Sublime

Her being different serves to bring the family or group to consciousness where it has been living too long in the dark.

Stripping things of their spirit makes it easier to exploit them

In the attempt to safeguard ourselves against vulnerability, we send our gifts underground.

The feminine aspects of the self—the caring, questioning, inviting—are often neglected or dismissed.

In a single moment, I could see how many times over a lifetime I had similarly removed myself from life in order to spare others my presence, walking ahead before I could get left behind.

If you are surrounded by people who cross their eyes and look with disgust up at the ceiling when you are in the room, when you speak, when you act and react, then you are with the people who douse passions—yours and probably their own as well. These are not the people who care about you, your work, your life.

The next stage in human evolution corresponds to Maslow‘s “self-actualizing” level; it has been variously labeled authentic, integral, or Teal.21

If we look at all the characters in the dream as aspects of the self, we can see that it is we who are abandoning our commitment to ourselves every time we compare ourselves unfavourably to another.

Our later emotional growth will depend on our willingness to experience, accept, and integrate the rejected and hidden parts of ourselves—the parts we labeled “unsafe” or “bad.”