The Spirituality of Carl Jung

& 4 Spiritual Treasures for Your Inner Life

In a small village on the shores of Lake Zurich, a man built a tower with no electricity and no running water. He cooked over an open flame. He read the I Ching. He carved Latin inscriptions into stone. And he listened—intently—to the images and voices rising from the depths of his own unconscious.

Carl Jung was a depth psychologist, yes. But he was also a mystic—one who believed that the psyche was not merely a structure to analyze, but a living reality filled with meaning. He thought God could be found in dreams. He believed the soul spoke in symbols. And he viewed suffering not as something to escape, but as an invitation to transformation.

For those walking a contemplative path, Jung offers more than a theory of personality or a book of archetypes. He offers a sacred map—one that affirms the complexity of the human soul, honors the language of the unconscious, and insists that our deepest wounds can become the doorway to the Divine.

This week, we’re walking that map—and bringing back four spiritual treasures for the inner life.

1. The Shadow Side

We’ve all had moments that shook our self-image. A flare of pettiness. A flash of jealousy. A comment that felt cold, even cruel.

Jung would say: that’s your shadow showing itself.

The shadow, in Jungian terms, isn’t evil. It’s simply the parts of ourselves we’ve pushed out of view—traits we learned to reject, impulses we deemed inappropriate, emotions that didn’t fit the mask we learned to wear.

But the spiritual life, Jung believed, isn’t about perfection. It’s about wholeness.

And to be whole, we must meet the shadow. Not to indulge it, but to understand it. Because often, what we repress comes out sideways—in projections, in conflict, in judgment of others. But when we welcome the shadow into consciousness, it becomes a guide.

Our shame might carry a buried gift. Our anger, a compass for justice. Our envy, an arrow pointing toward unlived dreams.

“Knowing your own darkness,” Jung wrote, “is the best method for dealing with the darknesses of other people.”

The task is not to destroy the shadow—but to befriend it, integrate it, and let it teach us how to love what we once feared in ourselves.

2. Personality as Sacred Pattern

Jung didn’t invent the idea of personality types, but he gave it spiritual roots.

He described two basic orientations of energy—introversion and extroversion—not as quirks, but as fundamental postures of the soul. Do you draw life from reflection or from action? From the inner world or the outer one?

He went further, identifying four core functions: thinking, feeling, sensation, and intuition. Each person has a dominant function, a way the world lights up most vividly for them.

These weren’t just psychological categories. For Jung, they were sacred maps—keys to understanding how the Divine expresses itself uniquely in each of us.

Knowing your type isn’t about self-limitation. It’s about self-acceptance. And about recognizing the mystery in how others operate too.

Jung himself, an intuitive introvert, built a solitary tower at Lake Bollingen to write and reflect. Over its door he carved the words: Vocatus atque non vocatus, Deus aderit. Summoned or not, God will be there.

3. Dreams and the Mythic Mind

When Jung was on the brink of breakdown after his split from Freud, he didn’t try to think his way back to sanity. Instead, he turned inward. Each night he recorded his dreams. Each day he painted what he saw. The result became The Red Book—part journal, part scripture, part vision quest.

(All of the illustrations in this post are Jung’s own!)

Through a process he called active imagination, Jung treated inner images not as fantasies, but as sacred encounters. He would take a dream or symbol and enter into conversation with it—writing, drawing, letting it speak. He met a wise old man. A dark feminine figure. A serpent. A child. He followed them not with analysis, but with openness.

And then he noticed something strange: the same symbols appeared again and again—not just in his patients’ dreams, but across cultures and centuries. From time immemorial, our myths, religion, and storytelling traditions seemed to contain the same twelve archetypes.

This led to his idea of the collective unconscious—a shared field of mythic images and patterns that belong to all of us.

Jung realized that to dream is to kneel beside a deep well—to lower the bucket into mystery and draw up the stories that shaped our ancestors.

To tend to those stories is to hold something holy in your hands.

It’s not just psychology.

It’s communion.

4. Mandalas and the Mystery of Wholeness

As Jung worked his way through his own unconscious, a certain shape kept appearing: the mandala—Sanskrit for circle.

He had long been drawn to circles in nature, and had even dreamed of one, an ancient single-celled organism called a radiolarian, as a child. But now, during his deepest descent into the psyche, the mandala became something more: a symbol of the soul’s inner architecture.

Jung saw in the mandala an integration of the opposing forces of the soul. The circumference could hold the soul’s spectrum of paradoxes, while the center offered unity. 

On the outside: light and shadow, chaos and order, masculine and feminine.

On the inside: stillness. Union. God.

Before long, Jung was sketching mandalas every day, as a means to understand his own psyche.

Often he would place a square within the circle of the mandala, and this quaternity, holding both shapes together, was so profound to him that he considered it an image of the numinous, the earthly spiritual reality that a sensitive soul could grasp.

Jung loved finding mandalas in nature, in ancient art, in Eastern religions, and in Christianity, most observable in its rose windows.

And as he invited his patients to make their own mandalas, they too began recognizing the unintegrated forces within themselves, moving to a place of greater wholeness and healing.

Mandals weren’t just decoration. They were soul-maps. Portals to the deeper Self.

And the path toward the center, Jung wrote, can be approached from any direction.

The Invitation

In the quiet of his stone tower, Carl Jung once wrote, “Your vision will become clear only when you look into your own heart. Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakens.”

He knew what the mystics have always known: that the soul carries its own wisdom. That dreams are not random, but revelatory. That our darkness belongs. That the symbols that find us are not accidents—but messages.

Jung left us a map not of escape, but of return. A way back to the center. A way to hold complexity without collapsing. A way to listen to the sacred whisper beneath our personalities, our projections, our pain.

This week, we’ll follow that map together.

Join us for our live class this Saturday, June 7: “Carl Jung: Dreamer, Depth Explorer, Mystic.” Taught by Jungian analyst Dr. Fanny Brewster, we’ll take a contemplative journey into the soul’s architecture, the wisdom of dreams, and the deep work of spiritual integration.

The psyche is sacred—let’s listen.

We look forward to seeing you there.

Learn More About the Jung Masterclass

---

Cameron Bellm is a Seattle-based spiritual writer, speaker, and retreat guide. After completing her PhD in Russian literature, she traded the academic life for the contemplative life, combining her love for language with a deeply-rooted spirituality. Her work can be found at the intersection of mysticism and activism, linking ancient spiritual practice with modern social engagement. Cameron's work has been featured in America Magazine, National Catholic Reporter, Jesuit Media Lab, and more. Her first book, The Sacrament of Paying Attention: How Writers, Artists, and Mystics can Lead Us into Sacred Human Communion, will be published in 2026. When her nose isn't in a book and her feet aren't softly padding through a library, you can find her marveling at the ferns, salmonberries, and spruce trees along a Seattle trail.