"Romancing The Shadow: Illuminating the Dark Side of The Soul"

I remembered that I got books from the library last Thursday, so I went through them, and picked up "Romancing The Shadow: Illuminating the Dark Side of The Soul" and is written by Connie Zweig and Steve Wolf, both Ph.D.s. It is an EXCELLENT book so far (I am only 45 pages in as of right now). Here are some of the thing I have found useful in it so far.

• Quoting Carl Jung, "The meeting with oneself is, at first, the meeting with one's own shadow. The shadow is a tight passage, a narrow door, whose painful constriction no one is spared who goes down to the deep well. But one must learn to know oneself in order to know who one is. For what comes after the door is, surprisingly enough, a boundless expanse full of unprecedented uncertainty, with apparently no inside and no outside, no above and no below, no here and no there, no mine and no thine, no good and no bad. It is the world of water...where I am indivisibly this and that; where I experience the other in myself and the other-than-myself experiences me"

I think that one goes along very well with what I have been thinking about what I call "self-integration". Or as Hegel would say, the 'synthesis' of opposites. It also touches upon the 'non-duality' of reality.

• "The shadow rears its head at midlife. During that time, we do not need to go in search of the shadow; it comes to find us. Whereas the tasks of the first half of life typically involve creating stability in love and work, the tasks of the second half involve creating consciousness of that which has been neglected and ignored. Thus a midlife crisis often feels like the notorious dark night of the soul. Frequently, the result may mean instability in love and work, the feeling of running out of gas, the urge to flee for the unlived life. We suggest that the first half of life is for developing the shadow, while the second half is for romancing the shadow....In what ways do you yearn for change....when you are eighty years old, what will you regret having done or not done?"