Quotes from Bud Harris

It takes more than just awareness for us to change. It takes courage and humility and the willingness to occasionally feel like fools and laugh at ourselves.

When Dr. Jung said we must be able to look forward in old age to the next day and to look forward to the great adventure that is ahead, he was making life's "imperative to grow" personal. As long as we are alive, we must be able to dream of the future, of a better world or better ways of life. We are also invited by our greater Self to dream new dreams of creativity and fresh ways of expressing ourselves, as many great artists have into their nineties.

Personal growth will cause a ripple effect as the growth in consciousness of enough people, one by one, can create general change, and lasting social improvements.

When we can trust that it's we who think, feel, and act rather than the ghosts of our parents or well-trained robots, we learn that we can also love, be in relationships, and be in the world without losing ourselves.

There are three aspects of the feminine element of being in the Jungian approach. The first one is being grounded within one's own nature. The second one is the capacity to then be truly related to another person and to other people. And the third aspect, which is another aspect of eros, is how personally related we are to life.

The journey of individuation is in this sense a continuous coming home to ourselves that gives us the ongoing courage to face the suffering involved in allowing our buried talents to emerge, and to realize the innate wisdom within us—that can only be forged by the fires of feelings and passion that bring our soul to an inner glow.

The meaning of 'whole' or 'wholeness' is to make holy or to heal. The descent into the depths will bring healing. It is the way to the total being, to the treasure which suffering mankind is forever seeking, which is hidden in the place guarded by terrible danger." – C. G. JUNG, C. W. VOL. 18, PARA. 270

Cultivating self-love is an odyssey with moments of difficulty and joy. It's an excursion into knowing ourselves, learning to accept and deal with what we discover... and struggling with our fear of allowing in a little madness to set us free.

What have you done with my life?

In fact, we are chosen for it, by something deep within us. And, our awakening—the crack in the illusion of how we are living—our call, generally comes in the form of a personal crisis that lasts, repeats, or gets worse until we begin to answer the call or repress it with such force that it becomes a serious set of emotional or physical symptoms, and we end up in lives that are spiritually and emotionally congealed.

It is no small task to learn to see our depression, anxiety, weight, relationship problems, addictions, and illnesses as efforts of our psyche to heal us—as symptoms that are trying to get us to change, in ways that will help our lives become better on a more profound level. Jung calls learning to value our problems and how they can lead us into becoming transformed, the "teleological aspects" of symptoms.