Quotes from Connie Zweig

There is an enemy-maker in each of us. We make enemies of the people we love the most and the people we know the least.

The rewards are profound. Shadow-work enables us to alter our self-sabotaging behavior so that we can achieve a more self-directed life.

Shadow-making happens in families and makes us who we are. It leads to shadow-work, which makes us who we can become.

This being human is a guest-house. Every morning a new arrival. A joy, a depression, a meanness, some momentary awareness comes as an unexpected visitor. Welcome and entertain them all! Even if they're a crowd of sorrows, who violently sweep your house empty of its furniture, still, treat each guest honorably. He may be clearing you out

The inner urge that sets us seeking is itself the thing we are looking for. Karlfried Graf Durckheim

Although at times it may be frustrating and even painful to hold the tension of your yearning rather than to submerge it, when you align with it you align with the force of evolution itself.

Meditation also appears to slow age-related degeneration in our brains. Neurologist Eileen Luders at UCLA looked at the link between age and the volume of the brain's white matter, which typically shrinks with age. She reported that this decrease was less prominent in meditators as compared to non-meditators. On average, the brains of long-term practitioners appeared to be seven and a half years younger at the age of fifty than the brains of non-meditators.

Spiritual Practices In Hindu myth, Hanuman, servant of the god Ram, tells Ram: "When I don't know who I am, I serve you. When I know who I am, I am you." Can you see the evolution of your soul through service? How can you be the change you long to see in the world?

As Ram Dass puts it, "The ego is a tiny room. But the soul can merge into the One.

And this is what I mean by "aging from the inside out." If we merely move around our internal furniture, redesigning our roles and maintaining high gear, we do not see through the ego's charade. Instead, we permit it to continue its endless efforts at control. And this does not carry us deeper into our spiritual center, beyond ego.

This is a key task of late life—to recognize early self-concepts and rejected parts, begin to repair them, and cultivate a broader, deeper sense of identity.

our early personal histories and unmet emotional needs influence our adult spiritual quests and religious desires.

Hence no progress or growth is possible until the shadow is adequately confronted—and confronting means more than merely knowing about it. It is not until we have truly been shocked into seeing ourselves as we really are, instead of as we wish or hopefully assume we are, that we can take the first step toward individual reality.

To admit frankly, our capacity for evil hinges on our breaking through our pseudoinnocence. So long as we preserve our one-dimensional thinking, we can cover up our deeds by pleading innocent. This antediluvian escape from conscience is no longer possible. We are responsible for the effect of our actions, and we are also responsible for becoming as aware as we can of these effects.

We should be as wary of psychologizing political events as we should be of politicizing psychological events.

Life consists of achieving good not apart from evil but in spite of it.

The sad truth is that man's real life consists of a complex of inexorable opposites—day and night, birth and death, happiness and misery, good and evil. We are not even sure that one will prevail against the other, that good will overcome evil, or joy defeat pain. Life is a battleground. It always has been, and always will be; and if it were not so, existence would come to an end. C. G. JUNG

In late life, we can pose this question internally no matter what activity we are engaged in, whether we are quietly drinking a cup of tea, sitting in a noisy meeting, cooking a festive family dinner, or running a marathon. Our identity or self-sense at any moment can be rooted in ego or rooted in soul. It's not what we're doing but how we're doing—our state of mind—that makes the difference.

Jung has pointed out that bitterness and wisdom form a pair of opposites. "Where there is bitterness, wisdom is lacking, and where wisdom is, there can be no bitterness." Tears, sorrow, and disappointment are bitter, he says. But wisdom is the comforter in suffering.

like the archetype of Peter Pan. But, he writes, "we are betrayed in the very same close relationships where primal trust is possible. We can be truly betrayed only where we truly trust—by brothers, lovers, wives, husbands, not by enemies, not by strangers. The greater the love, the greater the betrayal. Trust has in it the seed of betrayal.

we are betrayed in the very same close relationships where primal trust is possible. We can be truly betrayed only where we truly trust—by brothers, lovers, wives, husbands, not by enemies, not by strangers. The greater the love, the greater the betrayal. Trust has in it the seed of betrayal.

The "central defect of evil," says Scott Peck, "is not the sin but the refusal to acknowledge it."1 What we cannot face will catch us from behind. When we gain the true strength to acknowledge our imperfect moral condition, we are no longer possessed by demons.

As Gandhi put it, "Those who say that religion has nothing to do with politics do not know what religion really means.

the shadow is not necessarily always an opponent. In fact, he is exactly like any human being with whom one has to get along, sometimes by giving in, sometimes by resisting, sometimes by giving love—whatever the situation requires. The shadow becomes hostile only when he is ignored or misunderstood.