Sumaiyah Fatima

Studies have found that the same areas in the brain that light up in imaging scans when we break a leg are activated when we split up with our mate. As part of a reaction to a breakup, our brain experiences the departure of an attachment figure in a similar way to that in which it registers physical pain.

Observation is the ability to perceive the self even as we are experiencing an event. It places us in a larger frame of reference and broadens our perspective moment to moment. Put another way, self-observation allows us to see the fuller context in which we are living.

We can think of individuation in a sense perhaps closer to that intended by Jung, as the striving of the human organism toward wholeness, toward completion—an internal thrust toward self-realization or self-actualization reminiscent of Aristotle’s concept of entelechy. During the process of individuation, we become more and more completely that

Individuation is the fullest possible development of our personal selves in living relationship to the unknowable foundation that carries us along. It is the lifelong process of growing into the person we were meant to be—of becoming whole. Just as every acorn contains the blueprint for an oak tree, our possibilities and personalities develop over

“The everyday practice is simply to develop complete acceptance and openness to all situations, emotions, and people.”

The instruction is to relate compassionately with where we find ourselves and to begin to see our predicament as workable. We are stuck in patterns of grasping and fixating which cause the same thoughts and reactions to occur again and again and again. In this way we project our world. When we see that, even if it’s only for one second every three

When things fall apart and we’re on the verge of we know not what, the test for each of us is to stay on that brink and not concretize.