Your shadow self

As everyone settles in to their new year's resolutions, let us not forget and deny who we truly are. There are two parts to every story - thus, there are two parts to your story. It is your personal Yin and Yang. Although we would love to only focus on the positive sides of ourselves, everyone has a dark side. Their shadow self.

Carl Jung  stated that "unfortunately there can be no doubt that man is, on the whole, less good than he imagines himself or wants to be. Everyone carries a shadow, and the less it is embodied in the individual's conscious life, the blacker and denser it is...if it is repressed and isolated from the consciousness, it never gets corrected."  Sigmund Freud called this the Id and described it as "the dark, inaccessible part of our personality."

Don't deny your shadow self. Don't use a new year's resolution as another coping mechanism and crutch to deal with that dark and inaccessible part of your personality. See this new year as a fresh start, a blank slate, to truly accept and embrace all of who you really are.

The question, O me! so sad, recurring--What good amid these, O me, O life?
 
Answer.
That you are here--that life exists and identity,
That the powerful play goes on, and you may contribute a verse.  
    - Walt Whitman