Buddhist teacher Tara Brach shares a well-known and instructive myth about the Buddha and his compassionate interactions with the shadow god Mara:   You may be familiar with images of the Buddha [Siddhartha] meditating all night long under the Bodhi tree until he experienced full liberation. The shadow god Mara (who represents the universal energies of…

Bad situation … good situation. — ZM Dae Soen Sunim

“One way to get free of attachment is to cultivate the witness consciousness, to become a neutral observer of your own life. The witness place inside you is simple awareness, the part of you that is aware of everything — just noticing, watching, not judging, just being present, being here now.    The witness is…

The Overly-Defended Ego  Father Richard explains the ego’s role in creating the shadow self:   The ego is that part of the self that wants to be significant, central, and important by itself, apart from anybody else. It wants to be both separate and superior. It is defended and self-protective by its very nature. It must eliminate…

What the Shadow Reveals drawn from Swiss psychotherapist Carl Gustav Jung (1875–1961) On a personal level, our shadow is all we would not be, often all our parents told us was bad behavior; it is all we would improve, all we would fix and get over, move on from.… Our enemies can tell us what…

“Being conscious is cutting through your own melodrama and being right here. Exist in no mind, be empty, here now, and trust that as a situation arises, out of you will come what is necessary to deal with that situation including the use of your intellect when appropriate. Your intellect need not be constantly held…