Jung’s concept of the “Intergrating the Anima/Animus” is very practical when you can bully Jungians and strip away their jargon
Look at it this way:
When you want to reach high levels of performance you will be confronted by the masculine and feminine polarity inherent in all things (jargon alert)
“Integrating” them will lead usually lead to a breakthrough
For example:
Fighting is a very MALE behaviour
Your goal is to break someone else’s will using shear force
But if you step into any Martial Arts gym, you’ll quickly realise that charging around like an aggressive idiot will get you knocked unconscious very quickly by “graceful” fighters
A famous example of what I mean is Muhammad Ali
Ali was an outside fighter who “floated around you like a butterfly“
He wasn’t some aggressive pitbull who charged in with crazy aggression
Instead he literally danced circles around his opponents and stung them with stiff jabs and sharp counter strikes
This is quite a feminine approach…
When you watch him he doesn’t seem like some aggro warrior, it’s like he’s gliding or skipping…
But this is a powerful and common strategy for Martial Artists
Grace, style, smoothness, and sharpness are all the traits they develop to outwit and out move aggressive idiots
And it’s NOT that these guys lack manly power – often their power is frightening because they strike with fluid movements and the force travels well through their kinetic chains
They are an intergrated polarity
Feminine energy married to a manly behaviour to change the paradigm
But there’s always a flip side to these type of things
For example: I was sparring today
My style of fighting is this “outside fighting“
The guy I was sparring was a taekwando champion – an EXCEPTIONAL outside fighter
He just kept himself far out of my reach and kicked the fuck out of me
After some nasty stings I began to realise I needed a new strategy
Eventually I saw a simple answer… to take the MALE approach
So I began charging him down like a graceless bulldog
I got really close and smothered him
This made the spar ugly with a lot of clinching
But he lost all his advantage and had to fight an annoying fight where he couldn’t use his amazing kicks
This saved me a having a limp all day tomorrow from getting stung
And, little things like this pop up all the time, and polarised thinking is a very quick way to see alternatives
- A tough manly boxer needs ballet classes to get better more graceful footwork
- A petite ballet dancer needs to pump iron in the weightlifting room to get straighter form
- A deep baritone singer needs to work on his airy headvoice
- A fairylike soprano needs depth to her voice
- A sharp rational engineer needs to work on his emotional intelligence around people
- A passionate creative painter needs to plan out a rigid routine to keep herself productive
- A heady idealist needs to ground themselves in the hardness of reality
- A firm pessimist needs to open themselves to hope and possibility
- A talented writer with great flair and phrasing needs to work on plotting and structure
- A formulaic writer who can churn out templated stories needs to work on style and colour
All these are little examples of thinking reframes that come when you look at things in terms of gendered polarity
As Jung said: the great crusade of our lives is trying integrate all the polarised opposites
Jungcucks who are stuck in their heads turn this into a sort of Pokemon Go for reading books
But in truth it’s found in the vast array of things you are doing every single day
You just haven’t develop the eye to see them!
Now, this is Psychology done properly
It’s not a weird abstract ego trip
It’s about learning how to discover big ideas about WHAT YOU CAN DO and then applying them to YOUR ACTUAL LIFE
You have an incredible brain and you’re criminally underusing it, because you’ve never learned HOW to use it
To give you an example: A gentleman came into my program studying Shamanism
He wanted to become a better Shaman and felt studying Jung would help
Of course, most Jungians would fill his brain with their Jargon and make him a really strange guy to be around when you take powerful psychedelic drugs because he’d be there chanting in jargon
I instead trained him to use the power of his words properly
I taught him THE PSYCHOLOGY of how words effect the mind
So when he’s in a serious situation with someone “having a bad trip” he knows how to talk to them to pull them out of it
He has the ability to use his words to paint a more positive and relaxing image inside their minds
He found this incredibly powerful
It was both practical, but also exciting and stimulating
So took this skill and began applying it everywhere
He ended up getting excited about language and persuasion in general and got a job for a glasses company where he was selling $1,000 a day…
Yeah… even I was amazed when he told me haha
But he explained that it was exactly like what I taught him about shamanism:
The person comes in, they are in distress (eyesight is poor, headaches)
If you believe the glasses can help them (honest assessment, no desire to bullshit them) you paint the picture in their minds of what the glasses are like… This excites them and they buy
This practical application cracked open a whole new world for him
Again, this is the type of practical applications of these ideas that are possible