How much of my life is genuine or approval seeking?

Sourcing my motivation to where it comes from something deeper will have to come from me. Pursuing genuine excitement and doing things because I love it, that's a good North Star, instead of doing something so I can get a result.

Detachment is about separating yourself from your emotions, not suppressing them. Control is an illusion, trying to cling to it will leave you miserable. Okay, if you want to stop suffering, you need to understand; everything that comes from outside only has power if it finds an echo within you. What you do not see, do not understand and do not master, master's you. Know, all the theories, master all the techniques, but when teaching a human soul, be just another human soul- Carl Jung.

That human soul, you insist on hiding behind a strong, invulnerable, controlled character, it is screaming to be seen. Becoming emotionally strong has nothing to do with being cold. It has nothing to do with ignoring pain, avoiding conflict or pretending not to care. It has to do with integrating, with accepting, with bringing to light everything you have buried in the dark. You do not become untouchable by creating a barrier between yourself and the world. You become untouchable when you realize that no one can touch what has already been embraced within you.

When you integrate your shadows, your fears, your flaws, your insecurities. Then you stop reacting to everything, you observe, you choose, you are no longer an emotional puppet & that is true freedom.

Carl Jung called this individual individuation, the process of becoming who you really are, not what others expect of you, not what you thought you should be to be accepted, but what emerges from within, from the meeting of light and shadow, between ego and unconscious. Individuation is not a process of perfection, but of integration. You do not need to become a better person. You just need to become whole.

Here's the secret that no one told you, the more you run from pain, the more it chases you. The more you try not to be affected, the more fragile you become, but when you face your own wounds, when you accept who you are with all that is beautiful & ugly, noble & shameful. Nothing outside has power to dismantle you. However, this path requires courage, courage to look within, courage to abandon the masks, courage to feel, because it is precisely in pain that the key to transformation is hidden.

Let us teach you how suffering far from being your enemy, can become the gateway to your true strength. You learn to hate pain. Since you were little, you were taught that suffering is a sign of weakness, that crying is a waste of time, that feeling too much makes you vulnerable, & so you began to run, to avoid, to deny but the more you flee from suffering, the more it chases you, and the worst part, it changes form. It disguises itself as anxiety, anger, apathy, boredom, self-destructive impulses that you don't even understand where they come from. Ignored pain does not disappear, it just digs tunnels inside of you, until one day, without warning, everything collapses.

Jung saw suffering in a completely different way. He believed that pain was the messenger of the soul, the alarm of the unconscious, the language that the self-what you are in your entirety uses to get your attention. He said, depression is like a lady in black. If she appears, don't push her away, invite her to sit down, offer her coffee & listen to what she has to say. But you don't listen. You silence yourself, distract yourself, keep yourself busy, numb yourself. You do everything to avoid looking at what really matters.

What is this pain trying to show you? The truth is that suffering only hurts so much because you are still at war with yourself. There is still a part of you wanting to grow, & another part wanting to keep everything as it is. There is something inside you that cries out for transformation, but your ego accustomed to control, tries to suffocate that call & it is in this friction that pain is born. Sometimes change hurts. Sometimes growth hurts. Sometimes letting go of old beliefs, cutting toxic ties, allowing what no longer serves you to die. All of this is a mourning, an internal process of death and rebirth.

It is precisely in this space of ruin that something new can be born, because when everything in you is deconstructed, when certainties crumble, when pain lays bare your vulnerability, you can finally see who you really are without the layers of protection, without the performance, without the mask, & at that exact point, suffering becomes sacred. Because it brings you to your knees before the only thing that can set you free, yourself.

Jung knew this, he understood that suffering is not the failure of the system. It is part of the process of becoming activated, enlightened, fully realized. Pain is not the end of the road. It is the beginning of the journey towards individuation. The problem is that most people give up before crossing that dark valley, they flee, they distract themselves, they return to the surface. Do you want to understand how this crossing process happens? How the path of individuation, no matter how lonely & brutal it may seem, is what sign like finally sets you free.

Let's continue, it's going to get deep now. The path to individuation is the royal shield. Few people have the courage to begin the journey of individuation, and few have and fewer have the courage to complete it, because this path does not promise comfort, does not offer guarantees, does not protect your ego, it destroys it.

Jung referred to individuation as a process of becoming who you really are, but this means, above all, unlearning what you think you are, & that hurts more than any external rejection, because you start to realize that much of what defines you until now was an illusion. You are not your achievements. You are not your traumas. You are not the image you constructed to be loved, respected and admired. All of this is what you created to survive. But surviving is not living, and individuation is life's call beyond survival. It is when the unconscious begins to push everything that has been repressed, hidden and distorted to the surface. Let go of the mask you created out of collected convenience.

In other words, you will have to tear off your own skin to discover what lies beneath. It is in this process that you begin to become untouchable, not because nothing affects you anymore, but because you have already gone through the fire.

You have faced your monsters, you have looked into the eye of your shame, your neediness, your anger, your ego, and you said, I see you, and you can no longer control me. That is this internal clarity, this lucidity in the face of your own darkness, that gives you a strength that does not depend on approval, recognition or control. You no longer need to be loved by everyone. You no longer need to win every argument. You no longer need to appear strong because you know who you are, and no one can take that away from you.

True emotional armor is not a shell. It is a core. It is the integration of all of your parts into the center of consciousness that remains unshaken in the face of storms. You may feel pain, but it does not own you. You may feel hurt, but you do not lose yourself because you have stopped being reactive and you have become whole.