The rewards are profound. Shadow-work enables us to alter our self-sabotaging behavior so that we can achieve a more self-directed life.

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.

The rewards are profound. Shadow-work enables us to alter our self-sabotaging behavior so that we can achieve a more self-directed life.

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.

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.

To sin is to be off the mark, that is, to inhibit development, contracting backward into regression rather than expanding forward into growth.

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.