Connie Zweig

Connie Zweig, PhD, is a retired Jungian therapist and author of Meeting the Shadow (A New Edition is now available) and Romancing the Shadow (A New Edition is now available). Her award-winning book, The Inner Work of Age: Shifting from Role to Soul, extends shadow-work into midlife and beyond and explores aging as a spiritual practice. Her book, Meeting the Shadow on the Spiritual Path: The Dance of Darkness and Light in Our Search for Awakening, extends shadow-work into religion and spirituality. Her new PODCAST, Dr. Neil’s Spiritual Awakening to Non-Duality, posts on all podcast platforms. See her new SUBSTACK for livestreams and new writing: https://www.shadowworkawareness.com/about.
http://conniezweig.com

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Just One Question | Connie Zweig: What Does It Mean to...

You know the object of your addiction is bad for you. So why can’t you stop? Dr. Connie Zweig has spent decades working with people who feel stuck in exactly that gap between knowing and changing.

Zweig is a retired Jungian therapist and the author of the newly republished Meeting the Shadow and Romancing the Shadow — the books that helped launch the shadow-work movement, and the reason a new generation is now discovering it on TikTok.

In this clip, she walks Tami through her method step by step, using the story of a client who couldn’t stop eating ice cream every night while waiting for an unavailable boyfriend to call. Awareness alone, Zweig explains, is never enough. You have to name the shadow character, trace it back to where it was first modeled, and uncover the valid need hiding underneath it.

What you’ll take away from this clip:

  • Why awareness of a compulsive pattern rarely changes it on its own
  • How to identify a “shadow character” through its recurring thoughts, feelings, and body sensations
  • Why every addictive or compulsive behavior is protecting a valid, hidden need
  • Zweig’s own story of discovering her “judge” shadow character — inherited from her father

This clip is taken from the full Insights at the Edge conversation with Connie Zweig: “Meeting One of the World’s Leading Experts on the Shadow.” 

This episode is sponsored by Omega Institute, a global gathering hub for lifelong learning and spiritual exploration. Omega offers weekend workshops, special events, rest and rejuvenation retreats, professional training, online learning, and more. Discover what calls to you at eomega.org/true.

Connie Zweig: “Meeting One of the World’s Leading ...


As a new generation joins the search for understanding and meaning in our ambiguous and uncertain world, there’s a growing resurgence of interest in the Shadow—Carl Jung’s famous term for the aspects of ourselves that hide in our unconscious yet often drive behaviors we’d rather not repeat. In this podcast, Tami Simon speaks with acclaimed Jungian therapist and author Dr. Connie Zweig about her life’s mission to help us grow in self-awareness and move toward personal and collective healing by learning how to work with the Shadow. 

This aha-moment-filled conversation explores: meeting the Shadow on the spiritual path; ego formation during childhood; the concept of repression and the problem with the closet metaphor; why the Shadow hides—and when it erupts; “romancing the Shadow”; three cues to explore with respect to compulsive behaviors; “Shadow characters” and the practice of personifying aspects of the Shadow; the intergenerational aspect; engaging Shadow work at midlife; the superego; projection in relationships; sharing our secrets; money, sex, and power; shifting from a persona marriage to a Shadow marriage; the Vedanta tradition and the teaching on leshavidya, “the remains of ignorance”; the moral development missing in many spiritually advanced practitioners; illusions, idealizations, and archetypal projections; why the first reaction to meeting the Shadow is denial; Shadow projection in the politics of our times; step one: self-examination; bridging inner work and outer work wisely; how to practice “holding the tension of opposites”; cultivating nonduality in your own psychology; the “third thing” and the transcendent function; and more.

Note: This episode originally aired on Sounds True One, where these special episodes of Insights at the Edge are available to watch live on video and with exclusive access to Q&As with our guests. Learn more at join.soundstrue.com.

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Just One Question | Adyashanti: Is It an Awakening If ...

Is a spiritual awakening only real if it completely rearranges your life? That’s the question Tami Simon puts to Adyashanti in this episode, and his answer digs into something a lot of seekers wrestle with: the gap between a powerful glimpse of clarity and the ongoing work of actually living from it.

Adya, the American-born teacher behind books like The End of Your World and Falling into Grace, walks through why those temporary tastes of awakening are real, even when they fade, and offers a surprisingly practical way to hold onto what they revealed without grasping at them. Then he does something rare: he tells the story of his own first major awakening, a moment he describes as feeling like a nuclear explosion going off inside him.

Here’s what we cover:

  • Why a fleeting shift still counts as a real awakening, even if it doesn’t stick
  • The two (seemingly contradictory) pieces of advice Adya gives people chasing a past peak experience
  • How the first awakening can feel like a “freebie,” while everything after asks you to participate consciously
  • Adya’s own account of the night everything fell away and the still, small voice that told him, “This isn’t all of it. Keep going.”

And there’s so much more. Listen to the entire conversation from this Insights At the Edge episode, “Waking Up: What Does It Really Mean?” 

Kimberly Ann Johnson: “Becoming a Sexual Alchemi...

What if aging isn’t the slow closing of your erotic life, but the doorway into its most alive season?

This week, Tami Simon speaks with Kimberly Ann Johnson—sexological body worker, somatic experiencing practitioner, birth doula, and author of the new Sounds True book Erotic Seasons: Tuning In to the Rhythms of Women’s Sexuality and Spirituality—about what she calls erotic sovereignty, and the sentence that closes her book: the female body is its own spiritual path.

Join Tami and Kimberly to explore:

  • Erotic sovereignty—your relationship to your own life force, and why it stays with you across every season
  • Why the goal isn’t a more regulated nervous system, but a more responsive one, and what it means to run more charge
  • The four erotic seasons—maiden, mother, virgin, crone—and the surprising reason virgin comes after mother
  • Why hormonal transitions are “wet clay”: golden opportunities for repatterning that our culture teaches us to rush past
  • Menopause as a death rehearsal, and the life review that arrives decades before we expect it
  • Hot sex and warm sex—widening the range beyond adrenaline, and learning the language of the pause
  • “Hormones are gods”: the collective endocrine system, and why living intergenerationally may be the original hormone therapy
  • Becoming a sexual alchemist—arousal as healing energy, and why care is the whole ethic

Whether you are 25 or 75, Kimberly offers a map for meeting your body’s changes as thresholds rather than losses.

Please note: this episode includes candid discussion of sexual abuse and sexual wounding, including Kimberly Ann Johnson’s own experience.

Listen now, and meet your body as the path. →

This conversation offers genuine transmission, not just concepts about awakening, but the palpable presence of realized teachers exploring the growing edge of spiritual understanding together, and it originally aired on Sounds True One.

Get a FREE month of membership at https://bit.ly/STOne-Free-Month.

The Point of Insight | Our Medicine Lives in the Wound


What if the very thing that wounded you is the source of the medicine you’re here to give?

In this month’s Point of Insight, Tami Simon shares a personal story: minutes before going live with an archetypal astrologer, she was told—correctly, and within seconds—that she carried “the mother of all mother wounds.” That single moment became the culmination of a much longer, gradual unfolding: a lifetime’s worth of “drops,” from a mentor she called the Queen of the Reframe, to an interview with yoga teacher and activist Seane Corn titled “Your Pain Is Your Purpose,” to an email from a business coach whose four simple words reframed everything—your karma is your dharma.

Join Tami as she reflects on:

  • How a lifelong feeling of not belonging became the soil for a life’s work helping others feel connected
  • The difference between sudden insight and the slow, gradual “boiling water” of a tipping point
  • Why real breakthrough requires going all the way through pain, not around it
  • Joanna Macy’s question—”What breaks your heart?”—and how grief and care become fuel for service
  • Why “never turn away” may be one of the most important spiritual instructions there is

This is a shorter, solo reflection from Tami—released once a month on the Insights at the Edge feed—on where our deepest wounds and our clearest purpose meet.

Listen now. →

Find the original Insights at the Edge episodes here: “Seane Corn: Your Pain Is Your Purpose“