Make it Conscious - Inner Work Exercises

In this exercise, we're going to be working with the shadow. The shadow is everything we don't like about ourselves that we also hide from conscious awareness, and it exists for good reason. We have to take a stance in life, and any time we do that, something else must be left out. But if there's anywhere that our shadow gets revealed, it's often in our relationships with other people. Some of the best opportunities to understand our shadow are in conflict with others, in falling outs, in the feedback that was actually given to us explicitly by other people. In this exercise we're going to be relaxing some of those defences that may have served a purpose at times and using conflict as a mirror for shadow material.

This exercise uses active imagination, a technique developed by Carl Jung for engaging directly with unconscious contents, facilitating genuine psychological transformation.

Work with Max: Book a free Perspectives call — https://makeitconscious.com/coaching/

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Free Personality Dynamics Assessment: https://makeitconscious.com/pda/

Discover your psychological type and development pathway.

Hestia - The hearth of the Make it Conscious community: https://hestia.makeitconscious.com/

Premium courses, active imagination exercises, and community for Jungian depth work.

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Playlists & Series:

Active Imagination Exercises - https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLeuFwuWK5O2MMxqoPMkk9eEbVIrbwq-7B&si=NgEZKF8F2ztgqEpb

Mapping the Shadow Series - https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLeuFwuWK5O2PriUHnSAKpaf5eOpy27Nsw

More from Make it Conscious:

MiC Podcast - https://open.spotify.com/show/6AxGzV3sa6kK2NKSKDyuJa?si=4153da0bb1a243a3

Inner Work Exercises Podcast - https://open.spotify.com/show/4OMC4T1PNsA951dvvHhYMs?si=72af3c85c97b4536

Blog - https://makeitconscious.com/blog/

Connect:

Instagram - https://instagram.com/makeitconscious

X - https://x.com/makeitconscious

Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=61571759044093

In this exercise we're going to be working with anger. Anger is one of the most misunderstood emotions across virtually every tradition — religious, therapeutic, cultural. This is quite simply because most do not differentiate between conscious and unconscious anger, or at least having a conscious relationship to anger or not. As Alan Watts once said, "The idea that there are no wrong feelings is an immensely threatening one to people who are afraid to feel." Anger gets treated as the problem when actually it's the relationship to anger that is the problem. Just like every other emotion, anger exists for a reason. It is a signal. It has intelligence. It often knows something before the rest of you does.

This exercise uses active imagination, a technique developed by Carl Jung for engaging directly with unconscious contents, facilitating genuine psychological transformation.

🔥 Extended exercises and premium packs available in Hestia: https://hestia.makeitconscious.com/

----------

Free Personality Dynamics Assessment: https://makeitconscious.com/pda/

Discover your psychological type and development pathway.

Hestia - The hearth of the Make it Conscious community: https://hestia.makeitconscious.com/

Premium courses, active imagination exercises, and community for Jungian depth work.

Coaching with Max: Book a free 30-minute Perspectives Call: https://calendly.com/makeitconscious/30min

----------

Playlists & Series:

Active Imagination Exercises - https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLeuFwuWK5O2MMxqoPMkk9eEbVIrbwq-7B&si=NgEZKF8F2ztgqEpb

Mapping the Shadow Series - https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLeuFwuWK5O2PriUHnSAKpaf5eOpy27Nsw

More from Make it Conscious:

MiC Podcast - https://open.spotify.com/show/6AxGzV3sa6kK2NKSKDyuJa?si=4153da0bb1a243a3

Inner Work Exercises Podcast - https://open.spotify.com/show/4OMC4T1PNsA951dvvHhYMs?si=72af3c85c97b4536

Blog - https://makeitconscious.com/blog/

Connect:

Instagram - https://instagram.com/makeitconscious

X - https://x.com/makeitconscious

In this exercise, we're working with conflict — interpersonal conflict. This is a good exercise to do if you've had a conflict recently, especially one with an emotional charge that lingered and where you know there's something more to uncover about yourself and the situation.

Interpersonal conflict is one of the best windows into understanding ourselves and our own minds. But whatever self-knowledge conflict has to offer, you often cannot think your way to all of it. A direct encounter with unconscious content produces what thinking alone cannot. And when it comes to conflict this can get tricky, because the ego has a real stake in it. There's also the opposite trap: assuming it's all projection, or all your own mind creating it. The goal is to see clearly, and that means being willing to look in both directions — at the inner and the outer shadow work.

This exercise uses active imagination, a technique developed by Carl Jung for engaging directly with unconscious contents, facilitating genuine psychological transformation.

🔥 Extended exercises and premium packs available in Hestia: https://hestia.makeitconscious.com/

----------

Free Personality Dynamics Assessment: https://makeitconscious.com/pda/

Discover your psychological type and development pathway.

Hestia - The hearth of the Make it Conscious community: https://hestia.makeitconscious.com/

Premium courses, active imagination exercises, and community for Jungian depth work.

----------

Playlists & Series:

Active Imagination Exercises - https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLeuFwuWK5O2MMxqoPMkk9eEbVIrbwq-7B&si=NgEZKF8F2ztgqEpb

Mapping the Shadow Series - https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLeuFwuWK5O2PriUHnSAKpaf5eOpy27Nsw

More from Make it Conscious:

MiC Podcast - https://open.spotify.com/show/6AxGzV3sa6kK2NKSKDyuJa?si=4153da0bb1a243a3

Inner Work Exercises Podcast - https://open.spotify.com/show/4OMC4T1PNsA951dvvHhYMs?si=72af3c85c97b4536

Blog - https://makeitconscious.com/blog/

Connect:

Instagram - https://instagram.com/makeitconscious

X - https://x.com/makeitconscious

In this guided active imagination exercise, we're going to be working with the shadow. The shadow is everything that we don't like about ourselves and that we keep out of conscious awareness. Any time we take a stance in life, something else gets left out, and this creates a number of challenges. What gets left out must find expression somehow, and is a vital and necessary part of our personality that must be reconciled with in developing self-knowledge.

If there's anywhere that the shadow gets challenged and revealed, it's in our relationships with other people. Their responses to us - particularly the quiet ones, the unexplained distance and withdrawal - are not under our control, which is precisely what makes other people one of the most reliable mirrors for reflecting back our shadow material. Working with shadow material is not about becoming liked by everybody or reforming yourself for social gain, but about understanding where you may have become one-sided and, through that, developing greater self-knowledge and cultivating deeper relationships with others as well as with yourself.

This exercise uses active imagination, a technique developed by Carl Jung for engaging directly with unconscious contents, facilitating genuine psychological transformation.

🔥 Extended exercises and premium packs available in Hestia: https://hestia.makeitconscious.com/

----------

Free Personality Dynamics Assessment: https://makeitconscious.com/pda/

Discover your psychological type and development pathway.

Hestia - The hearth of the Make it Conscious community: https://hestia.makeitconscious.com/

Premium courses, active imagination exercises, and community for Jungian depth work.

----------

Playlists & Series:

Active Imagination Exercises - https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLeuFwuWK5O2MMxqoPMkk9eEbVIrbwq-7B&si=NgEZKF8F2ztgqEpb

Mapping the Shadow Series - https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLeuFwuWK5O2PriUHnSAKpaf5eOpy27Nsw

More from Make it Conscious:

MiC Podcast - https://open.spotify.com/show/6AxGzV3sa6kK2NKSKDyuJa?si=4153da0bb1a243a3

Inner Work Exercises Podcast - https://open.spotify.com/show/4OMC4T1PNsA951dvvHhYMs?si=72af3c85c97b4536

Blog - https://makeitconscious.com/blog/

Connect:

Instagram - https://instagram.com/makeitconscious

X - https://x.com/makeitconscious

The house is a symbol that immediately incites something in all of us. The psyche of its own accord very regularly produces the symbol of a home or a house to communicate the self. There is so much in the symbol that relates to the structure of our minds - houses have multiple floors, multiple rooms, high parts and low parts, underground sections. They contain various objects and various different people, each also reflecting back aspects of ourselves.

Carl Jung, in Memories, Dreams, Reflections, describes a dream he had of a house in which each floor was a different style from a different era. The ground floor medieval, the cellar Roman. This experience shaped his entire model of mind. There is also much to be said for the appearance of a house as the hard outer shell or facade we present, and the inner realm we protect. Home is a feeling state - a sense of belonging, safety, the ability to be yourself.

This exercise uses active imagination, a technique developed by Carl Jung for engaging directly with unconscious contents, facilitating genuine psychological transformation.

🔥 Extended exercises and premium packs available in Hestia: https://hestia.makeitconscious.com/

----------

Free Personality Dynamics Assessment: https://makeitconscious.com/pda/

Discover your psychological type and development pathway.

Hestia - The hearth of the Make it Conscious community: https://hestia.makeitconscious.com/

Premium courses, active imagination exercises, and community for Jungian depth work.

----------

Playlists & Series:

Active Imagination Exercises - https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLeuFwuWK5O2MMxqoPMkk9eEbVIrbwq-7B&si=NgEZKF8F2ztgqEpb

Mapping the Shadow Series - https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLeuFwuWK5O2PriUHnSAKpaf5eOpy27Nsw

More from Make it Conscious:

MiC Podcast - https://open.spotify.com/show/6AxGzV3sa6kK2NKSKDyuJa?si=4153da0bb1a243a3

Inner Work Exercises Podcast - https://open.spotify.com/show/4OMC4T1PNsA951dvvHhYMs?si=72af3c85c97b4536

Blog - https://makeitconscious.com/blog/

Connect:

Instagram - https://instagram.com/makeitconscious

X - https://x.com/makeitconscious

This exercise is designed to be used on a regular basis for working with and becoming aware of feeling. Feelings are how the body communicates its needs. Whatever you're doing in life, whatever you're working towards, in whatever way you're growing, it's necessary that every action you take resists something else. So we have many needs, but not all of them can be addressed or met at the same time. It's important therefore to regularly check in with what the body is telling us - what our emotions are telling us about other needs we may have set aside for a time.

This exercise is also available in extended fifteen and twenty-minute versions in Hestia.

This exercise uses active imagination, a technique developed by Carl Jung for engaging directly with unconscious contents, facilitating genuine psychological transformation.

🔥 Extended exercises and premium packs available in Hestia: https://hestia.makeitconscious.com/

----------

Free Personality Dynamics Assessment: https://makeitconscious.com/pda/

Discover your psychological type and development pathway.

Hestia - The hearth of the Make it Conscious community: https://hestia.makeitconscious.com/

Premium courses, active imagination exercises, and community for Jungian depth work.

----------

Playlists & Series:

Active Imagination Exercises - https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLeuFwuWK5O2MMxqoPMkk9eEbVIrbwq-7B&si=NgEZKF8F2ztgqEpb

Mapping the Shadow Series - https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLeuFwuWK5O2PriUHnSAKpaf5eOpy27Nsw

More from Make it Conscious:

MiC Podcast - https://open.spotify.com/show/6AxGzV3sa6kK2NKSKDyuJa?si=4153da0bb1a243a3

Inner Work Exercises Podcast - https://open.spotify.com/show/4OMC4T1PNsA951dvvHhYMs?si=72af3c85c97b4536

Blog - https://makeitconscious.com/blog/

Connect:

Instagram - https://instagram.com/makeitconscious

X - https://x.com/makeitconscious

In ancient Egypt, the word for mirror and the hieroglyph for life shared the same root - "Ankh." From the very beginning, the mirror was understood as offering more than a surface appearance. It was a place where something essential about a person becomes visible. Before polished metal, people saw themselves only in water, and across cultures the mirror appears not as a passive surface but as something that retains - a soul catcher. To break a mirror was to damage some part of yourself. In this exercise, we're going to engage with this symbol directly and allow whatever needs to come to the surface to do so.

This exercise uses active imagination, a technique developed by Carl Jung for engaging directly with unconscious contents, facilitating genuine psychological transformation.

🔥 Extended exercises and premium packs available in Hestia: https://hestia.makeitconscious.com/

----------

Free Personality Dynamics Assessment: https://makeitconscious.com/pda/

Discover your psychological type and development pathway.

Hestia - The hearth of the Make it Conscious community: https://hestia.makeitconscious.com/

Premium courses, active imagination exercises, and community for Jungian depth work.

----------

Playlists & Series:

Active Imagination Exercises - https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLeuFwuWK5O2MMxqoPMkk9eEbVIrbwq-7B&si=NgEZKF8F2ztgqEpb

Mapping the Shadow Series - https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLeuFwuWK5O2PriUHnSAKpaf5eOpy27Nsw

More from Make it Conscious:

MiC Podcast - https://open.spotify.com/show/6AxGzV3sa6kK2NKSKDyuJa?si=4153da0bb1a243a3

Inner Work Exercises Podcast - https://open.spotify.com/show/4OMC4T1PNsA951dvvHhYMs?si=72af3c85c97b4536

Blog - https://makeitconscious.com/blog/

Connect:

Instagram - https://instagram.com/makeitconscious

X - https://x.com/makeitconscious

The inner critic—a figure most of us can relate to on some level—is often assumed to be on our side, pushing us to improve, to achieve, to become who we're supposed to be. And that's not entirely wrong—it does produce movement, it does compel us to take action. Often entire careers or lifestyles are built around meeting the demands of the inner critic. But often that movement, while it feels like progress, is actually another form of appeasement. By following it alone, you're not building what truly matters to all parts of you, but rather satisfying a voice on its own terms.

From the perspective of Jungian psychology, the inner critic is a complex—a part of the mind with its own agenda, borrowed from somewhere real, usually very early in life, and usually from people who wielded enormous power over you. In this exercise, we open up that connection. Not to eliminate or to silence it, but to meet with it directly, understand what it's actually doing, what it's protecting, what its needs are, and communicate back to it what you need in turn.

This exercise uses active imagination, a technique developed by Carl Jung for engaging directly with unconscious contents, facilitating genuine psychological transformation.

🔥 Extended exercises and premium packs available in Hestia: https://hestia.makeitconscious.com/

----------

Free Personality Dynamics Assessment: https://makeitconscious.com/pda/

Discover your psychological type and development pathway.

Hestia - The hearth of the Make it Conscious community: https://hestia.makeitconscious.com/

Premium courses, active imagination exercises, and community for Jungian depth work.

----------

Playlists & Series:

Active Imagination Exercises - https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLeuFwuWK5O2MMxqoPMkk9eEbVIrbwq-7B&si=NgEZKF8F2ztgqEpb

Mapping the Shadow Series - https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLeuFwuWK5O2PriUHnSAKpaf5eOpy27Nsw

More from Make it Conscious:

MiC Podcast - https://open.spotify.com/show/6AxGzV3sa6kK2NKSKDyuJa?si=4153da0bb1a243a3

Inner Work Exercises Podcast - https://open.spotify.com/show/4OMC4T1PNsA951dvvHhYMs?si=72af3c85c97b4536

Blog - https://makeitconscious.com/blog/

Connect:

Instagram - https://instagram.com/makeitconscious

X - https://x.com/makeitconscious

For most of human history, the moon was the only source of light after dark, reflecting back the sun's light. It gave humans a sense of time — the word "month" comes directly from the same root as "moon" — and there is evidence to suggest that humans have been tracking its cycles for at least 30,000 years. The moon is probably the most universal symbol of the feminine, its phases mirroring the female menstrual cycle. In this exercise, we're going to come to know this symbol more intimately and allow whatever insight needs to come to the surface.

This exercise uses active imagination, a technique developed by Carl Jung for engaging directly with unconscious contents, facilitating genuine psychological transformation.

🔥 Extended exercises, premium packs and shadow work courses available in Hestia: https://hestia.makeitconscious.com/

----------

Free Personality Dynamics Assessment: https://makeitconscious.com/pda/

Discover your psychological type and development pathway.

Hestia - The hearth of the Make it Conscious community: https://hestia.makeitconscious.com/

Premium courses, active imagination exercises, and community for Jungian depth work.

----------

Playlists & Series:

Active Imagination Exercises - https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLeuFwuWK5O2MMxqoPMkk9eEbVIrbwq-7B&si=NgEZKF8F2ztgqEpb

Mapping the Shadow Series - https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLeuFwuWK5O2PriUHnSAKpaf5eOpy27Nsw

More from Make it Conscious:

MiC Podcast - https://open.spotify.com/show/6AxGzV3sa6kK2NKSKDyuJa?si=4153da0bb1a243a3

Inner Work Exercises Podcast - https://open.spotify.com/show/4OMC4T1PNsA951dvvHhYMs?si=72af3c85c97b4536

Blog - https://makeitconscious.com/blog/

Connect:

Instagram - https://instagram.com/makeitconscious

X - https://x.com/makeitconscious

In this exercise, we're going to be working with fear. As Carl Jung famously said, "where the fear, there is your task!" Working with fear is a very important part of the individuation journey, and in adult development more generally. There is little growth without confronting fear at some point or another.

Often what makes fear so challenging is more about how our mind is relating to it than the fear itself. Fear is coaxed and encouraged in large part by our own minds, and our avoidance of it feeds it. In this exercise, we use active imagination to gently confront fear: not to eliminate it exactly, but to transform it, understand it better, and let it point the way to whatever you need to do as part of your development.

This exercise uses active imagination, a technique developed by Carl Jung for engaging directly with unconscious contents, facilitating genuine psychological transformation.

🔥 Extended exercises and premium packs available in Hestia: https://hestia.makeitconscious.com/

----------

Free Personality Dynamics Assessment: https://makeitconscious.com/pda/

Discover your psychological type and development pathway.

Hestia - The hearth of the Make it Conscious community: https://hestia.makeitconscious.com/

Premium courses, active imagination exercises, and community for Jungian depth work.

----------

Playlists & Series:

Active Imagination Exercises - https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLeuFwuWK5O2MMxqoPMkk9eEbVIrbwq-7B&si=NgEZKF8F2ztgqEpb

Mapping the Shadow Series - https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLeuFwuWK5O2PriUHnSAKpaf5eOpy27Nsw

More from Make it Conscious:

MiC Podcast - https://open.spotify.com/show/6AxGzV3sa6kK2NKSKDyuJa?si=4153da0bb1a243a3

Inner Work Exercises Podcast - https://open.spotify.com/show/4OMC4T1PNsA951dvvHhYMs?si=72af3c85c97b4536

Blog - https://makeitconscious.com/blog/

Connect:

Instagram - https://instagram.com/makeitconscious

X - https://x.com/makeitconscious