Your life will be transformed when you make peace with your shadow.

Loving yourself means making choices that allow you to care for the important person that you are.

If we keep this question in mind while planning our days, we will see that we actually have countless opportunities to add to our life force. Being around people and places we love and doing things that give us deep satisfaction, taking time to digest the events in our lives, being less busy, telling the truth, laughing a lot, eating right, exercising regularly, having long talks with those we love-these are among the best ways to nourish our vitality. Our life force thrives when we are completely engaged in the present moment.

What you can't be with, won't let you be.

Jung first gave us the term ‘shadow’ to refer to those parts of our personality that have been rejected out of fear, ignorance, shame, or lack of love. His basic notion of the shadow was simple: ‘the shadow is the person you would rather not be.’ He believed that integrating the shadow would have a profound impact, enabling us to rediscover a deeper source of our own spiritual life. ‘To do this,’ Jung said, ‘we are obliged to struggle with evil, confront the shadow, to integrate the devil. There is no other choice.’

To get to this place of a warrior’s courage, we must give up the stories that have ruled our lives and shatter the self-image we created to affirm our story.

Like the lotus flower that is born out of mud, we must honor the darkest parts of ourselves and the most painful of our life’s experiences, because they are what allow us to birth our most beautiful self.