Shadow Work Quotes:

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

- Connie Zweig

source: Connie Zweig, Steven Wolf (2009). “Romancing the Shadow: A Guide to Soul Work for a Vital, Authentic Life”, p.6, Wellspring/Ballantine

topic: Life, Shadow Work, Self

Shadow work is the path of the heart warrior.

- Carl Jung

topic: Heart, Warrior, Shadow Work

The Shadow is a moral problem that challenges the whole ego-personality, for no one can become conscious of the shadow without considerable moral effort. To become conscious of it involves recognizing the dark aspects of the personality as present and real. This act is the essential condition for any kind of self-knowledge, and it therefore, as a rule, meets with considerable resistance. Indeed, self-knowledge as a psychotherapuetic measure frequently requires much painstaking work extending over a long period of time.

- Carl Jung

topic: Real, Dark, Shadow Work, Long Periods Of Time, Shadow Self

Poems are always interested in what Ivan Illich called 'shadow work,' not least because that is no small part of their own way of working.

- Jane Hirshfield

source: "Of Amplitude There Is No Scraping Bottom: An Interview with Jane Hirshfield". Interview with Rebecca Olson, tinhouse.com. March 16, 2015.

topic: Shadow Work, Shadow, Way

Filling the conscious mind with ideal conceptions is a characteristic of Western theosophy, but not the confrontation with the Shadow and the world of darkness. One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious. The latter procedure, however, is disagreeable and therefore not popular.

- Carl Jung

topic: Light, Darkness, Mind, Individuation, Inner Darkness

Everyone carries a shadow, and the less it is embodied in the individual's conscious life, the blacker and denser it is. At all counts, it forms an unconscious snag, thwarting our most well-meant intentions.

- Carl Jung

topic: Shadow, Intention, Individual, Shadow Work

The true work of art is but a shadow of the divine perfection.

- Michelangelo

topic: Christian, Art, Perfection, Fine Arts, Inspirational Art

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

- Connie Zweig

topic: Work, Shadow, Who We Are, Shadow Work

Maybe the only thing each of us can see is our own shadow. Carl Jung called this his shadow work. He said we never see others. Instead we see only aspects of ourselves that fall over them. Shadows. Projections. Our associations. The same way old painters would sit in a tiny dark room and trace the image of what stood outside a tiny window, in the bright sunlight. The camera obscura. Not the exact image, but everything reversed or upside down.

- Chuck Palahniuk

topic: Fall, Dark, Shadow, Jung, Camera Obscura