Hi everyone. I have some news. I have decided to rename my publication “Reinventing Freedom” since all the sections in the newsletter are about various ways to practice personal and/or large community freedom. You will see the new name in your inbox soon! Now on to the topic for today, Wholeness.
Introduction
Jung’s model prioritizes Wholeness. There is no focus on willpower or self - hate when you are struggling with a problem. Instead, the goal is to access not just the resources of one’s conscious mind but the vast wisdom of the unconscious mind as well.
There are two major steps to achieve Wholeness. Today we are going to explore the initial step of what can happen when we gently remove the social masks that we use to hide any part of ourselves that society says is imperfect - generally any vulnerability we might have.
Shadow
Why is Wholeness important? If we never take off these masks and are constantly pushing these disowned vulnerable parts into the unconscious - what Jung called the shadow - these parts will become activated and eventually show up in our external reality. https://scottjeffrey.com/individuation-process/
Here is an example. Imagine you start to feel intense jealousy when a new colleague easily draws positive attention. You might pause and then consider the possibility that the jealousy might be information from your shadow part telling you that you are abandoning yourself in important ways. At that point you can change course and give yourself the attention you are missing.
Jung saw repeatedly in his work that the individuals who had the courage and humility to accept these shadow parts had access to information others did not. And it was information they could use to incrementally improve quality of life.
Updates
There’s another way to use the knowledge hiding within the unconscious part of the psyche and achieve more Wholeness. We can update old conclusions reached when we were very young, especially those conclusions that are limiting our lives now as adults.
Maybe you learned when you were five that any mistake you made, for example, got you shamed so you concluded that only perfection earned you belonging. As an adult you may not even be aware that you reached that conclusion; you may just see it as who you are.
Now let’s say that you find yourself in a situation where your perfectionism is bogging down the workflow of your team. Uh oh. What will you do? Changing these conclusions may be difficult depending on how much shame is behind them. We’ll use the perfectionism example from above to go through the steps:
Identify the conclusion. Only perfection earns me belonging in my life.
Pause and sit with the possibility of doing things differently. Shame may surface.
Start experimenting with tiny ways to simplify the work and/or cut a corner.
Notice what emotions surface (your unconscious may send you danger signals).
Process the emotions maybe via journal writing and then continue.
Document progress.
Repeat the steps as necessary.
If you are wanting to update a different conclusion the steps should still work with some slight adjustments. I am using this process myself to broaden skill sets related to this newsletter.
Conclusion
So there you have it. Discover your shadow self and then use that information to update old stories/conclusions. The good news is that what you see in your shadow often holds hidden strengths you can use to improve your well being. Now, what old conclusions about yourself and/or the world at large are you ready to update? Let me know in the comments.
Finally, here is more good news about how some urban centers are designing for wildlife. One story in this article is about how otters and flying squirrels are returning to Chicago. Awesome. https://e360.yale.edu/features/urban-refuge-how-cities-can-help-solve-the-biodiversity-crisis