What leads to happiness, fulfillment, and individuation?

Gail Gross, Ph.D., says, "Whether you have your total body remade, or build another mansion, or buy another whatever, happiness is not in any of that. It's really all about the light, the idea of imprinting God, like a little duck when it's first born. Whatever shows up in its vision right away is what it imprints on. We were given the imprint on our soul of God. There is God in all of us. The philosophers in the time of Aristotle believed that you only remember what you already knew. It's all there in the DNA of who we are, the DNA of our souls. But we are so busy with life and living and career and mates and children and fighting and importance, and all the things this denser world demands of us. And the criteria that we hold up for success in this life uses us all up.

"Jung would say that all of the defenses - the protective layers - that we have developed to walk through life in a way that makes us feel safe, are constrictions, repressions. They are not the true self, not the individuated self. They are the defended self. We learn that early in our development. There is a disowned part of us - what Jung termed 'the shadow.' But only when you integrate the shadow and embrace it as part of the entire aspect of what it means to be human, only then can you come into fulfillment and individuation. It seems like a paradox, but you first need to feel individuated in order to feel whole, to recognize that you are part of everybody, and that everybody is a part of you. But when you are young, you defend yourself to be safe, and you learn very quickly that you have to cover up the part of you that seems to not be working, like screaming and yelling, and getting mad, and being jealous, or losing your temper. You ultimately repress it or disown it, but like a shadow, it's still there. It's the very repression of that behavior - holding it down - that can make you sick.

"To survive, the shadow must be integrated, because anything that is repressed causes destruction, a breakdown. The repression or the holding down of the shadow may lead to illness. But, it is the real self, the undefended self that is always fine, happy, light."