Today is brought to you by Carl Jung

Carl Jung was a deep philosophical thinker who examined all aspects of the self when writing about the human experience. He wrote from the perspective that we are spiritual beings, and that having a spiritual relationship with oneself truly helps us to understand the deeper aspects of who we are.

Many people confuse this notion of spiritual being-ness with religion and religious practices. The spirituality of Carl Jung's writings is that of facilitating a conversation within ourselves, a true dialogue with our deeper unconscious energies which move through each of us. Oftentimes, these deeper unconscious energies come to light when we find ourselves annoyed, angered, irritated, or upset with other people.

No fan of spiritual bypassing, Dr. Jung wrote, “People will do anything, no matter how absurd, to avoid facing their own souls.” What is spiritual bypassing? It is suppressing negative emotions because they aren't "spiritual enough" or we feel they do not serve us or will only bring more negativity to us.

Yet, when we suppress negative emotions by pretending they aren’t there, ignoring them, or by sweeping them under the rug in any number of ways, they don’t actually go anywhere. In fact they become much more toxic, because they are now subconsciously doing the very thing we feared: attracting more of the same energy. Repressed emotions get stuck in our subconscious. When we allow ourselves to feel them and to move out of our system, when we acknowledge them and engage them in a deep internal dialogue, we allow them to keep moving, eventually moving out of us.

I was watching a movie the other night, a true story, of a man on a camping trip. A terrible storm blew up, with lots of thunder and lightning. The center metal tent pole acted as a lightning rod, and in the blink of an eye the man was struck by lightning while inside his tent, and was rendered unconscious. What saved him is that the lightning passed through him, to the other boys in the tent with him, and his dog had taken the brunt of the electrical load. In being an open circuit rather than a closed circuit, the electrical charge could keep moving.

I learned of this open circuit concept in an electrician course I took a few years ago. Electricians are trained to keep an open circuit, not a closed one. That way an electrical charge could keep moving through rather than staying within one's body, causing death.

Negative emotions are like that as well. If we can allow them to strike us, render us immobile for a temporary time out, and to pass through us, while engaging in a soul conversation to discover the deeper message, the charge will dissipate and leave minimal damage. In this way, we can discharge the negativity rather than stuffing it in and carrying it with us, adding to it every time more negative emotions come our way.