Jung writing here – beautifully – on the slow, lifelong process of individuation and how it means a deep befriending of all the parts of ourself and our life story. It is what we are learning as we “stay” in meditation, becoming more and more at ease with the divisions within ourselves. It reminds us that we move towards the full potential of our own maturity through the struggles of life and that we can get “lost” many times along the way.   To become fully ourselves means that we pass through these numerous “psychic transformations” and finally come to see that the happiness we were seeking for all along is based on what is already present within us and a reconciliation with what has made us who we are.

It is the state of someone who, in his wanderings among … his psychic transformations, comes upon a secret happiness which reconciles him to his apparent loneliness.  In communing with himself he finds not deadly boredom and melancholy but an inner partner; more than that, a relationship that seems like the happiness of a secret love, or like a hidden springtime, when the green seed sprouts from the barren earth, holding out the promise of future harvest.

Jung, Mysterium coniunctionis