Dear Friend,

Know Thyself. These words were inscribed on the Temple of Apollo in Delphi, Greece around 800BC. I was able to visit this temple at the end of a 7 day healing retreat I taught on the Heroine’s Journey, archetypes, myth, and the descent to the Goddess.

I wasn’t planning on visiting Delphi but felt a strong pull the entire time I was in Greece, so postponed my trip home by one day so I could take a solo trek to visit this site. Know Thyself has been a driving force in my life for as long as I can remember, and it felt important to set foot on this sacred ground where for millennia people have been on a similar quest.

It was at Delphi where leaders and kings from all over the world traveled to visit a female Oracle, called a Pythia, who would enter trancelike states and give answers to the questions posed by petitioners. Humankind has always desired answers and clarity about life’s big questions, and it seems that intuition and the capacity to go beyond the five senses has often provided answers.

Why is it so difficult to know thyself? Why can we often see others more clearly than ourself?

Carl Jung, perhaps my favorite teacher on understanding the depths of life, believed that knowing thyself was about integrating the various parts of self (i.e., the light and the dark) through a process of individuation. But the process of individuation he teaches is not easy because it requires us to confront our shadow, or the denied and pushed away parts of self that are uncomfortable.

Perhaps knowing thyself is so challenging because we don’t want to see the hard stuff, and so instead distract ourself with work, busy-ness, focusing on others, or anything in the external world. But this denial and avoidance results in anxiety, feeling like we are lost, and a growing sense of not really being vitally alive.

We come most alive when we are willing to do the work of integration with our eyes wide open, and do “the most terrifying thing” according to Jung, which is to see oneself and accept oneself.

Spending several hours on the land where people literally took a pilgrimage to know more about themselves shifted something in me. It gave me encouragement to stay disciplined on my own path of individuation (which is ongoing). It also reminded me that perhaps the reason “Know Thyself” was the primary maxim inscribed on this ancient temple is because this process is absolutely what life is about.

If you, like me, are deeply curious about knowing thyself, there are some upcoming ways to deepen into this with me. I do believe while the time is always right for individuation and self-inquiry, I have found that the dark months of winter seem to hold extra energy for us to go inward for personal growth work. When we commit these dark months to working with our own shadow, when the light returns come Spring, we naturally experience less fragmentation and more wholeness.

To Knowing Thyself,

Betsy