We must meet & confront our wounds…
We must meet and confront our wounds and our shadows, walk up to our own Golgotha where our ego will suffer and be transformed. Meeting our wounds means creating the interior space to hold the reality of our experiences – our hopes, joys, terrors, hurts, triumphs, and finally our strength. It means accepting the anger and rage that breaks the mold of our denials, and frees us to experience the stages of grief inherent in every life, and in every experience of transformation. Leaving denial means seeing the poor dysfunctional men, women, and criminals within us, and going through the stages of grief from former hurts and events that shamed and diminished us.
Source - Bud Harris, Becoming Whole: A Jungian Guide to Individuation (The Quest for Consciousness and Living a Life with Soul).
Many things must also be talked about, which involves trust of a kind we are not accustomed to reposing in our fellow human beings – because we do not trust ourselves. Not only are we completely uneducated in this inward way of seeing; we are also subject to a certain apathy, an inertia which shrinks from the effort of learning to see, preferring the refuge of unconsciousness. Yet there is no alternative to the long, slow, laborious process of self-discovery through living each day as oneself, to bringing into being a truly conscious relationship with another person.
Inevitably, it hurts; any birth does.
One must dare to suffer the death of illusions, and the dissolution of projections. One must dare to be mistaken. One must dare to be vulnerable, to be inferior, to be magnanimous enough to allow for the failings of others because one is prone to them oneself; and one must dare to incur (and inflict) pain and wounded pride, as well , at times, as a thoroughly bruised and battered ego which needs to be shaken out of its self-complacency. One must retain a sense of humor. And one must be willing to accept the element of unconscious collusion in all situations, however much they may seem the fault of the other.
Nothing comes into a man's life that is not a reflection of something within himself.
Nothing is ever wholly the fault of another, for at the deepest roots of our being we are all one psyche, and the same life stream permeates us all. We possess in seed form every potential in human nature, from the darkest to the lightest; within each of us there exists the saint, the martyr, the murderer, the thief, the artist, the rapist, the teacher, the healer, the god, and the devil.
Individuals are different, but the collective psyche gives birth to us all.
Ultimately, one must acknowledge both the smallness and the greatnessof the personal self in all matters of choice, and one must stand between these opposites of being nothing and being everything.
Source - Liz Greene, Relating: An Astrological Guide to Living with Others on a Small Planet (Samuel Weiser 1977), pp. 279-280.
Art: Taisuke Mohri Sapporo, 'The Mirror'