Accept me completely, with all my demons.

Something that is helping me a lot to develop peace within me, is accepting myself as I am. By this I don't just mean my physical being, which has also been a process. The most difficult thing has been learning to recognize those parts of me that I don't like, that I don't feel proud of, and that can even make me ashamed.

I see Jung's phrases on social media a lot: “No one becomes enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making their darkness conscious.” This phrase is completely true, however what it does not describe is the complexity of this process.

As Jung himself also said, we engage in a series of addictive, self-destructive, anesthetizing thoughts and behaviors, anything no matter how absurd it may seem, in order not to connect with our consciousness. And it is really only through making conscious that inner world that we perhaps reject with our entire being, that we can free ourselves from suffering.

What I have learned is that it is very difficult to become aware of our dark parts without compassion. But in order to have compassion with those parts of ourselves, it helps us understand that we develop these in order to survive. That is, at some point in our lives, we had to develop these self-destructive, addicted, disconnected parts of the world, etc. to be able to cope with situations that at that time we could not have survived without those resources, which today hurt us instead of helping us.

Certainly once one begins to see these rejected parts of ourselves, with a different perspective, in an understanding way, understanding why they are here in our being and with compassion towards ourselves, and we integrate them as part of our being, one begins to take strength from these parts and these parts stop directing our behavior. 

It is a process, complex, beautiful and liberating.