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Want to Evolve? Start with the Parts of Yourself You Ignore
Why Your Shadow Holds the Wisdom You’ve Been Searching For
For most of my life, I thought progress meant becoming better.
Smarter. Kinder. More disciplined.
I thought growth was about polishing the parts of myself I was proud of and getting rid of the rest.
What I didn’t realize was that the parts I was so desperate to eliminate — the messy, dark, uncomfortable parts — were actually the key to everything I was looking for.
My next breakthrough didn’t come from a mountaintop revelation or a self-help book. It came from somewhere I never thought to look: inside my shadow.
Carl Jung, the Swiss psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, described the “shadow self” as the unconscious part of our psyche that holds everything we refuse to acknowledge about ourselves.
He wrote, “Everyone carries a shadow, and the less it is embodied in the individual’s conscious life, the blacker and denser it is.”
For years, my shadow loomed large, unacknowledged but deeply influential. And I had no idea.
Like many people, I was raised to be “good.”
