Make it Conscious - Inner Work Exercises

The unconscious can communicate with us in all kinds of ways: not only in words, but in its movements, in its demeanour, or maybe just a feeling. 🌿 This work begins with understanding your own psychological blueprint. Take the free Personality Dynamics Assessment: https://makeitconscious.com/pda/ 🔔 To work with Max directly, book a free Perspectives call — https://makeitconscious.com/coaching/ O...

Skilful communication is a vital part of adult development. It's the first place where understanding and intention meet the world - how we share our ideas. That applies not only with others, but to ourselves. Skilful communication is truthful, purposeful and empathic. In this exercise you'll practise these three points as you speak to the various aspects of the psyche. 🌿 This work begins with und...

In this episode we bring you back to something you enjoyed doing as a child. There are often many things we were naturally drawn to as children but have since forgotten, or never fully explored. There is always something useful in them, always some reason we were attracted to them — though that is not to say it is as simple as going back to those things, doing them the same way, or trying to make...

In this episode we turn attention to the world of work and what it is you do day to day, and specifically to the resistance you have to it. This might come up when you find yourself doing a task or your day job — something you feel you should be doing, or have decided you should be doing, but which you nonetheless struggle to get your full self on board with. 🌿 This work begins with understanding...

As much as we do active imagination for ourselves, it is not only us that benefits, if we are not being driven as much by our complexes, shadow and our unchecked needs and desires. This practice is certainly a gift to ourselves, but it is not a waste of time and not a frivolous activity. It is very purposeful, and in some ways a generous thing to be doing — not only for ourselves, but also for oth...

One of the most common questions asked by active imagination practitioners is: "am I doing it right?" And "how do I know?" It's not uncommon to hear of people having profound experiences, vivid images, and fluid conversations with what they encounter. That's all possible — but it might be tempting to think that if it doesn't happen for you, you've done something wrong. Whether you're doing this pr...

One of the applications of active imagination is to engage proactively with the archetypes of the collective unconscious. While it's not possible to integrate any particular archetype in its entirety, it is important to build and deepen a relationship with them. If you reject or repress any archetype, it tends to return in a darker, more disruptive form. And by meeting archetypal material in symbo...

Welcome back to this core active imagination series. Today we're going to be working with emotion, in a proactive way — meaning you get to decide from the outset which emotion you want to work with. You can work with any kind, pleasant or unpleasant, something you're experiencing now or experienced recently. The fact that it is an emotion means it has some kind of charge for you, that it is connec...

Working with dreams is one of the primary methods Jung practised and recommended to his patients. A dream is unconscious content coming alive at night, when the ego is quiet, so anything that felt unfinished still has something in it for you. If nothing particular comes to mind, that's fine — you can work with whatever your mind shows you as the exercise proceeds. 🌿 This work begins with understa...

This exercise introduces a technique I call simply bare attention: directing your attention to the direct and raw experience of what you are actually feeling or sensing. Bare attention avoids two extremes that limit this work. The first is not noticing a feeling entirely; the second is getting involved in narrative about the feeling. To work with unconscious content, we need the layer where the fu...

One of the main features of this work is the ability to turn the mind back on itself. At each step of this technique there's an element of doing exactly this — becoming aware of the mind itself. As far as we know, this is a uniquely human ability, something that defines us: the ability to self-reflect. Some might call it mindfulness, which captures part of it, though that word doesn't really expla...

One of the key purposes of active imagination is producing insight — into ourselves, into why we do what we do, into what caused our situation, and how what we're doing now might affect our lives in the future. This is a vital part of any inner work or adult development process. But there's a challenge, because producing insight is a contradiction in terms. How can you produce insight into yoursel...

Today I'm going to be sharing more with you about the basic framework of this technique — this three-step approach to active imagination practice that you can use on a daily or regular basis, today the third step: bringing content into the imagination and connecting with it. 🌿 This work begins with understanding your own psychological blueprint. Take the free Personality Dynamics Assessment: http...

Continuing through the three-step basic technique for active imagination that you can do on a regular, even daily basis — watch your mind, note what appears, and connect with it in the imagination. This exercise focuses on that second step, noting. 🔔 Work with Max: Book a free Perspectives call — https://makeitconscious.com/coaching/ 🌿 Not ready to book a call? Take the free Personality Dynamics...

In this exercise we focus on the first of three steps in this active imagination technique — watching the mind. Using the breath as a canvas, we turn the mind back on itself rather than remaining lost in the natural flow of discursive thought. This is the foundation of the practice: simple, repeatable, and available no matter what's going on for you. This exercise uses active imagination, a techni...

Active imagination is a technique developed by Swiss psychologist Carl Jung, who described the conscious mind — the ego — as like a cork in an ocean, to illustrate the vastness of the unconscious relative to what we're aware of. In this exercise, we engage with the unconscious directly using a simple three-step method you can use on a daily basis. The unconscious mind is a vital part of who we...

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...

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...

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-knowle...

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...

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...

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....

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 some...

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...

<p>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 femin...