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Three daily habits
Jungian analyst James Hollis, 84, encourages his patients to write these on the refrigerator. Shut up means remembering that someone is always suffering more than you, which makes gratitude a daily practice, both giving it and receiving it. Suit up means preparing: taking care of health, showering, brushing teeth, getting organized, because no one performs well on an exam, in a relationship, or at work without doing the homework.
Showing up
Show up means filling the outward roles everyone has: father, mother, sister, brother, teacher, mechanic, engineer, podcaster. Nobody gets to freeload. Carried on alone for ten, twenty, or thirty years, those three most often leave people pretty miserable.
Time with the unconscious
Once a day, a person also needs to step out of role fulfillment and stimulus-response mode: sit quietly, draw, or listen to music with nothing to accomplish. The unconscious mind speaks in emotions and analogies, and it feeds back what he called a person's deepest heart's desires. A calling gets found while working hard at something else, then at something hated a little less, until the pull toward the key self begins.
How does gratitude change how people feel?
In a 2003 study in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Robert Emmons and Michael McCullough asked one group to list things they were grateful for each week for ten weeks. Other groups listed hassles or neutral events. The gratitude group reported more optimism and fewer physical complaints. The study helped launch modern research on gratitude.
What did Jung mean by becoming whole?
Carl Jung called the lifelong process of integrating conscious and unconscious parts of the personality individuation. He used the word self for the center of that wholeness, as distinct from the everyday ego. Jung introduced the idea in the early twentieth century. He thought dreams and images were how the unconscious communicated.
What does the brain do in quiet moments?
In 2001, Marcus Raichle at Washington University in St. Louis described a set of regions that become more active when a person is resting and not focused on a task. He named it the default mode network. It is linked with remembering, imagining the future, and thinking about oneself. The brain burns nearly as much energy at rest as it does during a demanding task.
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