This week, I set aside my original plan to talk about something that feels deeply necessary in light of recent events: our ability to hold complexity.
Holding complexity means being able to carry multiple — and often conflicting — emotions, beliefs, and desires at the same time. It’s a mark of maturity, and it’s essential for healing at every level: personal, relational, communal, even global.
In this episode, I explore:
- Why we “contain multitudes” (thank you, Walt Whitman).
- Carl Jung’s idea of the shadow, and why light and dark always come together.
- The parable of the Prodigal Son as a story of holding both/and.
- Dialectics: how two opposite truths can coexist without canceling each other out.
- What happens when we can’t hold complexity: fear, rigidity, stalled growth.
- How curiosity and compassion become the doorway and the key to transformation.
I close with a poem by Rainer Maria Rilke that reminds us to let both beauty and terror shape us, and to keep going.
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