SESSION 1.8 – The Wounded Self

Objectives:

Introduction:

Each of us has been wounded. Everyone, during the course of his/her life has been hurt. Nowadays a lot of people remain anxious about their wounds. But many do not realize that their inner wounds affect the way they behave and act towards others in society, especially the ones they love. Coming to terms with our wounds is the Christian path. According to Hildegard von Bingen, by becoming truly human we transform our wounds into pearls. How is this possible? This session helps us to recognize the process in which we can begin healing our wounds so that we may become “wholly’ human.

The Wounded Self

Our wounded self is our dark or shadow side, not because it is bad but because it is cut off from the light of God. It lives in the darkness of fear and the heaviness of false beliefs instead of in the light of love and truth. Moving toward "enlightenment" is moving into the light of truth. When we heal our fears and false beliefs, our energy lightens. We may even hear from others, "You seem so much lighter!"

Doorways to Darkness

Just as the light of God enters our hearts when we choose to open to love, the darkness enters when we choose to close our hearts and act from anger, fear, shame, judgment or hurt. Our anger, fear, shame, judgment and hurt are the cracks in our energy field through which the darkness enters. The darkness can also enter when we cloud our energy with drugs, alcohol, nicotine or sugar.

Becoming immune to darkness means never acting out of my wounded self's feelings of fear, anger, shame, judgment or hurt but always moving into an intent to learn about these feelings as soon as they come up.

Through purifying ourselves on the physical and emotional levels by eating well and doing our healing work, each of us can reach a place where our frequency is high enough that we can do this, we can hear our spiritual Guidance all the time.

When we feel hurt, angry, judgmental, shamed, blaming, depressed or frightened, our dialogues are with the wounded aspect of our Inner Child. These painful feelings come from our own unloving behavior toward ourselves. However, when you have been operating most of the time from your wounded self, you cannot suddenly become a loving Adult in order to do the dialogue process. So, often, your early dialogues may be between one aspect of your wounded self (for example, the part that chooses to indulge in binge eating), and another aspect of it (the part that is furious at being overweight).

We cannot bring light to darkness with darkness. In other words, we can't heal our darkness by being furious at it. We can transform darkness into light only by learning about and loving the darkness. We heal darkness only with light--the light of love. Our challenge is to love the part of us that we judge as bad, unlovable or unworthy, and it's a challenge that calls for the loving Adult.

But how can we have a dialogue between our wounded self and our loving Adult when we haven't yet developed a loving Adult? Here is where your imagination comes into play. You need to imagine that the dialogue is between your wounded self and your personal spiritual Guidance. You ask your wounded self questions and offer comfort and help, not from your own thoughts, but from what you would imagine your loving, wise and powerful spiritual Guidance would say and do. Or, if you know a person who you feel really is loving, wise and powerful, you imagine that person in dialogue with your Inner Child. Either one is a good stand-in for your loving Adult.

Given that you might not have role models of loving behavior in your daily life, you can use your spiritual Guidance as your role model to emulate and assimilate. Eventually, when you do this long enough, you begin to take on the qualities of your Guidance. This is how you develop your loving Adult. It takes practice. You have to learn to concentrate on this imaginative process and to trust what you hear.

Many of us have been brought up to believe that when we create--whether it be poetry, a painting, a song, a musical score, a book, a screenplay, a theory--we bring these things forth from our own minds. We may believe that we actually have the capacity to be creative all by ourselves. The truth is that creativity flows when we are open to Spirit and use the gift of our imaginations.

Just as love, compassion, truth, peace and joy are not feelings we generate from within our own small selves but are gifts from Spirit, so too are our imagination and the creativity that flows from it. We all have the capacity to learn to access the Source of wisdom and creativity.

It takes a lot of practice, yet practicing seems to be difficult for many people. If you were determined to become accomplished at a particular skill, for example playing a musical instrument, you would think nothing of practicing every day. In fact, you would know that you needed to practice daily in order to become skilled and then continue practicing daily to maintain your skill. You will become skilled only by daily practice, and you will continue to reap the benefits only by daily practice. It is only through daily practice that you will learn to consistently hear and trust both your Guidance and your true Self. The problem is that the wounded self won't practice, so unless you pray daily for help in shifting your deepest desire from getting love to being loving, you will not have enough of a loving Adult to override the wounded self and make the decision to practice.

Loving actions are those actions that support our highest good and the highest good of others. Loving actions are those actions that are motivated by love rather than by fear.

Many people who have been on a path of personal and spiritual growth have spent a lot of time talking. Talking with friends about what is wrong and what they want. Talking with therapists about their past and their beliefs. Talking with a mate about what needs changing. They have explored and explored and talked and talked - and not much has changed.

Exploring our limiting beliefs and where we got them is essential for opening the door to loving action, but taking loving action is the secret to joy. We can talk and talk and learn and learn, but until we are willing to take loving action, nothing will change. It is not that it is time to stop learning about our fears and beliefs, but it is time for all this learning to result in loving action.

Who Is In Charge Of The Actions You Take?

We are always taking action, yet much of the time the actions we take are not loving, in that they do not support our own and others' highest good.

All of our actions are being motivated by one of two intentions:

When our actions are being motivated by fear and our intent is to control, our wounded self is in charge.

When our actions are being motivated by love - both for ourselves and others - our loving Adult is in charge.

The Wounded Self

The wounded self is who we are when our primary intention is to have control over getting love and avoiding pain. Other common terms for the wounded self are the false self and the ego.

Our wounded self, coming from old fears and limiting beliefs, tries to feel safe through attempting to control our own painful feelings, as well as control others' feelings and behavior and the outcome of things.  We are operating as our wounded self when we are listening to and taking action based on the programmed lies of our mind - lies such as:

These are just a few of the hundreds of lies that we absorbed as we were growing up. When we listen to and take action based these false beliefs, our actions are controlling rather than loving. Controlling actions lead to anxiety, depression, stress, anger, and many other painful feelings. We get caught in a vicious circle of creating our pain with our unloving, controlling actions, then choosing more controlling actions in our attempt to stop the pain that we have created with our controlling actions. Whew!

For example, if you lash out at someone with blaming anger in an attempt to control him or her, you may end up feeling anxious and lonely. You may then try to control your feelings of anxiety and loneliness by overeating or eating junk. This may result in feeling physically bad as well as in weight gain. Then you may feel anxious and depressed over the weight gain, which may generate fears of rejection. You may then attempt to cover over your fears of rejection by being overly nice in your attempt to control how someone feels about you. When that person does not respond in a loving way to you, you may then feel hurt and lash out in anger and blame in your attempt to have control over the other person as well as over your own hurt. Now you are right back where you started - a vicious circle of pain and controlling behavior.

The Loving Adult

In order to take loving action, your loving Adult needs to be in charge of your choices. Your loving Adult is who you are when you are coming from a deep desire to be a loving person and you are open to learning about what is most loving to yourself and others. When you are truly open to learning, you will naturally be connected with a higher source of guidance - i.e. when you ask "What is the most loving action in this moment?" helpful answers will pop into your mind. Once you receive the answer in a particular situation, the loving Adult then takes the loving action. It is time to open to learning about loving action and then take the loving action. Less talk, more action!

Codependence

Codependence is a dysfunctional defense system that was built in reaction to feeling unlovable and unworthy - because our parents were wounded codependents who didn't know how to love themselves.  We grew up in environments that were emotionally dishonest, Spiritually hostile, and shame based.  Our relationship with ourselves (and all the different parts of our self: emotions, gender, spirit, etc.) got twisted and distorted in order to survive in our particular dysfunctional environment.

We got to an age where we were supposed to be an adult and we started acting like we knew what we were doing.  We went around pretending to be adult at the same time we were reacting to the programming that we got growing up.  We tried to do everything "right" or rebelled and went against what we had been taught was "right."  Either way we weren't living our life through choice, we were living it in reaction.

In order to start being loving to ourselves we need to change our relationship with our self - and with all the wounded parts of our self.    The best way in starting to love ourselves is through having internal boundaries. Learning to have internal boundaries is a dynamic process that involves three distinctly different, but intimately interconnected, spheres of work.  The purpose of the work is to change our ego-programming - to change our relationship with ourselves by changing our emotional/behavioral defense system into something that works to open us up to receive love, instead of sabotaging ourselves because of our deep belief that we don't deserve love. 

(Codependence and recovery are both multi-leveled, multi-dimensional phenomena. What we are trying to achieve is integration and balance on different levels. In regard to our relationship with ourselves this involves two major dimensions: the horizontal and the vertical. In this context the horizontal is about being human and relating to other humans and our environment. The vertical is Spiritual, about our relationship to a Higher Power, to the Universal Source. If we cannot conceive of a God/Goddess Force that loves us then it makes it virtually impossible to be loving to ourselves. So a Spiritual Awakening is absolutely vital to the process in my opinion. Changing our relationship with ourselves on the horizontal level is both a necessary element in, and possible because we are working on, integrating Spiritual Truth into our inner process.)

These three spheres are:

  1. Detachment
  2. Inner Child Healing
  3. Grieving

Because Codependence is a reactive phenomena it is vital to start being able to detach from our own process in order to have some choice in changing our reactions.  We need to start observing our selves from the witness perspective instead of from the perspective of the judge.  We all observe ourselves - have a place of watching ourselves as if from outside, or perched somewhere inside, observing our own behavior.  Because of our childhoods we learned to judge ourselves from that witness perspective, the "critical parent" voice. 

The emotionally dishonest environments we were raised in taught us that it was not ok to feel our emotions, or that only certain emotions were ok.  So we had to learn ways to control our emotions in order to survive.  We adapted the same tools that were used on us - guilt, shame, and fear (and saw in the role modeling of our parents how they reacted to life from shame and fear.)  This is where the critical parent gets born.  Its purpose is to try to keep our emotions and behavior under some sort of control so that we can get our survival needs met.

So the first boundary that we need to start setting internally is with the wounded/dysfunctionally programmed part of our own mind.  We need to start saying no to the inner voices that are shaming and judgmental.  The disease comes from a black and white, right and wrong, perspective.  It speaks in absolutes: "You always screw up!"  "You will never be a success!" - these are lies. We don't always screw up. We may never be a success according to our parents or societies dysfunctional definition of success - but that is because our heart and soul do not resonate with those definitions, so that kind of success would be a betrayal of ourselves. We need to consciously change our definitions so that we can stop judging ourselves against someone else's screwed up value system.

We learned to relate to ourselves (and all the parts of our self - emotions, sexuality, etc.) and life from a critical place of believing that something was wrong with us - and in fear that we would be punished if we didn't do life "right." Whatever we are doing or not doing the disease can always find something to beat us up with.  I have 10 things on my "to do list" today, I get 9 of them done, the disease does not want me to give myself credit for what I have done but instead beats me up for the one I didn't get done.  Whenever life gets too good we get uncomfortable and the disease jumps right in with fear and shame messages.  The critical parent voice keeps us from relaxing and enjoying life, and from loving our self. 

We need to own that we have the power to choose where to focus our mind. We can consciously start viewing ourselves from the "witness" perspective.   It is time to fire the judge - our critical parent and choose to replace that judge with our Higher Self - who is a loving parent. We can then intervene in our own process to protect ourselves from the perpetrator within - the critical parent/disease voice. (It is almost impossible to go from critical parent to compassionate loving parent in one step - so the first step often is to try to observe ourselves from a neutral position or a "scientific observer" perspective.)  This is what enlightenment and consciousness raising are all about.  Owning our power to be a co-creator of our lives by changing our relationship with ourselves.  We can change the way we think.  We can change the way we respond to our own emotions. We need to detach from our wounded self in order to allow our Spiritual Self to guide us.  We are Unconditionally Loved.  The Spirit does not speak to us from judgment and shame. 

We need to change our relationship with ourselves and our own emotions in order to stop being at war with ourselves.  The first step to doing that is to detach from ourselves enough to start protecting ourselves from the perpetrator that lives within us.  When we were 3 or 4 we couldn’t look around us and say, ‘Well, Dad’s a drunk and Mom is real depressed and scared - that is why it feels so awful here.  I think I’ll go get my own apartment.’  Our parents were our higher powers.  We were not capable of understanding that they might have problems that had nothing to do with us.  So it felt like it was our fault.  We formed our relationship with ourselves and life in early childhood.  We learned about love from people who were not capable of loving in a healthy way because of their unhealed childhood wounds.  Our core/earliest relationship with our self was formed from the feeling that something is wrong and it must be me.  At the core of our being is a little kid who believes that he/she is unworthy and unlovable.  That was the foundation that we built our concept of ‘self’ on.  Children are master manipulators. That is their job - to survive in whatever way works.  So we adapted defense systems to protect our broken hearts and wounded spirits.  The 4 year old learned to throw tantrums, or be real quiet, or help clean the house, or protect the younger siblings, or be cute and funny, etc.  Then we got to be 7 or 8 and started being able to understand cause and effect and use reason and logic - and we changed our defense systems to fit the circumstances.  Then we reach puberty and didn’t have a clue what was happening to us, and no healthy adults to help us understand, so we adapted our defense systems to protect our vulnerability.  And then we were teenagers and our job was to start becoming independent and prepare ourselves to be adults so we changed our defense systems once again. It is not only dysfunctional, it is ridiculous to maintain that what happened in our childhood did not affect our adult life.  We have layer upon layer of denial, emotional dishonesty, buried trauma, unfulfilled needs, etc., etc.  Our hearts were broken, our spirit is wounded, our minds programmed dysfunctionally.  The choices we have made as adults were made in reaction to our childhood wounds/programming - our lives have been dictated by our wounded inner children.  (History, politics, ‘success’ or lack of ‘success’ in our dysfunctional society/civilizations can always be made clearer by looking at the childhoods of the individuals involved.  History has been, and is being, made by immature, scared, angry, hurt individuals who were/are reacting to their childhood wounds and programming - reacting to the little child inside who feels unworthy and unlovable.)  It is very important to realize that we are not an integrated whole being - to ourselves.  Our self-concept is fractured into a multitude of pieces.  In some instances we feel powerful and strong, in others weak and helpless - that is because different parts of us are reacting to different stimuli (different ìbuttonsî are being pushed.)  The parts of us that feel weak, helpless, needy, etc. are not bad or wrong - what is being felt is perfect for the reality that was experienced by the part of ourselves that is reacting (perfect for then - but it has very little to do with what is happening in the now).  It is very important to start having compassion for that wounded part of our selves. It is by owning our wounds that we can start taking the power away from the wounded part of us.  When we suppress the feelings, feel ashamed about our reactions, do not own that part of our being, then we give it power.  It is the feelings that we are hiding from that dictate our behavior, that fuel obsession and compulsion. 

Codependence is a disease of extremes. 

Those of us who were horrified and deeply wounded by a perpetrator in childhood - and were never going to be like that parent - adapted a more passive defense system to avoid confrontation and ‘hurting others.’ The more passive type of codependent defense system leads to a dominant pattern of being the victim. Those of us who were disgusted by, and ashamed of, the victim parent in childhood and vowed never to be like that role model, adapted a more aggressive defense system.  So we go charging through life being the bull in the china shop - being the perpetrator who blames other people for not allowing us to be in control.   The perpetrator that feels like a victim of other people not doing things ‘right’ - which is what forces us to bulldoze our way through life.  And, of course, some of us go first one way and then the other.  (We all have our own personal spectrum of extremes that we swing between - sometimes being the victim, sometimes being the perpetrator.  Being a passive victim is perpetrating on those around us.) The only way we can be whole is to own all of the parts of ourselves.  By owning all the parts we can then have choices about how we respond to life.  By denying, hiding, and suppressing parts of ourselves we doom ourselves to live life in reaction. A technique in this healing process is to relate to the different wounded parts of our self as different ages of the inner child.  These different ages of the child may be literally tied to an event that happened at that age - i.e. when I was 7 I tried to commit suicide. Or the age of the child might be a symbolic designator for a pattern of abuse/deprivation that occurred throughout our childhood - i.e. the 9 year old within me feels completely emotionally isolated and desperately needy/lonely, a condition which was true for most of my childhood and not tied to any specific incident (that I know of) that happened when I was 9.  By searching out, getting acquainted with, owning the feelings of, and building a relationship with, these different emotional wounds/ages of the inner child, we can start being a loving parent to ourselves instead of an abusive one.  We can have boundaries with ourselves that allow us to:  take responsibility for being a co-creator of our life (grow up);  protect our inner children from the perpetrator within/critical parent (be loving to ourselves); stop letting our childhood wounds control our life (take loving action for ourselves); and own the Truth of who we really are (Spiritual Beings) so that we can open up to receive the Love and Joy we deserve.  It is impossible to truly love the adult that we are without owning the child that we were.  In order to do that we need to detach from our inner process (and stop the disease from abusing us) so that we can have some objectivity and discernment that will allow us to have compassion for our own childhood wounds.  Then we need to grieve those wounds and own our right to be angry about what happened to us in childhood - so that we can Truly know in our gut that it wasn’t our fault - we were just innocent little kids.

Emotions are energy that is manifested in our bodies.  They exist below the neck.  They are not thoughts (although attitudes set up our emotional reactions.)  In order to do the emotional healing it is vital to start paying attention to where energy is manifesting in our bodies.  Where is there tension, tightness?  Could that “indigestion” really be some feelings?  Are those “butterflies” in my stomach telling me something emotionally?  When I am working with someone and they start having some feelings coming up, the first thing I have to tell them is to keep breathing.  Most of us have learned a variety of ways to control our emotions and one of them is to stop breathing and close our throats.  That is because grief in the form of sadness accumulates in our upper chest and breathing into it helps some of it to escape - so we learned to stop breathing at those moments when we start getting emotional, when our voice starts breaking.

Western civilization has for many years been way out of balance towards the left brain way of thinking - concrete, rational, what you see is all there is (this was in reaction to earlier times of being out of balance the other way, towards superstition and ignorance.)  Because emotional energy cannot be seen or measured or weighed (“The x-ray shows you’ve got 5 pounds of grief in there.”) emotions were discounted and devalued.  This has started to change somewhat in recent years but most of us grew up in a society that taught us that being too emotional was a bad thing that we should avoid.  (Certain cultures/subcultures give more permission for emotions but those are usually out of balance to the other extreme of allowing the emotions to rule - the goal is balance: between mental and emotional, between intuitive and rational.) 
Emotions are a vital part of our being for several reasons. 

1. Because it is energy and energy cannot just disappear.  The emotional energy generated by the circumstances of our childhood and early life does not go away just because we were forced to deny it.  It is still trapped in our body - in a pressurized, explosive state, as a result of being suppressed.  If we don’t learn how to release it in a healthy way it will explode outward or implode back in on us.  Eventually it will transform into some other form - such as cancer. 

2.  As long as we have pockets of pressurized emotional energy that we have to avoid dealing with - those emotional wounds will run our lives.  We use food, cigarettes, alcohol and drugs, work, religion, exercise, meditation, television, etc., to help us keep suppressing that energy.  To help us keep ourselves focused on something else, anything else, besides the emotional wounds that terrify us.  The emotional wounds are what cause obsession and compulsion, are what the “critical parent” voice works so hard to keep us from dealing with.

3.  Our emotions tell us who we are - our Soul communicates with us through emotional energy vibrations.  Truth is an emotional energy vibrational communication from our Soul on the Spiritual Plane to our being/spirit/soul on this physical plane - it is something that we feel in our heart/our gut, something that resonates within us. 

Our problem has been that because of our unhealed childhood wounds it has been very difficult to tell the difference between an intuitive emotional Truth and the emotional truth that comes from our childhood wounds.  When one of our buttons is pushed and we react out of the insecure, scared little kid inside of us (or the angry/rage filled kid, or the powerless/helpless kid, etc.) then we are reacting to what our emotional truth was when we were 5 or 9 or 14 - not to what is happening now.  Since we have been doing that all of our lives, we learned not to trust our emotional reactions (and got the message not to trust them in a variety of ways when we were kids.)

 4. We are attracted to people that feel familiar on an energetic level - which means (until we start clearing our emotional process) people that emotionally / vibrationally feel like our parents did when we were very little kids.  Until we start releasing the hurt, sadness, rage, shame, terror - the emotional grief energy - from our childhoods we will keep having dysfunctional relationships.

The wounds don’t go away.  They have less power to dictate our life as we heal.  We need to own them and honor them in order to own and honor ourselves - but then we need to learn to have internal boundaries that will allow us to find some balance in our life, allow us to trust the process and our Higher Power. 

We are on a Spiritual journey - and the Force is with us.  It will help and guide us as we face the terror of owning how painful our human experience has been.  The more we are able to feel and release the feelings/emotional energy, the more clearly we can tune into the emotional energy that is Truth - and Love, Light, Joy, Beauty - coming from The Source Energy.

Grief Process Techniques

The way to stop reacting out of our inner children is to release the stored emotional energy from our childhoods by doing the grief work that will heal our wounds. The only effective, long term way to clear our emotional process - to clear the inner channel to Truth which exists in all of us - is to grieve the wounds which we suffered as children. The most important single tool, the tool which is vital to changing behavior patterns and attitudes in this healing transformation, is the grief process. The process of grieving.  We are all carrying around repressed pain, terror, shame, and rage energy from our childhoods, whether it was twenty years ago or fifty years ago. We have this grief energy within us even if we came from a relatively healthy family, because this society is emotionally dishonest and dysfunctional.

In order to do the inner child work we need to be willing to do the grief work.  Emotions are energy and that energy needs to be released through crying and raging.  We need to own our feelings about what happened to us.  We need to own our right to be angry that our needs were not met. Grief is energy that needs to be released. We need to give our self permission to feel our pain, sadness, & rage. We need to own and honor the feelings. Part of grief work is simply owning the sadness and the anger. We need to own the grief about what happened to us as children - and then we also need to own the grief over what effect it has had on us as an adult.

Grieving is a very different experience from being depressed. While we are grieving we can still appreciate a beautiful sunset or be happy to see a friend or be grateful to be sad.  Depression is being in a dark tunnel where there are no beautiful sunsets.

The deep grieving work is energy work. Once we can get out of our heads and start paying attention to what is happening in our body - then we can start releasing the emotional energy. When we get to a place where the emotions are coming up - when the voice starts breaking - the first thing I have to tell people is to keep breathing. We automatically stop breathing and close our throats when the feelings get close to the surface.  At that point the technique is to locate where the energy is concentrated in the body - it can be any place from head to feet - much of the time it is in our back because that is where we carry stuff we don't want to look at, or in the area of the solar plexus (anger or fear) or heart chakra (pain, broken heart) or chest (sadness) - then the individual breathes directly into that place. Visualizes breathing white light into that part of the body. That starts breaking up the energy and little pieces of energy start getting released. These balls of energy are the sobs. This is a terrifying place to be for the ego because it feels out of control - it is a wonderful place to be from a healing perspective. Empowering the healing is going with the flow - inhale the white Light, exhale the sobs. Sobs, tears, snot from the nose, are all forms of energy being released. You can be in the witness watching yourself and controlling the process at the same time you are in the pain and releasing it. 

By controlling the process I am referring to choosing to align self with the energy flow, surrendering to the flow, instead of shutting it down as the terrified ego wants to do. It is very hard to learn this process without a safe place to do it, and someone who knows what they are doing to facilitate it. Once you have learned how to do it then it is possible to facilitate your own grief processing. 

The anger work is also an energy flow process. The bat (tennis racket, bataka, pillow, whatever) is lifted over the head as you inhale and then as you hit the pillow you expel the energy - in shout, a grunt, a "fuck you", a scream, whatever words come to you. Inhale, exhale - open your throat to say whatever needs to be said.  Own your voice.   Own the child's voice. It is vitally important for us to own our right to be angry about what happened to us or about the ways we were deprived. If we do not own our right to be angry about what happened in childhood it greatly impairs our ability to set boundaries as an adult. 

We need to own and release the anger and rage at our parents, our teachers or ministers or other authority figures, including the concept of God that was forced on us while we were growing up. We do not necessarily need to vent that anger directly to them but we need to release the energy. We need to let that child inside of us scream, "I hate you, I hate you," while we beat on pillows or some such thing, because that is how a child expresses anger.  That does not mean that we have to buy into the attitude that they are to blame for everything. We are talking about balance between the emotional and mental here again. Blame has to do with attitudes, with buying into the false beliefs - it does not really have anything to do with the process of releasing the emotional energy.

It is terrifying to face healing the emotional wounds. It takes great courage and faith to do the grief work.  The only real way to do it is with a Spiritual Program. Recovery is not "self-help" - we are not doing this work alone. Our Spirit is guiding us.  The Force is with us.

There is no quick fix! Understanding the process does not replace going through it! There is no magic pill, there is no magic book, there is no guru or channeled entity that can make it possible to avoid the journey within, the journey through the feelings.  No one outside of Self (True, Spiritual Self) is going to magically heal us.  The only one who can turn on your heart light is you. The only one who can give your inner children healthy parenting is you. The only healer who can heal you is within you. 

Now we all need help along the way. We all need guidance and support. And it is a vitally important part of the healing process to learn to ask for help.  It is also a vital part of the process to learn discernment. To learn to ask for help and guidance from people who are trustworthy, people who will not betray, abandon, shame, and abuse you. That means friends who will not abuse and betray you. That means counselors and therapists who will not judge and shame you and project their issues onto you. Therapy that fosters dependence and does not include emotional release is not very healing. Psychoanalysis addressed these issues only on the intellectual level - not on the emotional healing level. As a result, a person could go to psychoanalysis weekly for twenty years and still be repeating the same behavior patterns. Our mental health system not only does not promote healing - it actually blocks the process. The mental health system in this country is designed to get your behavior and emotions under control so that you can fit back into the dysfunctional system. 

Learning is remembering. 

Teaching is reminding others that they can remember too.

No one outside of you can define for you what your Truth is. Nothing outside of you can bring you True fulfillment. You can only be fully filled by accessing the transcendent Truth that already exists within. This Age of Healing and Joy is a time for each individual to access the Truth within. It is not a time for gurus or cults or channeled entities, or anyone else, to tell you who you are.  Outside agencies - other people, channeled entities - can only remind you of what you already know on some level. Accessing your own Truth is remembering.  It is following your own path. It is finding your bliss.

 

 

 

Printable Version