Love and Awakening, John Welwood

“What you don’t own, owns you.” I could see how being a bitch owned me, I worried about it all the time, but I still didn’t want to own it.

By choosing not to allow parts of ourselves to exist, we are forced to expend huge amounts of psychic energy to keep them beneath the surface.

Poet and author Robert Bly describes the shadow as an invisible bag that each of us carries around on our backs.

“the shadow is the person you would rather not be.”

To be divine is to be whole and to be whole is to be everything: the positive and the negative, the good and the bad, the holy man and the devil.

When we suppress any feeling or impulse, we are also suppressing its polar opposite. If we deny our ugliness, we lessen our beauty. If we deny our fear, we minimize our courage. If we deny our greed, we also reduce our generosity.

We fear ourselves. We fear every thought and feeling we have ever repressed.

We all contain the imprint of the entire universe within ourselves.