Inner Work Quotes

“The purpose of learning to work with the unconscious is not just to resolve our conflicts or deal with our neuroses. We find there a deep source of renewal, growth, strength, and wisdom. We connect with the source of our evolving character; we cooperate with the process whereby we bring the total self together; we learn to tap that rich lode of energy and intelligence that waits within.”
― Robert A. Johnson, Inner Work: Using Dreams and Active Imagination for Personal Growth

“It is perhaps this human tendency to see everything as “good” or “bad” that creates the greatest obstacle to accepting and utilizing our varied inner personalities.”
― Robert A. Johnson, Inner Work: Using Dreams and Active Imagination for Personal Growth

“Each of us is a microcosm in which the universal process actualizes itself.”
― Robert A. Johnson, Inner Work: Using Dreams and Active Imagination for Personal Growth

“Each of us is part heroine or hero and part coward, part parent and part child, part saint and part thief. It is in learning to identify these great archetypal motifs within ourselves, learning to honor each one as a legitimate human trait, learning to live out the energy of each in a constructive way, that we make inner work a great odyssey of the spirit.”
― Robert A. Johnson, Inner Work: Using Dreams and Active Imagination for Personal Growth

“There is a universal sense in humans that there is unity and cohesion at the heart of life, and that it is possible for us to be consciously aware of it. So far as I can discover, it is this awareness of the primordial and essential unity of the human psyche that most religions and philosophies have referred to as enlightenment.”
― Robert A. Johnson, Inner Work: Using Dreams and Active Imagination for Personal Growth

“if we don’t go to the spirit, the spirit comes to us as neurosis.”
― Robert A. Johnson, Inner Work: Using Dreams and Active Imagination for Personal Growth

“From Jung I took courage to tell my patients not to put their faith in abstract concepts. Put your faith in your own unconscious, your own dreams. If you would learn from your dreams, then work with them. Live with the symbols in your dreams as though they were your physical companions in daily life. You will discover, if you do, that they really are your companions in the inner world.”
― Robert A. Johnson, Inner Work: Using Dreams and Active Imagination for Personal Growth

“The inner self is not only plural: Jung found that the psyche manifests itself as an androgyny, containing both feminine and masculine energies.”
― Robert A. Johnson, Inner Work: Using Dreams and Active Imagination for Personal Growth

“In fact, no one “makes up” anything in the imagination. The material that appears in the imagination has to originate in the unconscious.”
― Robert A. Johnson, Inner Work: Using Dreams and Active Imagination for Personal Growth

“Our egos divide the world into positive and negative, good and bad. Most aspects of our shadows, these qualities that we see as “negative,” would in fact be valuable strengths if we made them conscious. Characteristics that look immoral, barbaric, or embarrassing to us are the “negative” side of a valuable energy, a capacity we could make use of. You will never find anything in the unconscious that will not be useful and good when it is made conscious and brought to the right level.”
― Robert A. Johnson, Inner Work: Using Dreams and Active Imagination for Personal Growth

“The inner, unconscious model of the individual is like the plan for a cathedral: At first, as the plan is translated into physical reality, only the general contours can be see. After a time, a small part of the actual structure is finished enough to give an intimation of what the final work of art will be. As years pass the edifice rises, stone by stone, until finally the last blocks are in place and the finishing touches are complete. Only then is the magnificent vision of the architect revealed.”
― Robert A. Johnson, Inner Work: Using Dreams and Active Imagination for Personal Growth

“You must understand that when you approach the unconscious you are dealing with one the most powerful and autonomous forces in human experience.”
― Robert A. Johnson, Inner Work: Using Dreams and Active Imagination for Personal Growth

“Once we become sensitive to dreams, we discover that every dynamic in a dream is manifesting itself in some way in our practical lives”
― Robert A. Johnson, Inner Work: Using Dreams and Active Imagination for Personal Growth

“individuation also consists to a great extent in bringing the different inner persons within us together in a synthesis. Individuation is not only becoming conscious of these inner energy systems, it is also bringing relatedness and unity among them. The end product of this evolution is something we can sense, feel, and describe intuitively even though we have not yet attained it—the sense of wholeness, of being completed. The wholeness of our total being, and our consciousness of the quality of wholeness, is expressed in an archetype. Jung called this archetype the self.”
― Robert A. Johnson, Inner Work: Using Dreams and Active Imagination for Personal Growth

“we sometimes feel as though dreaming is the imagination at work during sleep and the imagination is the dream world flowing through us while we are awake.”
― Robert A. Johnson, Inner Work: Using Dreams and Active Imagination for Personal Growth

“any form of meditation that opens our minds to the messages of the unconscious can be called “inner work.” Humankind has developed an infinite variety of approaches to the inner world, each adapted to a stage of history, a culture, a religion, or a view of our relationship to the spirit. A few examples are yogic meditation, zazen in Zen Buddhism, Christian contemplative prayer,”
― Robert A. Johnson, Inner Work: Using Dreams and Active Imagination for Personal Growth

“Every symbol in your dream has a special, individual connotation that belongs to you alone, just as the dream is ultimately yours alone. Even when a symbol has a collective or universal meaning, it still has a personal coloration for you and can be fully explained only from within you.”
― Robert A. Johnson, Inner Work: Using Dreams and Active Imagination for Personal Growth

“Our dreams constantly speak to us of our beliefs and attitudes. They are of such crucial importance because they largely determine what we do, how we relate to people, and how we react to most situations. Most of us are not remotely aware of how much we are controlled by our beliefs, even less aware of how unconscious our attitude systems are. No one decides what beliefs and attitudes he or she will start off with. We all begin our lives with a set of attitudes that are dictated to us by the world outside us—family, tribe, or society. Generally, we don’t know we have them. If we are consciously aware of them as our beliefs, we assume that they are right; it rarely occurs to us to question them. At a certain point our dreams begin to challenge them and point them out to us, for the process of inner growth demands that we examine consciously everything that motivates us. If you look at the belief systems floating around in your dreams, you may find a power-mad dictator, a great general, a saint, or a sage living in you, with a complete matching set of attitudes. When this image appears, you should ask: “What set of beliefs, what opinions, does this character function out of? Do I unconsciously hold that same opinion without realizing it?”
― Robert A. Johnson, Inner Work: Using Dreams and Active Imagination for Personal Growth

“Our dreams constantly speak to us of our beliefs and attitudes. They are of such crucial importance because they largely determine what we do, how we relate to people, and how we react to most situations. Most of us are not remotely aware of how much we are controlled by our beliefs, even less aware of how unconscious our attitude systems are. No one decides what beliefs and attitudes he or she will start off with. We all begin our lives with a set of attitudes that are dictated to us by the world outside us—family, tribe, or society.”
― Robert A. Johnson, Inner Work: Using Dreams and Active Imagination for Personal Growth

“Curiously, people usually resist their good qualities even more emphatically than they resist facing their negative qualities. There may be a character in your dream who behaves in a noble and courageous way. Since that inner person is part of you, its qualities are also yours. So long as you are facing your negative and immature traits squarely, you also have a duty to acknowledge the fine qualities in yourself, and to live them consciously.”
― Robert A. Johnson, Inner Work: Using Dreams and Active Imagination for Personal Growth

“It is this awareness, this conscious participation in the imaginal event, that transforms it from mere passive fantasy to Active Imagination. The coming together of conscious mind and unconscious mind on the common ground of the imaginal plane gives us an opportunity to break down some of the barriers that separate the ego from the unconscious, to set up a genuine flow of communication between the two levels of the psyche, to resolve some of our neurotic conflicts with the unconscious, and thus to learn more about who we are as individuals.”
― Robert A. Johnson, Inner Work: Using Dreams and Active Imagination for Personal Growth

“We incarnate the archetypes with our physical lives. Our individual lives are containers in which they materialize on the face of the earth, the battlegrounds where they fight their eternal, cosmic battles, the stages on which they perform the universal drama that becomes, in one particularized form, every human life.”
― Robert A. Johnson, Inner Work: Using Dreams and Active Imagination for Personal Growth

“The unconscious is a marvelous universe of unseen energies, forces, forms of intelligence—even distinct personalities—that live within us. It is a much larger realm than most of us realize, one that has a complete life of its own running parallel to the ordinary life we live day to day. The unconscious is the secret source of much of our thought, feeling, and behavior. It influences us in ways that are all the more powerful because unsuspected.”
― Robert A. Johnson, Inner Work: Using Dreams and Active Imagination for Personal Growth

“People were startled to hear that if we don’t go to the spirit, the spirit comes to us as neurosis. This is the immediate, practical connection between psychology and religion in our time.”
― Robert A. Johnson, Inner Work: Using Dreams and Active Imagination for Personal Growth

“Our egos divide the world into positive and negative, good and bad. Most aspects of our shadows, these qualities that we see as “negative,” would in fact be valuable strengths if we made them conscious. Characteristics that look immoral, barbaric, or embarrassing to us are the “negative” side of a valuable energy, a capacity we could make use of. You will never find anything in the unconscious that will not be useful and good when it is made conscious and brought to the right level. What part of you will be hidden behind this symbol, the thief? Perhaps a lively trickster, with all sorts of surprising talents. Perhaps a juvenile delinquent in you who has never been allowed to grow up and put his heroic urge into something useful and mature. Perhaps it is Dionysus, who has had to hide out in the unconscious because you have no natural place for his ecstatic and lyrical spirit in the midst of your purposive life. Only you will be able to say what part of you is represented by this symbol if it appears in your dream—for it is your own unconscious that holds the clues. But you may be sure that if you give it its place, and hear what it has to say, it will be revealed as a valuable part of your inner self. Curiously, people usually resist their good qualities even more emphatically than they resist facing their negative qualities. There may be a character in your dream who behaves in a noble and courageous way. Since that inner person is part of you, its qualities are also yours. So long as you are facing your negative and immature traits squarely, you also have a duty to acknowledge the fine qualities in yourself, and to live them consciously.”
― Robert A. Johnson, Inner Work: Using Dreams and Active Imagination for Personal Growth

“Sometimes men envisioned a feminine muse who inspired them to poetry, literature, art, or refined sensibility. Women, by contrast, often imagined the soul as a masculine presence that provided wisdom and strength.”
― Robert A. Johnson, Inner Work: Using Dreams and Active Imagination for Personal Growth