Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Each of us wrestles with the dark giant in our own way.
Shadow-making happens in families and makes us who we are. It leads to shadow-work, which makes us who we can become.
There is an enemy-maker in each of us. We make enemies of the people we love the most and the people we know the least.
The shadow disguises itself in our projections, when we react intensely to a trait in others that we fail to see in ourselves.
As each layer of shadow is mined from the darkness, as each fear is faced and each projection reclaimed, the gold shines through.
The rewards are profound. Shadow-work enables us to alter our self-sabotaging behavior so that we can achieve a more self-directed life.
To sin is to be off the mark, that is, to inhibit development, contracting backward into regression rather than expanding forward into growth.
If you can hold the tension of opposite points of view in your intimate relationships with people, instead of making somebody right and somebody wrong, you are really taking an evolutionary step.
I remember when the Cold War ended, how quickly the United States was swept by a nationalistic fervor and turned against Saddam Hussein. As soon as we lost our age-old enemy, the Soviet Union, we instantly created a new one.
Unconscious of your story, you are in its grasp; but with consciousness, an alchemical process begins: The solidity of the complex dissolves and you can open up to the arrival of a new archetype, the birth of a new cycle of life. In the shadow, then, lies our myth and our fate.
Once you uncover the history of this pattern and trace its roots, you will see that your reaction in the present moment is really a reaction from the past, a shadow character's attempt to protect you from reexperiencing an old emotional wound, which instead sabotages you in the present.
There are certainly statistics which show that most people who become sociopaths, who become homicidal, who become child- abusers, have had a history of incredible suffering. This is what we call the transmission of family sin, in which these unconscious patterns get carried on for generations in a legacy of pain. When they are not brought to awareness and worked through, each generation just automatically enacts them.