Quotes from Jenny Alexander

Jung called the Shadow 'the seat of creativity'. Embracing the Shadow means opening yourself up to possibilities, letting go of fixed certainties about the Self and the world. It means engaging with complications and conflicts, which are necessary aspects of all creative work.

The point about positive thinking, and later cognitive behavioural therapy, was that you could choose how you thought about life, and that how you thought about it changed not only your interpretation of what happened, but also the actual course of events.

I read, in a fascinating book by F David Peat called Blackfoot Physics, that although we in the West think of the brain as the seat of learning, in indigenous cultures it is the belly.

The call to dreams is a call to soul.

As Einstein said, knowledge is limited, but imagination is not.

I learnt that if you change the way you perceive a situation, you can change the way you feel about it, and changing the way you think in general, changes your experience of life.

cure his patients' neuroses because 'the illness is itself the cure' and I could easily see how that would work with psychological symptoms.

and more relaxed about living with uncertainty about the rest.

We have to meet the world as if our ideas about it are real, but holding the knowledge that they are only ideas; to act as if we know, but tolerate the truth of not knowing.

The more uncertain I have felt about myself,' Jung said, 'the more there has grown up in me a feeling of kinship with all things.