Like Beauty embracing the Beast, our beauty is deepened as our beastliness is honored. The poet Rainer Maria Rilke realized this when he said he feared that if his devil’s left him, his angels would take flight as well.
excerpt from Meeting the Shadow
edited by Connie Zwieg Ph.D. and Jeremiah Abrahms

Denial is pushing something out of your awareness. Anything you hide in the basement has a way of burrowing under the house and showing up on the front lawn.
Howard Sasportas

Not moral perfection but the promotion of the rejected complementary attitude is the basis of a religiously stable personality.
Liliane Frey-Rohn

To live without the creative potential of our own destructiveness is to be a cardboard angel.
Sheldon B. Kopp

I looked and looked and this I came to see — that what I thought was you and you was really me and me.
Unknown

All in one and one in all.
Budhist proverb

The most common form of despair is not being who you are.
Kirkegaard

If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.

Before you take the splinter out of your brothers eye, take the log out of your own.
Jesus

For the good that I would, I do not, but the evil which I would not, that I do.
St. Paul

You see the issue of the Shadow isn’t a question of admitting faults. It’s a question of being shaken right down to your foundations by realizing that you are not as you appear — not to others, but also to yourself.
Liz Greene, Ph.D.

The Shadow cannot be eliminated. It is the ever-present dark brother or sister. Whenever we fail to see where it stands, there is likely to be trouble afoot. For then it is certain to be standing behind us. The adequate question therefore never is: Have I a shadow problem? Have I a negative side? But rather: Where does it happen to be right now? When we cannot see it, it is time to beware! And it is helpful to remember Jung's formulation that a complex is not pathological per se. It becomes pathological only when we assume that we do not have it; because then IT HAS US!
Edward C. Whitmont

This thing of darkness I acknowlege mine. There is nothing more confining than the prison we don't know we are in.
William Shakespeare

Depth psychology has presented us with the undeniable wisdom that the enemy is constructed from denied aspects of the self. Therefore, the radical commandment "Love your enemy as yourself" points the way toward both self-knowledge and peace. We do, in fact, love or hate our enemies to the same degree that we love or hate ourselves. In the image of the enemy, we will find the mirror in which we may see our own face most clearly.
Sam Keen

Shadow work leads to a practice I refer to as the pursuit of the unhypocritical life, which some might call living with integrity.
Jeremiah Abrahms

To practice lightside/dark side thinking is to practice holding opposites, a subversive act in our either/or culture. For Jung, this act is a developmental step, the end of a naive all-good view or a cynical all-bad view, which results in a more nuanced perception of reality and a capacity to tolerate paradox and ambiguity. This, too, is one of the promises of shadow-work.
Connie Zwieg, Ph.D. and Steve Wolf, Ph.D.

Shame is the gristle we must chew on to integrate the Shadow complex.
Gilda Franz

The Shadow, of course never dies; we always cast a shadow. But how we relate to it, and it to us, depends on whether it is known. Once known, we have inevitably lost an innocence that can never be recovered. What replaces it is a knowledge of the complexity of our nature. Sometimes we are fortunate, and this knowledge elicits a kindness and tolerance in us for others — even, perhaps for ourselves.
Deena Metzger


The cave you fear to enter holds the treasure you seek.
Joseph Campbell

  

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