How Do We Celebrate Our Mothers? A real-world poem for Mother’s Day How do we celebrate our mothers — The ones who are here and the ones who aren’t? The ones who gave their lives for us, And the ones who walked away. The ones who lovingly directed our lives as if we were art projects, And the ones who never knew how to welcome us … Read More
Understanding hatred Previously, we looked at our tendency to express our hatred instead of working with it more deeply. Often, we can become obsessive about our hate targets and project all sorts of troubling material onto them. The fascinating thing about hatred is that you choose your hate targets not simply because they’re odious, but because they’re specifically odious in ways that cause specific, shadow-driven hatequakes … Read More
Hatred: The Shadowy and Necessary Emotion As we take a tour through the emotional realm, we’ve started with the Anger Family emotions that help you set boundaries: Anger, shame/guilt, and apathy (the protective mask for anger). Now, we’ll look at an emotion that can set boundaries in very troubling ways if you don’t know how to work with it: hatred. Actually, we’ll continue to look at … Read More
When people think of empathy, they tend to see it as a soft skill — as a yielding and pleasing kind of behavior. They think: If you listen to me and agree with me and make me feel good, that’s empathy. If you fix my problems and soothe everything, that’s empathy. Empathy equals niceness. But there’s actually a deeper form of empathy that transcends mere niceness … Read More
In preparing to talk about hatred, we’ve looked at the shadow, which is the part of us that is suppressed, disowned, or dishonored. The Jungian tradition of shadow work shows us how to retrieve material that has been forced (or has fallen) into the shadow. If we don’t know how to work with it, our shadow material can become quite toxic. We can even create entire … Read More
In the 1930s, there was an excellent radio show called The Shadow that enchanted millions of people, my father included. The Shadow was a serialized detective show, and each week, the announcer would ask in a deep baritone voice: “Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men? The Shadow knows!“ In 1937, the young Orson Wells lent his voice to the radio show and … Read More