Whereas the Little-L Lower Self is the part that says, "I can't," the Big-L Lower Self digs in deeper and says, "I won't." Its signature move is to be destructive. And it doesn't care who it hurts, including us.

Our Lower Self acts against our own best interest.

It feels most alive when latching onto activities and behaviors that supports its negative intention, which is to stay stuck. In this part of ourselves, we are cruel, both to ourselves and to others.

Worse yet: we like being destructive.

When our life force twists and turns

Why do we like our negativity? Because we get so much twisted pleasure from it.

For the life force streaming from our Higher Self—our inner light—has gotten twisted. This is the origin of the dark layers of our Lower Self. And it means our Lower Self is highly charged.

Through our negativity, our Lower Self now turns our life force against life. So then we can only activate our life force it by acting out destructiveness.

This is the temporary but current reality of who we are, in the dark layers of our being. And since we all need pleasure—we can't live without pleasure—we won't give this up.

Until, that is, our destructiveness destroys our life.  

When we do the work of self-healing, we are re-orienting our will, so we start seeing how our own Lower Self currently operates. We must learn to be with what is, and stop avoiding our current reality.

We do this by becoming present with what we currently feel. Where are we experiencing disharmony?

How are we co-creating it? What are we getting from it?

We must learn to pray, from our ego, for help from our own Higher Self. For we need divine courage to take on this formidable foe. The Big-L Lower Self, after all, is a not easy to overcome.

As creative, smart and clever as we are in the best parts of ourselves—in our Higher Self—that's how crafty, conniving and slippery our Lower Self can be.

First, we need to understand the script that the Lower-Self is following. Then we must make a serious effort to change how our story goes.

What's hiding in the dark?

When we start to do this healing work, we'll become aware of the gap between what we say we want—our conscious intention—and how our life actually is.

What we're not seeing is the material in the unconscious regions of our psyche. For once we push thoughts and feelings out of our awareness, this is where they go. But now we are no longer aware of them.

As such, we can no longer challenge them with our conscious mind.

We've talked about the Little-L Lower Self, the part holding painful old feelings and misunderstandings about life, or images. This all resides in our unconscious.

Beyond this, also in our unconscious, sits our Big-L Lower Self. The intention of this part is to say no to life and stay stuck. To remain in separation.

What does the Big-L Lower Self use to justify itself? The wrong thinking of the Little-L Lower Self. So we justify our negativity and rationalize our destructiveness. That's why it's important to face into our immaturity.

Using these tools as weapons, we build cases against others, weaving in half-truths that only breed confusion. Our goal? To stay separate and hurt others, as a way to avoid our own pain.

Too often, we attempt to bypass self-development work by placing a yes over the top of our hidden no. This can happen with positive thinking, when we fail to reorient the faulty beliefs buried within.

When we do this, we are building on deficit, creating faulty structures that will eventually need to come down—so they can be rebuilt in the right way.

We can't win, but we can overcome

The more we collude with dark forces, acting out our faults and following the path of least resistance, the more strength we give to those dark forces. For all energy is self-perpetuating.

The energy coming from our Higher Self creates continuously flowing circles of peace, joy and abundance. But Lower Self energy creates vicious circles that end in crisis, struggle and more pain.

When we act from our Lower Self, hoping to defeat, cripple and overpower others, we end up losing. For it's not true that we were ever defeated—our childhood pain was not going to kill us.

It is equally untrue that we can now win this way—to be the victor. For our brothers or sister's pain is also our pain, since at our divine core, we truly are one.

It makes sense that we cannot return to God—to the source of all that is—until we become, once again, compatible with God. To do this, we must overcome our own Lower Self.

We must transform our inner darkness.  

Bear in mind, this won't happen quickly. This path is long and narrow, and the negative intention of the Big-L Lower Self is slow to turn. It takes patience, perseverance and a lot of hard work.

But in the end, there is really no other alternative.

This is the way we all must go.

In Jill's Experience

Throughout my life, one thing that's fueled my inner impulse to run has been hate. This feels like Big-L energy that wants to "make them pay for what they've done to me."

When I was little, hate felt like the only tool I had. If you don't care about me, I hate you. In fact, hate and anger are two common feelings we use to avoid feeling hurt.

I became more aware of my dance with hate when I saw it bubbling up toward the International Pathwork Foundation. The issue was about my work with these teachings from the Pathwork Guide.

Rewriting and organizing so many lectures has been a difficult task and taken many years. There are now more than 15 books that make this material easier to access.

But my work has not been appreciated by volunteers in this organization. For the most part it has been ignored. Other times, they've tried to stop me.

What did I do then? I started to hate them.

At one point, my hatred toward the people governing these teachings was quite strong. But that doesn't sound very spiritual, does it?

My work was to die into the pain of this. To be with what is—with the current reality. Which is that, for some reason I don't understand, I have not been supported by the Pathwork Foundation.

Getting past my hate felt like the process of forgiveness: I didn't do it for them. Letting go of my hate was about disentangling myself from darkness. For when we align with dark energies, we collude with evil, which is never the winning ticket.

I've come to realize this about hate: people have hate. The only question is, where do we put it? For we can find lots of places to put our hate—deserving or not. Cats, for instance, receive hate they don't deserve.

Today, I don't hate the Pathwork organization. But that doesn't mean I don't feel affected by them. That's the tricky thing about doing this work.

We need to be honest in sorting out our Emotional Reactions. This is our work to do. At the same time, in our humanness, we do hurt each other.

In Scott's Experience

When I started deeply doing my work, it began with a Daily Review. It was really quite simple: take 10 minutes before bed and review the day. Notice the situations that brought disharmony and jot them down.

I did this for three months. Soon it became time to comb through them to create a composite picture of my challenges. I needed to get everything on one page where I could see it.

This was challenging to do. I balked at taking the time to read through three months of my daily notes to get a better picture of things. Something in me refused.

I prayed for help, because the inner stubbornness wasn't abating on its own.

About this time, I had to travel to Wilmington, NC on very short notice. I was supporting an urgent manufacturing problem on a jet engine part. I traveled on a Thursday in early Spring and walked into the manufacturing plant on Friday morning at 6 am, only to find it completely empty of people. They had shut the plant down for annual maintenance during the first round of the NCAA basketball tournament, and nobody told me. I had to come back Monday morning.

Because it was still off-season, I got a room in a resort hotel on Wrightsville Beach for the weekend. I was given a glorious three-day weekend with hot sun, sand and waves. All I had to accomplish was this daily review composite.

I thought it would be easy to do on the beach.

Actually, it was really difficult.

I got settled under a beach umbrella. That didn't work. Then I went to the pool. That wasn't right. Then I walked the beach to get myself focused, and tried again.

Day One: Nothing accomplished.

More of the same Saturday, and it was exhausting.

Finally, on Sunday, I made a supreme effort and methodically, somehow, got through it. The list was remarkable in many ways. One of the things on it was a tendency, sometimes, in certain situations, to stubbornly refuse to get something done.

I occasionally had to use a supreme force of will to get them done. This was puzzling, but undeniable. It was certainly there in my effort to see what was in my Daily Review notes.

I worked with a Helper to explore these inner places in earnest. A few years later, I was in a group, and I wanted to work with this place in me. The Helper coached me to first feel into the experience on the beach, trying to write.

As I did so, he asked me where I felt these experiences in my body. They were in my belly. He asked me to bring my attention there, and to breathe into that space in my belly.

I suddenly dropped into an altered consciousness that had a belligerent attitude: "I won't do this. I. WILL. NOT."

The Helper talked with this part of me, but I was having none of it. He tried asking how it felt, what it wanted, and so on. I kept expressing this fragmented part of me, saying, "I. WILL. NOT."

This went on for some time, until the Helper suddenly asked, "What year is it?"

I replied, "1980."

He said, "Huh. Do you realize it is 2003?"

No, I did not. I refused to budge off "I. WILL. NOT."

Finally, he said, "Ok, you don't have to. You can stay there. It's time for me to go."

This part of me was caught in a bind. It utterly refused to move, but didn't want to be left behind. Finally, it said, "Wait, don't go." And it asked for help to come back to the light.

Afterward, I was a bit shocked at the negative intention of this part of me. Yet it was undeniable. No matter what was asked of it, the answer was a willful "NO!" even if it brought unwanted consequences.

That's what the Big-L Lower Self does. It says No to life. It says, "I won't."

The good news is this can skillfully be brought into consciousness and transformed. When that happens, all the energy applied there becomes available again to say Yes to life.