Dear Reader,

I'm sharing another raw excerpt from the book — this one on the power of metaphor.

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"If your current business were a garden, what would it look like?"

An image appeared: a small, cozy garden on the coast of Capri.

A beautiful undiscovered gem — but with dusty sculptures hidden behind overgrown vines. Small flowers bloomed here and there, tangled, half-hidden, almost forgotten.

I didn't consciously think this garden up. It just appeared.

The dust? My fear of being seen.

The few flowers? The habit of shrinking myself.

The overgrown vines? A lack of structure and support.

The gifts I was offering to the world were there — but obscured, unpruned, invisible. I hadn't been tending to them.

Then I imagined my ideal garden.

A new image emerged: the formal French gardens at Château de Vaux-le-Vicomte, just outside Paris.

Neatly pruned trees. A glowing fountain.

Pathways lined with symmetry, light, and flow.

Order. Rhythm. Elegance. Precise, but not rigid.

It felt alive, awake, seen.

My unconscious mind had given me a map — showing the gap between where I was and where I wanted to be.

The message was clear: to reach that version of life, I needed systems. Clarity. Visibility.

This is the power of metaphor.

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Carl Jung called this practice active imagination.

Between 1914 and 1930, during his "confrontation with the unconscious," Jung developed a method of entering an altered state where he could dialogue with figures emerging from his psyche.

Sometimes he drew mandalas — circular images that emerged spontaneously from his unconscious.

Other times, he received narrative visions —stories that carried symbolic meaning.

One disturbed him deeply: he saw himself ambushing and shooting Siegfried — the archetypal Germanic hero — riding in a "bone chariot" across a mountain path.

Jung was horrified. Why would he kill a hero?

When he sat with the metaphor, its meaning revealed itself. The "bone chariot" represented inherited, rigid ideals — the rational persona he had constructed during his years as Freud's protégé. Killing Siegfried meant releasing that identity to make space for something softer, more whole.

The story told him what his conscious mind couldn't admit: he needed to let his old identity die.

If Jung had asked directly, "Should I end my partnership with Freud?" he would have rationalised and overthought.

But the unconscious doesn't speak in arguments. It speaks in metaphors, symbols, and stories that bypass logic and go straight to truth.

Götterdämmerung, Act III: Si... Richard Wagner, Wiener Philh... PREVIEW   ​

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When we ask direct questions like:

“What’s wrong with my business?”

“Why am I stuck?”

“What’s my purpose?”

…we usually hit a wall.

The mind goes blank. Or spirals into overthinking.

But when we ask metaphorical questions, something unlocks:

If your business were a famous painting from history, what would it be?

If your last relationship were a house, what kind of house would it be?

If your work were a song, what would it be?

If your inner critic were an animal, what would it be?

If your burnout were a scene from a movie, what would be happening?

Suddenly, your inner storyteller takes over.

The answers don't come in bullet points or logical arguments.

They come as metaphors, stories, images, symbols—in the native language of your unconscious.

Exercise: Map the Metaphor

Choose one area of your life you feel unclear about — your business, relationship, creativity, or emotional state.

Pick a question and ask,

• If it were a garden, what would it look like?
• If it were a movie character, who would it be?
• If it were a city, what would it look like?
• If it were a weather pattern, what's the forecast?

Describe it in detail — without censoring or "figuring it out."

Then ask: What is this image telling me? What does it need from me?

Then imagine the ideal version. If your current reality were that same metaphor — but transformed into exactly what you want — what would it look like now?

What's different?

Let the gap between the two images become your map. Your unconscious already knows the truth.

With so much love,

Ginny Wan