I used to judge people who didn’t want to work on their ‘issues’ and patterns. I questioned their emotional courage, their fortitude, their depth. To be sure, many of us – myself included – could do a better job of dealing with our stuff head on. But, at the same time, I now recognize that we cannot know how courageous someone else is by looking at their lives from the outside. Perhaps they are carrying around so much unresolved emotional material – their own, even that of the collective – that they do not have any energy left over for processing. Or perhaps they are working in the deep within in ways that we cannot begin to imagine – healing their unresolveds, quietly building the egoic foundation necessary to take on the next level of inner work. It’s so hard to know where courage lives. Jeff Brown