The difficulties of our psychotherapeutic work teach us to take truth, goodness, and beauty where we find them.

They are not always found where we look for them.

Often they are hidden in the dirt, or are in the keeping of the dragon.

We all possess what Carl Jung called a shadow, and this is made up of the contents of our personality we repressed due to the shame, guilt, or fear they trigger.

But what is often overlooked about the shadow is that it contains both positive and negative elements.

Or as Young wrote, what our age thinks of as the shadow and inferior part of the psyche contains more than something merely negative.

In addition to repressing weaknesses and character flaws,

many of us do the same with strengths, talents, and our highest potentials.

Or as the author Ken Wilbur writes,

You can completely lose track of incredibly positive things about yourself,

your beauty, goodness, strength, and virtue, the so-called golden shadow.

In this video, we explore why we fear the contents of the golden shadow and why we avoid moving

towards our highest potential. The impetus that makes you fly is our great human possession,

wrote Herman Hesse.

Everybody has it. It is the feeling of being linked with the roots of power.

But one soon becomes afraid of this feeling.

That is why most people shed their wings and prefer to walk and obey the law.

The 20th century psychologist Abraham Maslow believed that we all possess an impulse to achieve greatness and an innate urge to move toward what he called our highest possibilities.

Very few of us, however, move anywhere close to these possibilities.

A primary reason for this, according to Maslow, is simply that we fear our greatness more than we desire it, or as he wrote, we fear our highest possibilities.

We are generally afraid to become that which we can glimpse in our most perfect moments.

We enjoy and even thrill to the godlike possibilities we see in ourselves, and yet we simultaneously

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