20/12/2025
Very true ✨
🙋🏻♀️✴️🗣️ I often share this quote from Jung, as there is much we can unpack within it. He wrote:
“One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious.”
This line is among Jung’s most quoted — and perhaps most misunderstood.
On social media it is often paired with images of meditating silhouettes or cosmic sunrises, as though Jung were suggesting that we simply need to “acknowledge our shadow” in order to become whole.
But in his original writings, this sentence emerges from a far more demanding vision of the psyche.
Jung was describing a lifelong process of incarnation — of allowing the rejected, repressed, and unlived dimensions of ourselves to find embodiment and voice within awareness.
He was not inviting a heroic conquest of the shadow, but a relational dialogue with it. To “make the darkness conscious” does not mean analyzing or transcending it; it means entering into felt relationship with what has been forgotten, feared, or shamed, allowing it to participate again in the life of the whole.
From a trauma-informed and embodied perspective, this insight deepens further. The “darkness” is not only psychological shadow or moral flaw; it is also the unintegrated residue of lived experience — grief that never had a witness, shame that learned to hide in the body, protective numbness that once kept us safe.
Making this darkness conscious involves more than insight. It requires presence, safety, and time. It asks that awareness descend from the head into the body — that spirit enter matter.
Jung intuited what trauma studies would later confirm: that light without vessel burns, and revelation without containment fragments. True illumination requires a body and nervous system capable of holding what is revealed.
In this sense, embodiment is not secondary to consciousness but its necessary home. The light that heals is not the blaze of escape, but the steady warmth that seeps into the cold places — cell by cell, memory by memory.
To make the darkness conscious is to trust the soul’s winter, and to know that in turning toward what was once exiled, something precious is already being refined.
- Matt Licata
