Beautifully put. The meditation / Buddhist phrase often used is that of "two darts". The first dart is the "real" affliction. So an easy example is - you wake

Beautifully put. The meditation / Buddhist phrase often used is that of "two darts". The first dart is the "real" affliction. So an easy example is - you wake up with a migraine. The first dart is real. It's an actual thing. The second dart though is your response. So in the case of a migraine you might feel all sorts of things: anger that it's happening again, irritation that it's today when you've got so much to do; worry that you've got a brain tumour; sadness that you're going to miss lunch... Insert a hundred similar responses here... What a meditation practice can do - and what Jung was sort of talking about - is make yourself much more aware of your responses. Although the first "dart" may be "real" and (in our example) you're gunna have a headache no matter what you do, you can relieve the suffering by lessening or even removing altogether the second darts. There's an often used quote which is attributed to Viktor Frankl (I'm not sure it was actually him...), but: “Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.” This is where some (only some in my experience and opinion) of the power of meditation is realised.