With Jules De Vitto
Tending to the Depths
A trauma-informed, integrative approach to reconnecting with our disowned parts, reclaiming the gifts that rest in the shadow, and returning to a soul-led life.
The spiritual path often gets romanticised. Peak experiences, spiritual highs, and a steady stream of cutting-edge approaches promising to finally solve and heal our trauma. The truth is that psycho-spiritual transformation is not always easy. It asks us to face the shadow, the parts of ourselves we are most afraid to turn towards and it often takes us through the depths of our grief.
Perhaps you’ve been on this journey for a long time…
You have read the books, sat on the retreats, learned to regulate your nervous system, reframe and rise above. But something in your soul is still longing to be acknowledged, expressed or returned.
This longing is expressing itself through the body in the form of exhaustion, tension or symptoms nobody can quite make sense of.
From the outside, life looks well arranged, and inside it there is a sense that you are living only a small aspect of who you actually are. With it comes grief that has not been named. You may have reached the limits of contemporary productivity and striving, and are burned out, overwhelmed, or simply numb from it all.
For some people there is an event that acts as a catalyst for this sort of life transition.
For others there is nothing to point to at all, only the sense that something is misaligned and that it has been missing a long time.
Here’s what often happens when challenges arise on our psycho-spiritual journey..
I
They get pathologised
Grief, anxiety or pain is often labelled as depression or anxiety or treated as something to be over within a reasonable period. People arrive believing their sorrow is a malfunction rather than a natural response to loss, change and transition.
II
They get bypassed
Perhaps you’ve been broken open by plant medicine, breathwork or intensive retreat, and then find that integrating any of it into ordinary life is overwhelming. Many of us return to business as usual and start longing for the next peak to carry us through the mundane.
III
They are carried alone
Every culture before ours built containers for times of significant life transition. When our challenges go unwitnessed, or are pushed into the shadow, they cannot alchemise, and our life-force gets stuck instead.
The many faces of grief
Most of what we grieve has never been called grief
We are taught to recognise only one kind of grief, the kind that follows a death. But grief arrives in many forms, and the ones we have no language for are often the ones we have carried longest. There is no order here and no hierarchy. Most of us are carrying several at once.
Losses and bereavement
Everything we love, in time. Bereavement, endings, impermanence.
Changes and transitions
Health, role, identity, work. The living losses nobody sends cards for.
What we have disowned
The parts we exiled in order to be acceptable. What was named as too much, too emotional, not strong enough.
What lives in shadow
Anger, guilt, envy, relief. The feelings we were not allowed to have, and the gifts that went down with them.
Trauma and what came down the line
The parts that withdrew when experience exceeded what could be borne, and the parts carrying what was never ours.
What never came
Belonging, safety, being met. Grief for what we needed and did not receive.
Crisis and awakening
When meaning, faith or identity collapses, and awakening arrives as disorientation.
What we lost touch with
Our severance from soul and from the sacred, felt as numbness or emptiness.
What the world is losing
Species, habitats, cultures, traditions. Sorrow for a living world coming apart.
The harm we have caused
Grief for the harm we brought to ourselves, to others and to the world, from the awareness we had at the time.
Something in us often needs to deepen before it can rise
Long before anyone spoke of personal development, cultures across the world told the same story about how individuals and the collective actually transform. There is often a shedding, a great loss or grief, where the old identity peels away. We spend time in stillness, descent, despair, or what we can summarise as a period of darkness.
When held, something occurs in those depths. Older traditions called it alchemy, the slow turning of base material into gold. Grief, sorrow and the difficult emotions we have been taught to turn away from work the same way. The parts of us carrying these emotions need somewhere to be held and processed. Pain and grief can stop being the enemy and become allies for our journey.
This is liminal ground, the threshold between what has ended and what has not yet begun. We are trained to move through such places quickly, to resolve them, to know what comes next. Yet the not knowing is where the change occurs, and staying there slightly longer than is comfortable is often the whole of the work. Francis Weller describes grief not as a problem to be solved but as a sacred initiation into deeper belonging.
The soul knows what it came for.
After James Hillman
Parts work
We are not a single, unified self
Most of us already know this without having language for it.
Part of me wants to say yes, but part of me is holding back.
A part of me still feels like a child when that happens.
Parts come into being for a reason. Many took shape early, in response to something difficult, and took on a job:
- to protect us
- to keep us acceptable
- to make sure we were never hurt that way again
A part might drive us to achieve, or keep us small and quiet, or numb us when feeling becomes too much. The methods may have become painful, but the intention underneath was always to help.
Within and beyond all of them is something steadier, called the Self. Not another part, but the calm, curious, compassionate ground from which every part can be met.
Parts of us may be stuck in old pain. The whole of us is not.
When we stop trying to silence our parts and begin to listen, the inner conflict quietens, and the energy we spent holding them down becomes available for living.
More on working with partsWhy this matters
What we hold down does not leave
Holding down emotions, or disowning parts of ourselves, takes an enormous amount of energy. What is left is exhaustion, tension, symptoms nobody can quite account for, and the sense of living at a distance from your own life.
Grief that goes unacknowledged goes underground, where it shapes our choices, our relationships and our sense of self. It is never only the pain that gets exiled - joy, creativity, desire, anger and playfulness go into the shadow alongside it.
Ascension and growth without integrating what has gone before, or acknowledging the shadow, is a bypass that only deepens the split between light and dark.
Descent is not regression, and this is not a path of darkness. In alchemy, and in the old stories of the underworld, going down is where the change occurs, and what we find there is often the life, or parts of ourselves that were pushed out of reach, waiting to be let back in.
What opens when we stop turning away from our pain
The parts you had to leave behind come home, and the burdens they were never meant to carry can be laid down.
What was exiled alongside the pain comes back with it: creativity, desire, play, and vitality in the body again.
You can stay with what is difficult, in yourself and in others, without needing to fix it or flee from it.
The sorrow you carry for the world stops being paralysing, and can be worked towards a sense of purpose or direction.
You stop needing the next peak, because ordinary life has depth in it again.
You find others who know this terrain, and the intimacy that comes from being witnessed rather than advised.
Grief and gratitude turn out to be held in the same two hands. And the rising, when it comes, is not a return to who you were before. It comes from further down, and it brings more of you with it.
Why I work this way
I spent years on that path of seeking
For a long time I was chasing openings, and attempting to by-pass my human experience in the process. Each peak felt like the answer, and each one wore off, and I went looking for the next.
What eventually shifted was a period of struggle and deep rest - deepening into embodied practice, grief tending and stillness. Something in my psyche shifted; I became interested, not only in the ascent but in the movement downwards into being properly embodied in my human experience.
Lineage
Who this work is inspired by
This approach is my own synthesis, developed through years of practice, but it stands on the shoulders of others.
My biggest inspiration is Francis Weller, whose gates of grief gave language to the sorrows we carry but had never been taught to name. I attended his grief ritual training, and his book The Wild Edge of Sorrow is the one I return to again and again. I went on to complete Apprenticing to Grief, a training programme with Sophy Banks and others for those wanting to gain the skills and confidence to hold space for grief.
Alongside this sits the work of Joanna Macy, whose Work That Reconnects showed that despair for the world is not pathology, but the measure of our belonging to it. My work and philosophy has also been heavily influenced by Buddhism and Tibetan Buddhist practices, and I have sat many Buddhist retreats in McLeod Ganj, Dharamshala, Kathmandu, Nepal and Thailand.
Running underneath all of it is depth psychology, and Carl Jung's insight that we do not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious. Trauma-informed practice keeps the work paced, safe and led by the nervous system, drawing on Gabor Maté, Peter Levine, Janina Fisher and Deb Dana.
It is held within Transpersonal Coaching Psychology, the tradition I trained and teach within alongside my colleague and teacher Jevon Dangeli, and colleague Hennie Geldenhuys, which meets the psycho-spiritual journey from an expanded, open awareness of the Self.
My work is also informed by shamanic traditions, which recognise soul loss, the way parts of us withdraw in the face of sorrow, and the possibility of their return. I trained in these practices at the Centre for Shamanic Studies in London, in the lineage of Michael Harner.
Ways in
Nothing here asks you to break yourself open. The work is trauma-informed and slow, you are never required to speak or to have worked out what your grief is about, and you can arrive with nothing more than the sense that something in you wants attending to.
Eight weeks · online
The Alchemy of Descent
A course in grief tending, shadow and soul work. Eight weeks through the gates of grief, into the shadow, and towards what waits to be reclaimed.
Find out moreOne to one
Working together
Transpersonal, integrative and trauma-informed work with Jules, at the pace your own psyche sets, for the parts of the road that ask for something more personal.
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Jules De Vitto
Founder, Transpersonal Coach & Facilitator
Jules is a transpersonal coach, trainer and educator working at the meeting point of psychology, coaching, therapy and education. She guides people through deep emotional and spiritual transformation, supporting them to tend to their grief, reconnect with their authenticity and reclaim lost parts, drawing on integrative methods that honour psychology, consciousness and spiritual growth alike.
Her practice is grounded in years of training in transformative work: Michael Harner's Shamanic Practitioner Training through the Foundation for Shamanic Studies, Grief Ritual Leadership Training with Francis Weller, and a grief apprenticeship with Sophy Banks and colleagues. She is also the founder of the Highly Sensitive Human Academy, a hub of courses, coaching, writing and a podcast for highly sensitive people.
