Saturday Insights — a 5-10 min article that simply aims to improve at least one aspect of your life. It's a combination between constant flow of motivation and distilled wisdom that compounds over time.

Every Saturday, you’ll get a new bite of insight that’ll allow you to get consistently better and open a completely new perspective.

Contents

• Mindfulness

• What You Resist Persists

• Solutions

• Takeaway

Hello readers, we’re so glad to have you back with us for today’s session.

Personal Note: We suggest taking notes of at least 1 (or more) points which you think can benefit yourself personally. By doing this, not only you’ll not forget it, but there’ll be 90% chance of you taking that action practically.

Before we get started, we’d like to take you through a visualization exercise.

Mindfulness

1. Find a comfortable relaxed position, and close your eyes.

2. Once you’re in position, draw your attention to your inhales and exhales.

3. Find a comfortable flow.

Subscribers, in your mind, imagine you’re running on a mountain road.

• You can hear your breath.

• You can hear your feet hitting the ground.

• You can see trees and rocks around you, and a hill in front of you.

You don’t know how long you’ve been running, but you love the feeling of your limbs moving, of your breath clicking, and of the plants and trees all around you.

Every step is like euphoria… you can hear birds chirping off in a distance and you can feel your feet on the ground.

For the next few moments, just imagine yourself here enjoying the movement and all the sounds around you.

If you need some walking, forest, and bird sounds to keep track of time and mind, here’s a 1 min track:

Listen now · 1:00

Carl Jung is one of the most renowned and respected psychiatrists ever.

He is the founder of Analytical Psychology, which is a theory that looks at how our individual experiences and our ancestral memories and experiences relate to each other to unconsciously dictate our behavior and thought.

Carl Jung and Sigmund Freud worked together on a joint vision of human psychology before they went their separate ways.

Jung’s research and vision differed from Freud’s, and the more they worked together, the more apparent it became that their ideas of psychology were too different to collaborate on. Shortly after they separated, Jung established Analytical Psychology —  a system designed to provide an alternative school of thought to Freud’s psychoanalysis.

As the years have gone by while studying Freud’s theories are interesting, they’re not really accepted in mainstream psychology anymore.

However, Carl Jung’s work on the other hand is still widely taught and accepted.

And today, we’d like to share some of Jung’s teachings because they’re parapsychology gold.

It’s an insightful eye-opening way to understand why you behave the way you do and what you can do to change it.

So, let’s start with one of his most popular quotes, shall we?

What You Resist Persists

This one is hung on walls of psychiatrists’ offices around the world.

As children, in order to deal with our experiences, we adapt our behaviors and actions to be more acceptable.

• If we were punished when we threw a tantrum, we would learn to suppress our anger.

• If our parents argued a lot and violently, we would learn to be quiet and shred carefully.

• If we were often criticized, we would be wary of trying new things.

But every experience and emotion that you suppress gets put into a corner of your mind that you hope to never see again.

But as you grow older, these memories, experiences, and emotions start rattling around — they start seeping out of the cracks in your mind’s room and into your everyday thoughts. And suddenly, you’re throwing a tantrum because you’re partner didn’t put the milk away.

Before even the big things would roll off your back, but now, you can’t even help but be vocal about the smallest of things.

In the moment, you get a surge of energy, but once that passes, you realize your reaction doesn’t even match the action or scenario.

You may feel guilty and confused.

Where did that intense reaction come from?

Well, for psychologists who follow Carl Jung’s philosophy, there’s a belief that the intense emotion and anger comes from previous experiences that have been buried and pushed away.

You may not be able to identify the experience immediately, it may take some time and thinking and reflecting, but eventually, you will get there.

And similarly, if you deny and resist any impactful experiences that you have now, they will eventually creep up on you — it may not be now or even next year or in 10 years, but eventually, they will come knocking and they’ll be destructive.

Solutions

The only way to deal with difficulty is to face it subscribers — acknowledge what happened and accept it as reality.

We all try to escape unpleasant realities, and we do pretty well when we are busy, but have you ever had those quiet moments and felt a wave of sadness wash over you? Everything seems fine yet you feel so unhappy.

We try to rationalize these thoughts and think them away, we try to find logical solutions for them, but still, they creep up! You may love your job, your relationships, your family, and your home, but there’s still a nagging feeling of unease.

Psychologists believe that this is your mind and body’s way of letting you know that something needs attention — it may not be what’s bothering you, but it is seeping into other areas of your life.

The only way to combat these thoughts is to address the underlying cause or causes.

Our brains don’t really like a deeper investigation — we prefer quick fixes and easy instant relief.

So, our neural pathways will look for strategies that we’ve used in the past because they’re readily available.

So, we have to make a conscious effort to take a different route this time. We need to be okay with tearing through overgrown cornfields and forging a new unfamiliar way.

So, how do we forge this path?

How do we properly deal with the traumatic sh*t that crops up without letting it mess with our lives now or in the future?...