message for anyone trying to create something on their own is to think about what they are passionate about changing in the world. Allow this passion to be the center of your business, and not get caught up with the nuances having a business may bring like niching and what your website will look like.
