Every human alive comes factory-installed with the ability to surrender fully to the life force and all its tantalizing pleasure currents.
The key to becoming who we truly are is this: We must overcome our fear of ourselves. This is the fundamental prerequisite for being all that we can be. In fact, in the final analysis, every kind of fear amounts to a fear of the self. For if we had no fear of our innermost selves, we couldn’t possibly fear anything in life. We wouldn’t even fear death.
But when we start to make our way along a path of self-confrontation, we don’t know that what we really fear is what lurks in our own unplumbed depths. And so it is that we so often project this very real fear of self onto all kinds of other miscellaneous fears. Then we deny we have those fears, and we set about covering them up.
Until one day we wake up and realize we have some enormous fear of some particular aspect of life upon which this tsunami of fear of our self has landed. Or maybe we just end up fearing life itself and so endeavor to avoid living it altogether. We do this in the same way we avoid knowing the self, to whatever extent we fear it.
To go one further, we’ll sometimes project our fear of life onto the fear of death. Since really life and death are two sides of the same coin. So actually, if we fear one we’re going to also fear the other. Fear of life and death, then, are a package deal.
Only when our search for self-knowing has gained a little traction do we become aware that what we’re really most afraid of is ourselves. We can recognize this by the backpedaling we do when it comes to seeing our part in our problems; when we resist, in all the more or less obvious ways we do so; when we won’t face our terror of letting go of our defenses, which would allow us to experience our natural feelings.
Jill Loree grew up in northern Wisconsin with parents who embraced their Norwegian, Swedish and German heritage. Foods like lutefisk, lefse and krumkaka were prepared every Christmas. And of course there was plenty of beer, bratwurst and cheese all year round.
She would go on to throw pizzas and bartend while attending college at the University of Wisconsin, and then moved into a career in technical sales and marketing. She would settle in Atlanta in 1989 and discover that the sweet spot of her career would be in marketing communications. A true Gemini, she has a degree in chemistry and a flair for writing.
One of Jill’s greatest passions in life has been her spiritual path. Raised in the Lutheran faith, she became a more deeply spiritual person in the rooms of Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) starting in 1989. In 1997, she was introduced to the wisdom of the Pathwork Guide, which she describes as “having walked through the doorway of a fourth step and found the whole library.”
In 2007, she completed four years of training to become a Pathwork Helper, and stepped fully into her Helpership in 2011. In addition to offering individual and group sessions, she has been a teacher in the Transformation Program offered by Mid-Atlantic Pathwork. She also led marketing activities for Sevenoaks Retreat Center in Madison, Virginia and served on their Board of Trustees.
In 2012, Jill completed four years of kabbalah training and became certified for hands-on healing using the energies embodied in the tree of life. She began dedicating her life to writing and teaching about personal self-development in 2014.
Today, Jill is the proud mom of two adult children, Charlie and Jackson, and is delighted to be married to Scott Wisler. She’s had more than one last name along the way and now happily uses her middle name as her last. It’s pronounced loh-REE. In 2022, Scott joined her full time in their mission to spread the teachings of the Pathwork Guide far and wide.
