Ten Percent Happier with Dan Harris - How To Handle The Parts Of Yourself That You Wish Didnt Exist Satya Doyle Byock

Episode Date: January 11, 2026

How to do "shadow work," interpret your dreams, and find your "self." Satya Doyle Byock is a psychotherapist and educator focused on the relationship with the unconscious. She is the director of The Salome Institute of Jungian Studies and the author of the book Quarterlife: The Search for Self in Early Adulthood. She writes weekly and hosts regular workshops on her Substack, Self & Society.  In this episode we talk about: The vast impact of Carl Jung's work What separates Freud and Jung The connection between Jung's ideas and Buddhism Practical exercises to help us resolve the tension between safety and meaning – between stability and taking a walk on the wild side Dreamwork: what it is, why we should do it, and the "how to" The perks of making the unconscious feel seen  Join Dan's online community here Follow Dan on social: Instagram, TikTok Subscribe to our YouTube Channel Additional Resources:  Satya's Substack, Self & Society.  Satya's new year-round program in Jungian Psychology and Myth (registration opens December 1; class begins February 2026) Get ready for another Meditation Party at Omega Institute! This in-person workshop brings together Dan with his friends and meditation teachers, Sebene Selassie, Jeff Warren, and for the first time, Ofosu Jones-Quartey. The event runs October 24th-26th. Sign up and learn more here! Tickets are now on sale for a special live taping of the 10% Happier Podcast with guest Pete Holmes! Join us on November 18th in NYC for this benefit show, with all proceeds supporting the New York Insight Meditation Center. Grab your tickets here!  To advertise on the show, contact [e-mail] or visit https://advertising.libsyn.com/10HappierwithDanHarris  

This is the 10% Happier Podcast. I'm Dan Harris. Hello, everybody. How we doing? In the many years of hosting this show and of just generally being attuned to all things, psychological and contemplative, over these many years, I have often heard talk of the shadow side or shadow work. But I have to admit, I didn't actually know what it meant. I knew the concept of the shadow was derived from the writings of the pioneering German psychotherapist Carl Jung, who died back in 1961, but I have to further admit that I never really knew much about who Young was and what he stood for. Turns out Young was not only the progenitor

of the concept of the shadow, but also terms such as dream work, wholeness, synchronicity, and the collective unconscious terms many, if not most of us, have heard before. So today we're going to learn much more about Young and all of these terms, and crucially, we're going to learn how to use all of these concepts to do life better. I especially liked this one. Sotia Doyle Bayak is a psychotherapist and educator focused on our relationship with our unconscious. She's the director of the Salome Institute of Jungian Studies. She's also the author of a book called Quarter Life, and she has a popular substack. I'll put a link to that in the show notes. In this conversation, we talk about the vast impact of Carl Jung's work, what separates Freud and Young, the connection between Jung's ideas and Buddhism, practical exercises to help you resolve the tension between your desire for safety and your desire for meaning. In other words, between stability and taking a walk on the wild side. We talk about dream work, what it is, why we should do it, and how to do it, and the perks of making the unconscious feel seen, plus how to actually make the unconscious feel seen.

plus how to actually make the unconscious feel seen. There's a lot here. Just to say, if you've ever struggled with the balance between being safe and responsible on the one hand and on the other hand, taking risks and aiming high, we've got a custom guided meditation that comes with this podcast. It was made by our teacher of the month, Sabine Selassie, who's crafting bespoke meditations for all of our Monday, Wednesday episodes this month. Those meditations are only available to paying subscribers over on Dan Harris.com.

subscribers also get weekly meditation and Q&A sessions, which we do live on video every Tuesday at 4 Eastern. The next one is tomorrow the 14th. It'll be me and Seb together. Sign up, join the party. And if you want to meditate with me in person, I am co-leading a weekend retreat very soon, October 24th through 26th at the Omega Institute in Upstate New York. It's going to be me, Sabine-Sulasie, Jeff Warren, and Afosu Jones-Corte. It'll be super fun. We do a session Friday night, two sessions on Saturday, and then a final one on Sunday morning. In between lots of free time to hike, play tennis, get a massage, do yoga, whatever.

The sessions mix meditation, discussion among the teachers, discussion among the audience members. The idea is really to mix serious meditation practice with socializing. And that's why we call it meditation party. I'll put a link in the show notes if you want to sign up. Okay, enough out of me. We'll get started with Satya Doyle Bayak right after this. Satya Doyle Bayak, welcome to the show. Thank you for having me.

I'm happy to be here. I'm happy you're here. I think it's a form of malpractice on my part that this show has been going for 700 episodes, eight years, something like that. And we've never really talked about Carl Jung. So we're going to remedy that today. I was interested to note that in my preparation document, my prep doc from my mighty senior producer, Marissa, She sent me a note, and here it is, when I asked Satya to do a young primer, I've never known how to pronounce that word. Is it primer? Primer? Anyway, I'll go with Primer. She said,

and I'm quoting here, a short primer on Youngian ideas is harder than you might imagine. So let me start there. Why is it so hard? Young is hard to place in a few tidy boxes. His work has infiltrated culture and psychology and pop culture in ways that I think most people have no real idea about. And yet because his work is so expansive, he's often kind of derided a little bit as a mystic or somebody that was off track. And yet his work has really become a huge part of our lexicon. So ideas like extroversion and introversion are completely from Jung. The entire system of Myers-Briggs is based on his personality typology, often without credit for a lot of people who use the Myers-Briggs system.

The lie detector test was based on his word association experiment. He coined the terms collective unconscious, archetypes, synchronicity. I could go on and on. So his influence really even in music and art and culture is extraordinarily vast. In fact, I think that artists and musicians and writers often have more familiarity with Carl Jung than a lot of mainstream psychology. because in a way his thinking really moves into theology and art and also things like physics, quantum physics. His work was vast. So it's hard to put in an easy bucket.

I had no idea that he was the one who came up with the idea of extroverts and introverts. And you mentioned a bunch of other terms with which he's associated or coined. I want to learn more about synchronicity and the collective unconscious. I don't actually know that I understand either of those concepts. the terms that I would most associate with Young would be shadow or like doing shadow work or investigating your shadow side or dream work. Absolutely. I hope we can talk more about those today. I mean, I think shadow work is something that has really become quite popular and is definitely having a comeback right now. In the last few years, I feel like everyone is talking about shadow work.

Shadow work is a specific term is kind of a little bit of a derivation of Jung's work. It's a way to package some of his ideas. But the basic idea of the shadow is parts of ourselves that we are not conscious of. And people often think of it as sort of the dark side of whoever you are. But I think of it as a huge amount of our creative self or what would lead us to feeling like whole humans. That is our shadow. It's what is behind us. It's what's not in the light. And so spending time exploring those parts of us that are not in the light and bringing them into consciousness makes us more whole humans, also more moral humans in a certain respect, better in relationship, better politically, better socially, but also more creative. And dream work is a huge way that we get there. I see. That was another term I was going to ask you about wholeness, because it's one of those terms that traditionally kind of have annoyed me because it seems. And, you know, Anodyne, bland. I don't know what the fuck.

People are talking about when they talk about wholeness. But actually, the way you use it makes complete sense. That if we are all naturally, I think, cut off from aspects of our own mind because the conscious mind can only hold so much. And so we have this unconscious, which serves many, many purposes, which we'll get into. But reckoning with, wrestling with, maybe wrestling is too aggressive a term, but getting in touch. with what's happening below the surface does lead to wholeness because you're not whole if you're ignoring massive parts of your own mind. Absolutely.

What happens as we grow, we are trained in whatever society and culture we are raised in. So in this society, that's a huge emphasis on rationalism, patriarchy, white supremacy, capitalism. There's a lot of systems that were sort of pulled into. to. And I talk about the way that that makes us inherently lopsided because inevitably, there's all sorts of aspects of our own individual selves and as a result shared humanity that's actually not getting included in not just sort of the external conversation politically and socially, but actually a huge part of who we are. Those things get pushed into the shadow. We can also think

about this in family systems, you know, with siblings. Often we sort of take different parts of what we're allowed to perform in a family, and other parts get shoved down. So it's both the recollection of those things, sort of to be pulled back in to the full self, but also parts that we maybe never even actually repressed. They just arrive later on in life. And often the toolkit is avoid repress, drink them away, shop them away, avoid, but bringing them into the conversation, and certainly wrestling is part of it. This shows up in mythology and theology, all the the time, these ways that we're wrestling or struggling with different aspects, the goal is hopefully relationship and integration over time versus just, again, suppression or repression.

I'm fascinated by this. I have a million things to both ask and say about it, and we'll get to it for sure in a deep way. But since I raised it, can you define synchronicity and also maybe the collective unconscious? I'll do my best. The term synchronicity is probably most easily defined as a meaningful coincidence. It's really a term that Jung actually worked on a great deal with the quantum physicist Wolfgang Paoli. The two of them were in very deep conversation for many, many years. And it's this idea of what Jung calls the psychoid space. So it's the place between matter and psyche. So very simple. I mean, I would love to hear if you've had any synchronistic experiences because they kind

bring this into more relatable experience, but things that kind of blow your socks off that you simply can't explain. For instance, there's so many examples, but you have a dream about somebody that you haven't dreamt about in a million years, and then you get a phone call the next day that they've passed away. And that there's no causal relationship between those things. There's no way to say in the way we understand the world working, typically in the West, causality, your dream to not make that person die. And there's no way for us to explain that that person passing away caused your dream. And yet you're left with an uncanny experience of connection. So it's this a causal relationship that Young calls synchronicity. I'm going to pause because that's a lot already.

Yeah. Before we get to collective unconscious, I think there's probably a lot more to say about synchronicity. You asked if I've had any, well, you identified one right before we started recording, which apparently is that Young and I have the same birthday? Yeah, I mean, that's not, I would say not really a synchronistic experience or encounter. I just liked it as I was reading more about you in preparation to talk. I thought it was lovely to see that because I think there's also a lot of similarities between knowing you study Buddhism and Buddhist thought and Buddhist meditation, that lineage is very deeply entwined with Young's work as well.

So it just made me smile to see that. Mick Jagger has the same birthday. Oh. So a lot of swagger on July 26th. Okay, so I don't know if this counts, but when I was a young man as a reporter in Baghdad in Iraq before and during the war, I had a girlfriend. She was a Spanish reporter who was there at the same time. And we dated then and for a while afterwards. And then we went our separate ways.

And she got married to a Spanish. movie star by the name of Juan Boto. I got married to a doctor in New York City whose name was and is Bianca. And Juan and Bianca dated in high school. No. Oh my God. Wow. I don't know if that counts as a synchronicity, but it's kind of crazy. It's wild. So I mean, like I got chills when you said that because it's inevitably the sort of phrases, what are the chances, right? You know, I don't know what the full meaning of that is for the four of you. but it's quite wild. The way that we tend to understand the world working in the West,

that feeling of like the chances of that are infinitesimal, you know, but it opens up questions of meaning for who all of you are and the web you're in and the connections you have. And it's fascinating. I actually never spoken about it publicly, but then Bianca sent me in all caps message the other day with a clip from social media of Juan on a Spanish talk show telling the story. Wow. And how did she feel about that, that he made it public?

Well, I think the fact that very few people we know are likely to see it because it's in Spanish made her comfortable. But now that I'm sitting it on the podcast, I don't know. You can edit this part out. Well, I won't, but she doesn't listen to the show mercifully. So you'll never know. Just on this point, like, okay, so we've had some fun. I've given you an example of a synchronicity. I mean, I can make a materialist argument that, yeah, the odds are low that this type of thing would have happened, but there doesn't have to be a metaphysical component.

Sure. That's what most people do. And that's fine. What gets sort of eradicated is a little bit of the magic and meaning of existence. So we can leave things up to chance 100% and say, yeah, it's infinitesimal chances, but weird things happen. The problem with that is that synchronicity often. carries with it quite life-changing and extremely impactful and emotionally important experiences for people. And when the materialist approach simply cast them aside with an irrelevancy, it actually steals from people's lives often something that was really quite important. So there's a sacredness that gets eradicated with that perspective. And moreover, I think what is happening increasingly, although it's been 100 years and we've not fully integrated it, is that Western science in terms of quantum physics, modern physics, actually is understanding that there are things we don't understand

that are related to the individual observer, the individual self. And so to sort of just make it about odds and the collective remove something very specific about that individual life. That's a loss. I think it's a genuine loss. I guess my take on this, and I haven't spent a lot of time thinking about it, is, first of all, I'm really comfortable with the fact that I slash we don't know shit. I'm fine with that. Where I get uncomfortable is when people come up with theories that don't have an evidentiary foundation.

And I'm not anti-magic. I think there is a magic that is often overlooked that is right in front of us and indisputable, which is that everything that's happening right now depends on a vast ocean of causes, and conditions dating back to beginningless time. And so it's a fucking miracle that we're in this moment that you and I are sitting here. The amount of things that had to happen to land you and I in conversation is extraordinary. And we're, I don't think most people think about that. It to me seems like a source of magic that's right there and doesn't require anything

metaphysical. I absolutely agree. and I don't even think that what I'm talking about is metaphysics so much as ways the world works that we don't yet understand. I think even what you just expressed, all of the things that had to come together to land us here in this moment, it's beyond our capacity to fully capture. It's simply beyond our capacity to fully understand or make sense of. And if we just allow that to be true versus simply washing away, well, it means nothing. Because that's what the impulse so often is, as well, it's meaningless. And I just, want to draw that into the realm of possibility that it is meaningful and let it be, let it live. We don't have to explain everything through outlandish theories to simply say, yeah, maybe there's a bit more meaning in the world than we currently think there is. Okay, I was being obtuse. I see your point now, and I totally agree.

Wonderful. I'm thrilled. I'm glad to agree. Not that you need my plus one on anything. Okay, so let's talk about the collective unconscious, because that is a term that I think many of us have heard, and I certainly didn't know it came from Young, and I honestly don't know really what it means. Yeah. Well, okay, so again, I'm going to do my best here, because this is a huge concept, and I actually, it's important to me that it makes sense, and again, I'm not just

saying things that maybe sound like theory versus fact. I'll give an example myself, that this will lead to a more clear definition, I think, but I had a dream the other night in which somebody said the phrase, I've carried a torch for her longer than something. I didn't catch a word of Troy. And I had a clear sense, actually, this wasn't Helen of Troy. And to be clear, I have almost no real knowledge of Helen of Troy or, you know, most of this history, mythology. And that phrase carry a torch is not one I would ever use in my own language. So it was curious to me. It was a very specific phrase that arose from my dream, from the unconscious, right, that made me wonder what is that about? So if I were young, I would have gone to my rose. He would have already understood this. He had

absurd amounts of history and mythology. But I went to Google and researched it. And it turns out that the very idea of carrying a torch comes from Rome and the idea of, I guess, couples would carry torches to their marriage home and they would light a candle in their new home. So it had this whole connection that in a million years, I mean, my conscious mind had no knowledge of, right? And yet something arises that allows me to then dive into a bit of ancient story that helps me understand things. I haven't gotten to the meaning of it for my own life necessarily yet, but it was a curious thing that arose in the middle of the night for me. So for Jung, the collective unconscious is, is, you can think of it as kind of the rhizome connecting things under the earth.

There is a sense of shared, I'm going to say consciousness, but we can think of this as the unconscious. It's shared mythology, like we share DNA, we share common organs. In the unconscious, we're sharing history and storytelling and mythology all over the world and also across time. This is a huge thing that separated Jung from Freud, because for Freud, the unconscious, they refer to it as the subconscious. It's really what has been repressed. And Jung and Freud, in a sense, had this quite major breakup in the early 1900s after being close colleagues, largely because Jung could no longer deny the fact that his dreams and the dreams of his patients, he was working a great deal with schizophrenic patients, there was this wellspring of storytelling showing up that

could not have arisen from the lived experience of those individuals. And yet, was seeing patterns that he knew to be connected to global mythology and storytelling. And there was, again, there was no causal connection between those things. So the collective unconscious became the term that he understood, he used, and we still used today, to understand this more archetypal layer and timeless layer of who we are. I mean, how this rhymes with Buddhism, I think, is that in Buddhism, one of the major assertions is that the self that we spend so much time building up and defending and assessing over is not as solid as we think. In fact, if you really look for it on a quantum physical level, you won't find it. So this theory is that on the unconscious level, we have

parts of ourself that we've repressed, but we also have some, we're drawing upon some sort of universal storehouse, species-wide storehouse of archetypes and mythology. Exactly. This is one of the many places where I think Jung saw his work in Buddhism and certainly in Taoism. I mean, I think the middle way from Buddhism is a huge piece of Jung's work in terms of, again, partially this conversation about wholeness that we're having is finding the balance between parts of ourselves, but also between sort of the self and the non-self, or existence and non-existence, everything and nothingness. And somewhere in that middle, that tension between those two things is really where we exist. We should be existing, not trying to live in the polarities.

Okay, so let's get practical. Aside from being an author, you're also, you know, work with patients. We've done a little tour through Jungian ideas. How do you take Jungian ideas and help people do their lives better? There's a lot of tools that we use, specific tools like dream work, like what we might call shadow work. But so much of what we're doing is really working towards reclaiming. This is another Jungian term, and it's another thing that separated Jung from Freud, but the term libido, which for Jung is about the life force of a person. And again, this connects to a lot of Eastern thought. But the idea that what we're actually trying to do is sort of less recover the traumas of

childhood and work through those things, although that's critical. But it's more really uncovering the life force of a person. And in a certain respect, where they're headed more than where they came from. And what the kind of, you know, the Dharma of that person may be, the life path of that person may be. So with patients, I'm doing any number of things from dream work to small exercises around different aspects of self and the conversations between different aspects of self, and basic self-work to sort of reclaim parts that have been ignored and denied. So there's a practical

exercise that I offered in my book and I think sort of in some ways exemplifies what we're talking about, but I call it the two selves exercise. And it's in really simple terms, I talk about the stability side and the meaning side of each. of us. This kind of a little bit gets into the rational and the, let's call it, the irrational or maybe the intuitive side, but that really, I think of for all of us in adulthood, we are always seeking some kind of balance between stability and meaning, survival and safety and purpose and connection. And the tension between these things is something that, it's sort of a, again, it's a simple way of understanding a very common tension that I see in people in adulthood.

And that very often what is happening is folks tend towards the lopsided approach because of however they were raised or however they're reacting against how they're raised versus actually allowing a conversation between the two sides. So I'll pause again because I could dive in further to this. Well, that's exactly what I would want you to do. Okay, keep going. diving in further, yes. Okay. In adulthood, very often, we are trained. I use these very simple archetypes, but the lawyer or the artist, right?

And very often, in terms of the shadow, the lawyer is often either envying or looking down on the artist, and the artist is either envying or looking down on the lawyer. And we can replace these two sides with any different careers or lifestyle choices. But essentially, one is structured, is related to society in some significant way, often has money and safety. And the other has a kind of freedom, self-expression, and even a quality maybe of being a bit of an outsider in a way that people who are really wedded to society and social norms sometimes long for it. There's freedom there. So with each individual, I like to explore how this tension is showing up. and how in folks who are sort of overly identified with a path of meaning might be really

struggling to support themselves and survive in the world and need to reclaim some sense of stability from their shadow. And folks who are overly identified with stability and structure might really need to be reclaiming the other. And almost always that's true. Very often the conversation between the two of these sides has been avoided, repressed, ignored. So I try to bring those forward and really allow both sides to express themselves and then be in conversation with each other. Coming up, Satya Doyle Bayoch talks about some practical exercises to help you resolve the intertension many of us feel between being safe and responsible on the one hand and then also creating meaning and taking risks on the other. We also talk about how Young's

ideas are connected to both Buddhism and internal family systems, which is a type of therapy we've talked about a lot on this show. And we're going to explore Satya's reticence or reluctance when it comes to using the very popular term shadow work. It seems to me that you have identified a core tension for members of Homo sapiens, myself included, that I have a near-pathological desire for safety as an anxious person and a half-Jew. And I also, have a pretty wild side of, I spent a lot of time in war zones and I like to stay out late once in a while and take risks and quit my safe job at ABC News, et cetera, et cetera. So that's great.

I'm curious, like for somebody listening, what can we do, do we need to be in your office in order to explore this tension or are there some exercises that we can do that might help us resolve it? There are exercises. So what I recommend, I'll try to walk through this in a way that's easy to follow along with at home, is you can basically get two pieces of paper and on your own actually, in whatever way you do this, again, for artists, this is going to be a lot more accessible. But you essentially create an entire personality for each part of you on one page and the other. So for you, it might be the war journalist and the guy who's out late partying. And on the other, it's the other. It's the one page and the other, it's the one page. And the other, it's the one page. And the other, it's the other. the ABC News journalist who's got a happy family at home, whatever those two things may look like, right? And you actually, rather than writing them as your own two sides, it takes a little leap, but to almost give them their own full lives. Let them fully live and express themselves.

They might have different names. They might have the same name. But see if there's a different personality that really gets a chance to fully express itself. What are they like? What relationships are they in? What clothes do they wear? What music do they listen to? Where are they living? What kind of home are they in? All of those different components. You get to enhance these sides of yourself versus just kind of living in a difficult tension with them, maybe picking one or picking the other to live for a while, and maybe tearing down a whole life that one has built because the other one is now screaming for attention. We want to give them a chance to be in full relationship and really be sort of working on holding this balance more than just kind of in a constant tug-of-war

with each other. So that's the first step. And there's not many more steps to this, okay? But the first step is to really give them a full personality on one page and the other, and then start by giving them a name to finding what their name is. This is reminding me a little bit of internal family systems, the increasingly popular form of psychotherapy where you name your quote-unquote parts, the aspects of your personality, to give them names and then to enter into a dialogue with them and between them? I have heard that, and I think that's probably true. I think internal family systems is actually extremely Jungian and very much based on a lot of Jung's ideas. And so while I think this actually

does have a great deal to do with internal family systems, the reverse is also true. So Jung was constantly working with the different personalities internally and the ways that what he called, he called them complexes, he called them autonomous complexes, too, the way that an entire personality can sort of take over someone's life without their conscious awareness. And really, the necessity to bring that more into consciousness and then into relatedness. So I think internal family systems has done an exquisite job of clarifying a lot of these ideas that can get really obtuse. at times. Another comparison that popped up in my mind as you were talking is so if you're having us get two sheets of paper and describe, name, map out our wild side and our civilized side, our meaning seeking side and our safety seeking side, the Buddha had one inner character. He named that character Mara. Mara was kind of the embodiment of

the three poisons in Buddhism. Those are greed, hatred, and delusion. So greed is pretty obvious. Hatred actually, sometimes the synonym is aversion, and part of aversion actually is fear. So there is a kind of of conservative nature to aversion or hatred. And then the third poison is defilement. I might be mangling this. I apologize Buddhist scholars, but this is how I understand it. The third poison is delusion, and delusion is being confused about the nature of reality, but it's also being confused about the fact that you're in the grips of greed or hatred right now. And when you're insufficiently mindful, greed or hatred can own you. And so in some ways, this exercise is understanding your greedy side,

understanding your aversive side, and the understanding is dealing with the delusional. illusion. Beautiful. I think you're totally right. And I think it's a different approach to what Buddha's approach maybe was in the end, although I think it's probably closer than we might imagine, because he really was personifying these aspects and wrestling with them. Again, he was facing them. He was engaging with them. And that's very different than keeping them in the unconscious or keeping them out of awareness. So by bringing them into awareness and having conversations with them and facing them, we have a much better shot of not living in delusion, as you say. Yeah. I mean, didn't Jung say something like, we don't get enlightened by imagining figures of

light. We get enlightened by taking the unconscious and making it conscious? Absolutely. By being in the darkness. Stepping into the darkness, you actually, you see what has been buried there all along. Yes. And you bring it into the light. Yeah. So this is part of Jung's response, too, to new age ideas or ideas that really are just. just there focusing on the good stuff and the light and all of this. So that was never his work. A lot of his ideas have been co-opted by folks that I think he would ultimately very much disagree with. Again, deeply consonant with Buddhism, the idea that the way out is through.

You need to see clearly your own inner nonsense so that it doesn't own you as much. And even after enlightenment in the Buddhist texts, there is transcribed. some of the Buddha's inner monologue where he will say the words Mara, I see you. Yes. So even after he's gotten enlightened, greed, hatred, and delusion are popping up in the Buddha's mind, but he sees them. Absolutely. I almost have so much to say.

I don't know what to say at this moment because you're nailing it. I mean, you're so exactly on point. And I love the connections you're bringing. Yeah. Thank you. Flattery will get you everywhere. Let's go back to your exercise. I don't know if that I let you finish describing how we would do this.

There's a little bit more. So this is what I do. What I lead folks through is the next step would be to really ask yourself, what percentage of these two sides are currently sort of sharing space? If you've named them, do you want to give us a couple names or shall I make some up? Sure. These are huge characters in my next book. Greed for me is Arthur.

who was my great-grandfather. I never met because he was a con man who took his own life during the Depression in the family kitchen after having lost the family fortune. And hatred is my, that was my father's side. My mother's side, hatred would be my mother's father. So my grandfather, Robert Johnson, unfair to really bracket him fully under hatred because he was a good dude in lots of ways. but he was a pretty harsh, angry, bullying figure at his worst. And so RJ is my inner shorthand for my inner bully. Amazing. So you're already doing this. You're already witnessing the tension between these two guys internally.

Do you feel that Arthur and RJ are connected for you to, you know, let's call it the war journalist versus the, well, you name it. I don't want to define your sides for you here. Honestly, I can fit my relationship to RJ and Arthur into your framework, but it isn't really the way I, I sort of deal with them on a much broader level, which is I have these unpleasant, difficult aspects of my personality, as we all do. How do I want to be with them? I want to be in a position of seeing it clearly, what the Buddhist would call some pajana. and actually having a certain amount of warmth toward them. Like they're trying to help, but not skillfully. Totally.

Okay, well, so what I'm going to do, because I'm curious about, I don't want to mash things together here that maybe aren't entirely meant to be together. But to sort of see maybe that Arthur, well, Arthur might be the wild guy who's sort of trying to excise some demons in war zones. I don't know. But there's a quality of this sort of wildness. and maybe again connected to lineage, which very often it is. And then there's Dan. So Arthur and Dan maybe are in a struggle a little bit.

I'm taking a leap here. But I think in a certain respect, one needs to be... This shows up in global mythology all the time. There's Gilgamesh and Incadu. There's Anana and Erishgagal. These are ancient ideas of the kind of civilized self and the wild self. And so if we have, let's say, Arthur and Dan, Arthur being the... wild self, Dan being the civilized self. The question might be in any given moment,

moments maybe is currently this month sort of, what is the balance of power that Arthur and Dan have in your life? And so I would ask someone to create a very simple pie chart and divide it into two parts. What is that balance of power look like? You want to try to do that? Well, I'm just, I'm doing two things right now. One is I'm making a note of this because I'm going to recommend it to my substack followers because I think this is a cool exercise. The second thing I'm doing is just preparing to fully reflect back to you what you've said so that the listeners to this podcast can have it in their brain and their working memory. So this is the two selves exercise. Just to restate it, you got two sheets of paper.

The first you're sort of mapping out naming and describing your wild. side. You're searching for meaning side. And the other sheet of paper, you're naming and describing you're searching for safety side, your civilized side. And then you're taking a third sheet of paper. Many trees are dying for this exercise. And you are... You can use the same piece. And in fact, if you want to use one piece for the first one, feel free. That's actually what I typically recommend. But yes, you're creating a pie chart next, wherever you choose. On your hand. You can put it on your hand if you want. Fair now. Okay. Yes.

You're creating a pie chart where you're mapping out, okay, within this contemporaneous period, a week, a month, or whatever, who's got their hands on the steering wheel, what percentage of the time? And I imagine what you're going to say next is that this helps you get a sense of, are you in some sort of balance? Yes, almost. What the next final piece is, sort of final piece, is to then create a second pie chart where the question is, what's ideal? What's the ideal balance? And I will say what's so important to understand is actually, as I would imagine for you, it's not ideal for Arthur to have 50% of the share of life, is my guess.

I might be wrong. But you might want him around 10% of the time or 20% of the time. It might feel intuitively, and I'm totally guessing here, okay, but it might feel intuitively like if he were gone completely, something actually would be missing. This isn't, right? There's something that would be gone. Arthur were gone completely. Yeah. My wife actually worries about this sometimes that she's like, I don't want you to get too into either the Dharma or modern psychological techniques in a way that

erases all of your edge, which is ironic because it's my edge that is often extremely annoying to her. But what a beautiful thing for her to see, that some part of your life force, your whole being actually is in that edge. And to get rid of him completely makes you less you as a whole human. To me, it's actually the irony. I studied Buddhism pretty hard in my early years. I actually walked away from it in a way. It's sort of still in my life here and there. How many practitioners of Buddhism I saw that I felt like had forgotten the whole point of the middle way and had just really gone deep into a very lopsided replication of supposedly what Buddha was saying, but I think really forgetting the holding of the tension point.

I'm just laughing because, I mean, I completely agree with you. And a cornerstone of my work is to take the Dharma and remove the unnecessary spiritual affectations that have accrued to it in the West. It's sort of silly. And this happens so often when we have teachers from so long ago that we no longer really can actually hear directly from. But we take bits and pieces and then screw the whole thing up. Yeah. And, you know, so I think the continued wrestling is the point to just simply eradicate or repress Arthur completely misses the fact that he's actually around for a reason. He helps you be who you are. So the next piece of this exercise then is what is actually the ideal. Again, I don't know if you want to answer that. Do you have an answer? I think your answer is right. It's like some percentage. It's significantly below 50%, but non-zero.

Great. So then what we actually see, and this I think is counterintuitive in a way when we think about balance, we tend to think of 50-50. You're on a scales, you know. But actually, internally, we tend to have a sense of actually, I need that part of me this much. And people have given every range of answer that I've done this with. But once we understand the ideal between the two, we then can compare the two charts. And I've seen folks who look at them and they say, oh my God, the part of the of me that is supposed to be 10% is 90%. That is an immediate diagnostic test of how out of whack things are for that person. Similarly, I've seen people they're just about 10% off. We then get into personally, okay, what are some steps for you personally to get this closer, not to 50-50, but to the balance you intuitively know you're trying to get to? And so then the final step is, oh, here are a few things I need to do. Here are a few things. I need to integrate. Here's a trip I need to take. Here's the practices every day I need to work on. But we need to then give both parts of these some air in our lives.

I love this. I think it's great. I want to go back to the first step before we've killed too many trees. I don't want to say we've given a short drift because I don't think we have. And I do think there's a lot more to say here because getting in touch with the shit you're suppressing, the aspects of your personality, that you do not like, that's no simple job. No, it's not simple at all. And I think it is supported when we allow it to be a little bit more novelistic, more theatrical, more of an art project. So I'm not saying, tell me all the bad shit you've done. I'm not saying, this is actually a little bit why I don't often use the term shadow work.

I resist a little bit that term in the way that I think it's entered common parlance. because I'm much more interested in what we think of as, like, in other words, Jung used that term of what's in the shadow quite literally, what's not in the light. It's turned into kind of what's your dark stuff, what's in the darkness, what are you, how are you bad, how are you not good? That's just sort of less interesting to me than how do we bring all of this into conversation. So I'm less interested in like the big reveal, tell me all the bad shit about who you are And that's an inevitable part of therapy, you know, this kind of confessional.

It's an inevitable piece of therapy. But it's really kind of exciting and interesting when we get to turn this more into like a novel and just get to know the different characters that are walking around inside of you. That's fun. That's actually really fun. And that's where I think therapy is a very creative, curious process. I mean, there is a certain amount of looking at past stuff you've done, what I've sometimes referred to, as the life review, which can be nauseating because you're thinking about when your demons or

shadow side or parts or whatever you want to call it have dragged you into the underworld. However, that doesn't have to be the whole thing. It can really be about this sort of perversely pleasing exercise of seeing aspects of your personality, which, by the way, are in all of us. Absolutely. And then, as you say, kind of treating them novelistically. Exactly. Because even when we have done horrible things, if we really give space to why we did that and what happened, there is still much more of a story than just, I'm bad. And that story is interesting. The kind of therapy that I enjoy, that I try to practice with people, that I try to practice in my own therapeutic work, is really much more about curiosity and extraordinary amounts of love. But it feels sometimes more like an art project, not because we are avoiding anything, but actually because we're not taking a moralistic good or bad stance.

We're simply holding the story. And that is always then leading to some form of creativity or better understanding. Yeah, in my own life, I've moved from a kind of black and white thinking, I think there's a term, like a manichaean view of the world, if I want to pretend. to be smarter than I actually am. I don't actually know what that's a reference to. But I've heard that word used before as a kind of, you know, a thresher function that the mind does. You're either good or you're bad. And over time, I've started just to look at everything through the lens of causes and conditions, right? That is like inherently impersonal. So I don't like that. There are

many things in my past. I don't like that I did, but I can understand that I was riding on this vast see of causes and conditions. That's not an excuse for it, but it is an explanation. It's not my fault per se, but it is my responsibility to use the old cliche. Sure. And it brings compassion. It's less like bringing the hammer down and more bringing a stance of curiosity to the whole thing, if I'm understanding you. Yeah. And it's compassion and understanding not in the sense of co-signing on things that are objectively harmful. It's not letting myself or anybody else off the hook. It's kind of just taking a broader perspective so that I can approach my own mistakes and those of others without unnecessary rage. Totally. I wish that more of that was part of our

justice system, you know, because it's so clear if I had been raised in a different socioeconomic or racial environment, there were so many things in my youth. I was a very angry child and very sad and very depressed a lot of the time. And it was so clear that if I'd been in different circumstances, I would have done all sorts of things. You know, if I'd been born male, that might have put me in different circumstances. So I think that approach, as I understand it, brings an enormous amount of compassion and understanding to our fellow humans on this journey. Yes. And so I don't know what your politics are, but I would say, I imagine our politics are similar. I have the same critique of the justice system, having covered it as a journalist for

decades and seen lots of miscarriages of justice and racial inequities and imbalances. I can also say, though, and this may be less popular with you and others whose politics might swing to the left, which again includes me, I think viewing the people we disagree with, including Donald Trump, through the lens of causes and conditions, which again doesn't mean we're co-signing on it or being dormats, I think will allow us to, as a my friend, Father Gregory Boyle, says, resist without vilifying. Absolutely. And he's a great man, by the way. I agree. I will say, I am in a constant process with this in my family. My mother-in-law is conservative. And we have an enormous amount of both tension and love in trying to sort out.

You know, how to, I don't know what the quite words are, but coexist. But I think your framing of causes and conditions, I'm always expressing, I understand completely where she is based on where she came from, 100%. There's absolutely no question at all. And so being able to really see that and love her very deeply. And the two of us, we both love each other very deeply and we often disagree on extremely important things. And that's an important tension to hold. Yeah, exactly. Coming up, Satya, talks about dream work, what it is, why you should do it. and how to do it. And we talk about the perks of making your unconscious feel seen. In our remaining time, let's talk about dream work. So we've talked about what you don't really

love calling shadow work, but just for the sake of shorthand. Sure. Let's say we talked about shadow work. But there's also a big emphasis in Jungian thought on dream work. Maybe let's start with a basic description of what that is and why we would do it. And then, like, how can we do it? So basically, everything we've spoken about the collective unconscious and kind of archetypal ideas, Jung says that dream work is the royal road to the unconscious. It is the emanations of the unconscious every night. So I often think about dreams in Jungian psychology as something akin to blood work

when we go see the doctor or x-rays. They are data and information in the unseen spaces. that help doctors understand what's going on diagnostically for the patient. You know, and if I look at blood work, it's complete mumbo-jumbo. I mean, I don't even know what I would be seeing. And same with x-rays. My father was a physician. He could read an x-ray. I remember one time we were watching ER.

And in a millisecond, he looked up from whatever he was working on and saw an x-ray that was backwards and said that x-rays backwards. And to me, you know, I said, how did you see that? It was on the screen for two seconds. he's like, it's a red blinking light that x-ray is turned around the wrong way, you know. So these are things I have no ability to see. But dreams similarly are sort of an image of the unseen space that can help us understand a person's psychology.

So what I do with patients and also with students is ask people to just simply start writing down their dreams. And I will say in terms of 10% happier, I think actually literally just writing down your dreams can help in all sorts of ways because we often wake up with different moods or sort of things that don't feel quite right, often simply by writing down our dreams, it's sort of like remembering something that your psyche is kind of rattling around with a little bit and can't quite grasp. So I encourage people to simply have like a journal next to their bed with a pen, whatever works for you, try never to look at your phone first thing in the morning, and actually

write down your dreams as much as you can in the first, rather in the present tense. So you're sort of, you know, I walk into a room and there's a man in a red hat on the right. You're trying to write in present tense again, kind of like you're telling a story. And the first step is simply capturing what you experienced in the night, what story unfolded. And importantly, people will say either I have 10,000 dreams or I have no dreams. And I invite people to, if you have so many dreams, you can't capture them all, write out one and trust psyche that that's enough. You know, you don't need to get everything. And if you have none, I often challenge folks to just sort of pay attention for a week if there's a tiny image that they notice and try to start writing down,

even with that very tiny image, very often more will start to show up once you've just captured a tiny piece of it. Can you say again why writing the dreams down would make you 10% if not more happier? Well, let me, I mean, I don't know if you've had this experience, but you have a memory or you have a thought and then the thought kind of goes away a little bit and you, we often, I mean, I will spend a half an hour sometimes being like, what was that thought that sort of showed up and then disappeared? You know, we sort of are trying to recollect things that they can kind of bug us or bother us, things like that. Very often when people wake up,

there's images and memories and stories that they kind of vaguely remember. Like there's sort of a mood or there's a sense of something. But we are so ill-trained to pay attention to the unconscious, which again is a part of us. Even if people think it's complete nonsense, we are spending a great deal of our time sleeping

and there are, in fact, stories unfolding. Everyone agrees that REM sleep exists. So Western science is very, very clear on that, and that REM sleep is incredibly important for our well-being. Entering dream state, whether people think it's nonsense or not, is extremely important for our mental health. So if we just capture a little bit of conscious knowledge of what it was that was unfolding, often that very connection can kind of clear up moods or funny things that we feel when we wake up. And then it can also start to influence our days and lives. And that's a much larger conversation.

But just having that bit of connection, sort of allowing memory to actually witness what it was that was happening can be surprisingly helpful. I'm still trying to understand that when I woke up this morning, I tried to capture the last dream because I knew I was talking to you. I don't know that it changed the complexion of my morning to have done that. I think you're saying it's not so much something that feels good in the moment, but it over time accumulates into an increasing sense of wholeness? Yes, I think that's true. I also think, I don't know that, in fact, I'm certain writing down my dreams every morning sometimes is just a pain in the ass. In fact, very frequently, it's not what I feel like doing, right? So it might even bother me or annoy me initially.

I'd rather be doing all sorts of things or I have something I really need to be working on. It's not so much I mean this. Every single day, don't worry. If you write down your dreams, you'll be 10% happier. Simply that very often I think some of what people are experiencing is a kind of hovering mood or feeling they can't quite name. And in that case, I have seen quite a bit of improvement when people simply notice what it is that they're dreaming about. Because often people will say both that they're having these moods and say they're having recurring dreams, which is a very specific symptom. there's a very specific image or message that psyche is sort of constantly trying to convey

and every morning you wake up and pretend like that didn't happen. And there's a groundhog's day quality to it. And so simply saying, okay, what are you trying to say? Again, I think of this extremely relationally. Like the kid is tugging on your shirt constantly, dad, dad, dad, dad, dad, dad. At some point, if you go, okay, what do you, what do you need, the tugging might stop happening, for one, right? There's some relief there. But actually, there may be something really important that is being conveyed that initially just seemed like an annoyance. That's really interesting. You said before that something was a much larger conversation, that understanding something about your dreams can impact your waking life in some

profound way. What were you pointing at there? Well, I think the question, it's sort of like getting an x-ray and getting blood work is step one, right? Everything after that is diagnostics and treatment. So we're really kind of just talking about getting the blood sample at the moment and how to do that for ourselves. And that's writing down the dreams. Right. So then once you've written them down and you've gotten the diagnosis, can you talk through what that might look like? Yes. I mean, that's then the basis of Jungian analysis. Again, I mean, I want to make this as clear as possible, but you don't even necessarily have the diagnostics if you simply write down the dream because you're doing this for yourself.

You're taking your own sample. You now have to take this to the doctor or have your own background, your own dream group, your own study, so that this actually becomes something you want to work on and learn from. We can think of this to switch metaphors here as, you know, Bible study or Torah study or studying an actual text then. This is when I think it's extremely interesting, it's deeply meaningful, but you actually start learning about

what these stories are that are happening while you sleep. Again, this is a huge way that we connect the conscious to the unconscious self. It's part of wholeness. We're not just disregarding them as nonsense. It's like, hey, what's going on?

You know, what is the kid trying to say? What is the animal trying to communicate to me with these movements that it's making? What is this foreign text that I've never been able to understand, but some people understand? There is, again, a stance of curiosity. That becomes a great deal of work that I'm not sure I can easily summarize in this moment, but it's a launching off point to really start exploring your own dreams. Right.

So I think what you're saying is there can be relief that can be had over time from the wholeness-inducing benefits of writing down your dreams. And there's a process that that process can initiate a separate process where you're talking about these dreams, these texts with your trained therapist. Exactly. Or you can do it in all sorts of with your dream group. I mean, there's different levels of training and different levels of background and knowledge that come into play. Maybe one thing that, you know, listeners can do more easily is if you, let's say, get 10 dreams, write down 10 dreams, one thing you can start to notice and just take a lens to is, are there themes showing up? What are the themes? And you might just simply notice, what are three themes

that showed up? Is the color red showing up a lot? Is there a young boy showing up more often than not? Is there an elephant wandering through a few dreams? And why am I dreaming of an elephant? Just simply bringing that awareness. Maybe it's a specific location. If you look for themes, then your conscious mind might again sort of tip off and say, oh, you know, there's little revelations. Oh, that makes sense. Again, the goal is your kind of inviting a really fun project and curiosity that is in self-life enhancing. To take that kind of interest in yourself as a beautiful thing. It's not solipsistic, narcissistic. It's beautiful. That makes life more of a creative project and less of a chore day by day. nobody likes hearing well other than you nobody likes hearing about people's dreams it's really boring um but i can tell you i'm pretty confident in the message that my psyche is trying to send to me which is you're anxious dream work can help with that dan if you ever want to talk dream work can help you'd be shocked well maybe there's more my unconscious is trying to tell me but most of my dreams are like i'm behind

on a work project or i'm late for something and i can't get there Do you want me to tell you what that might mean? Okay. I was assuming it means I'm anxious, but you can tell me it means something else. So often, very frequently, maybe always, the theme of being late for something is, again, we're kind of returning to a lot of this conversation, but that your conscious self is determined to get to that thing. And another part of you is actually doing everything it can to interrupt and to keep you

from getting there. So you are actually in a kind of civil war internally. This very much what we were talking about, maybe with Arthur and RJ or Arthur and Dan, is less than about tending to the anxiety from, let's say, a meditative perspective. And more psychologically, what is it that you are doing to sabotage your own goal? And until that person gets time and space, you're going to continue having dreams. of being late and not quite arriving at your destination. That's really interesting.

One thing I'm hearing coursing through the comments you've been making over the last five to ten minutes and probably all the way back to the beginning of this conversation, is that there's a deep relief that can be had when you can just make your unconscious feel seen. Yes. Yes, very much. I feel that as almost attachment work or just basic relationship work, it's like a good marriage, a good intimate relationship. Very often, so many of the symptoms that are showing up are the byproduct of a lack of witnessing or listening.

And if we can actually bring presence to our own deeper selves, our unseen selves, very frequently symptoms on their own begin to resolve. Two questions I ask at the end of every interview. The first is, is there something you were hoping that we would talk about that we didn't? No, we covered a lot of ground, I think. I'm delighted by the conversation. Me too. This has been awesome.

Shout out to Marissa Schneiderman for bringing you to my attention. Second question, and I do see some connection between the first and second question, at least when I put on my advocating for you hat, which is we didn't really talk much about your book, Quarter Life, which is ostensibly a roadmap for people in their 20s and 30s, but actually is, as you describe it, a kind of roadmap to psychological adulthood in general and really does talk a lot about this, you know, how to balance the civilized and wild sides of our own minds. But can you say a little bit more about quarter life and also, you know, mention any other resources that you are putting out into the world?

Do you have a website, social media, other books, anything else? Just plug everything, please. I'm happy to. I will also say, I'm sort of glad we didn't talk about Quarter Life in more depth, only because I did that on Book Tour for two years. And I loved your summary just now. It's still very dear to my heart, of course. But I'm also really happy with everything we spoke about today.

Yeah, so Quarter Life is my book, Quarter Life, The Search for Self in Early adulthood. And it's my offering to people in their 20s and 30s primarily, also late teens, that's really kind of more of a soulful psychology and less get your shit together, you know, what are you going to do, figure it out. There's a lot of books directed at that time of life that I think often add to the symptoms in terms of stress and anxiety versus help. And I wanted a book that it's really the book I was looking for in my early 20s. But it's very much, as you say, about psychological adulthood. And it's a lot of the work that I saw being spoken of

but in midlife psychology and a lot of Jung's work that I thought was extremely applicable to people earlier in their lives in terms of trying to make sense of how to become a person in society and a happy person. The rest of my work, I teach a lot on Jungian psychology. I have a little institute called the Salome Institute of Jungian Studies. I teach clinicians. I teach lay people. and I have a substack called Self and Society in which I talk about the individual in the collective and how incredibly hard that is in this moment in time. And we will put links to all of those in the show notes.

Thank you. One of my best friends named her daughter Salome. Oh, yeah? She turned into a fantastic young woman. It's one of my very favorite names. It's a great name. Satya, thank you very much. Really appreciate it. It's great to meet you.

An absolute pleasure. Thank you, Dam. Thanks for having me. Thanks again to Sotia Doyle Bayock. Don't forget to check out her book, which is called Quarter Life, The Search for Self in Early Adulthood. She's also got a new year-round program in Jungian psychology and myth, which begins in February of 2006.

I'll put a link to that year-round program in the show notes. If you want to learn more about how to resolve this tension that many of us feel between safety and responsibility on the one hand and meaning and risk-taking on the other, we've got a guided meditation, as I mentioned earlier, specifically designed to accompany this podcast episode. It comes from Seb and A. Salasi, who is our Teacher of the Month over on Dan Harris.com. Seb, as part of her teacher of the month, duties will also be guiding some meditation and Q&A sessions live on video several times during the course of the month. The next one is Tuesday, October 14th at 4 Eastern. We do them at the same time every week. The next one is on the 14th,

With both me and Seb, that should be fun. Also, don't forget about the meditation party retreat that Seb and I are going to be doing on October 24th through the 26th up at the Omega Institute. Finally, thank you to everybody who works so hard on this show. Our producers are Tara Anderson and Eleanor Vasili. Our recording and engineering is handled by the great folks over at Pod People. Lauren Smith is our managing producer. Marissa Schneiderman is our senior producer.

DJ Kashmir is our executive producer. and Nick Thorburn of the band Islands wrote our theme.