All our prisons are of our own making. But we got ourselves into them, so we can get ourselves out.

When we follow the path of least resistance, we allow our Lower Self to run the show. We align with our negative intention to stay stuck. And this won't change until we explore the depths of our unconscious.

When we start doing the work of self-knowing, then, this is where we must go—into the dark regions of our psyche. For we can't get to know our light—to connect with our Higher Self at our core—without discovering what is currently blocking it in our layers of Lower Self.

This self-transformation process involves uncovering difficult truths. Who I am, right now? Where do I say no, and why? How does this serve me?

For if we didn't believe our negativity was somehow serving us, we would default to our natural state of aliveness. Instead, we say no without knowing why. As a result, our lives are out of balance and we live in a state of disorder.

Relationships are path within a path

There are two key principles that govern the creative process. They are the active principle and the receptive principle. They must work in balance for positive, harmonious creation to happen.

When they are out of balance, we create disharmony.

The active principle carries our "make it happen" energy. From here we engage with life, make an effort, and reach out. The receptive principle holds our "let it happen" energy. From here we allow, relax and let be.

When these divine principles operative in harmony, we experience mobility in relaxation. In this highly desirable state, our creations feel like effortless effort.  

We humans embody these two concepts through our masculinity and femininity. So our work comes alive in our relationships. There is, in fact, great spiritual significance in our relationships.

If we want a good gauge for how we are progressing spiritually, we can simply look at the quality of our relationships. Where is there struggle and strife? Where is there harmony and ease?

The Pathwork Guide calls relationships a "path within a path." For our partners in life—especially our intimate partners—are uniquely effective at bringing our work to the surface.

By exploring any conflict with the people in our lives, and working together to unravel our difficulties, we can progress much faster on our spiritual path.

The divine nature of spiritual laws

This work of spiritual development is gradual. It takes time and effort. And there are no shortcuts.

There is a spiritual law that says we can't skip steps. For we may want to be further ahead than we are, to be seen as more "spiritual" than we currently are. When we do this type of spiritual bypassing, we slow our progress.

Our goal on this path is to know ourselves. In our current condition, we have both lightness and darkness within. So to be in truth, we must see both sides of ourselves—as we currently are. To do otherwise is to violate spiritual laws.

Because whenever we are not aligned with truth, we are not following spiritual laws.

God's spiritual laws have been carefully crafted to assure that the further we deviate from them, the greater our pain and suffering will be. We have free will, and this gives us the incentive to use it in a way that eventually returns us to our true home.

Our understanding of free will is essential for understanding God. For God has free will. Therefore, if we didn't have it, we could never return to God. For we wouldn't be compatible with God.

The work of transformation our Lower Self takes effort. In fact, it is a divine law that we must make an effort if want to have the best in life—which is exactly what God wants for us.

For there is always a price to pay for having what we truly want. What is the price? Our willingness to do the work.

This is how we become enlightened, by gaining more and more connection with our own inner light

It's time to wake up

The Pathwork Guide calls enlightenment the willingness to explore and unwind every disharmony. Then we find will its divine kernel. For every darkness harbors light within, and this light can always be restored.

To do this work, then, does not mean we are "all better." That we have no more material to uncover and transform.

Rather, it means that we are ready to turn attention to our current reality. To do this, we must start feeling what we feel. We need to watch ourselves in action, and this may be uncomfortable.

This is what we have been avoiding. It's why we have turned away from ourselves. But though our self-created blindness, we have lost our connection with the divine. We have disconnected from our Higher Selves.

Often, in our confusion, we make a virtual out of our faults. We court temptation and keep secrets, identifying with our Lower Self instead of learning to identify it. Eventually. we come to believe that this is the truth of who are.

It's time to wake up.

It's time to see the whole truth.

Our work, then, is to turn and face ourselves. We must start to feel and see what we have not been willing to face, until now. For nothing can be avoided if we want to transform our Lower Self and learn to live from our divine essence.

Although darkness is not our ultimate destiny, it's what's here now. So knowing ourselves means knowing how—in what specific ways—we want to cheat life.  

Also, we must come to realize we are the ones who have chosen darkness. No one did this to us. All of our prisons are of our own making. But we got ourselves into them, so we can get ourselves out.

We are the only ones, in fact, who can do this. No one else can or should do this for us. To believe otherwise is to live in wishful thinking.  

Finding the divine within

It's not easy to look within, to see where darkness lives inside us. It is humbling and requires a certain commitment. Until we become more skilled at self-discovery, we will often see in someone else what we haven't been willing to see in ourselves.

When we see it outside ourselves, it bothers us greatly. For example, we may have a fault of procrastination that we think is sort of charming. We know this about ourselves, but we like it. Yet when we experience this in someone else, we are highly irritated by it.

What makes our negativity so hard to overcome is that our Lower Self is highly charged. For it's always made from a twisted stream of Higher Self energy. This is why our faults can be so hard to let go of.

What can help is to find the divine essence within them. For instance, underneath our fearfulness is caution and an awareness that something is amiss. Our anxiety is a gauge that tells us something is being repressed that we don't wish to see.

Negative pleasure works the same way. It's based on our basic nature of needing pleasure. Simply put, people cannot live without pleasure.

When a child has painful experiences—as all children do—it attaches its pleasure principle to the negative event. Later, as an adult, the person will need to recreate that same unpleasant condition to activate their life force—to come alive.

This is why it's so hard to let go of the dramas in our lives.

Our stories of struggle feel electrifying, but they don't feel good. Nonetheless, we can't let go of them. But it doesn't have to be this way. We can unwind any distortion and find the beauty inside the beast.

Spiritual development through sexual exploration

One place to search for twisted inner connections is in our sexuality. For our distortions often show up in sexual fantasies. What does it take for us to come fully alive?

There is a good reason our sexuality works this way.

When we are born, all our experiences are physical. Our mental and emotional development will happen as we grow. So everything in life, since the day we are born, gets imprinted in our physical being. And our bodies are where our sexuality lives.

Later, when arousal activates our life force, it lights up the most loving parts of us. At the same time, it activates our wounds. Through our minds, we then create fantasies that reflect this combination of pleasure and pain.

Now, in fact, we need this combination to feel great pleasure. It's not that we are just made this way, but rather our inner wiring now runs this way.

By doing the necessary work of unpacking our painful childhood experiences, we can unwind these twisted patterns. When we do this, we will be able to experience all the positive effects of our pleasure current, without the troubling twists and turns.

In Jill's Experience

This idea of exploring our spiritual work through the lens of sexual fantasies may seem strange. For many, we have been exposed—probably for many lifetimes—to religious teachings that separate sex from God. I know I was.

It's not easy to overwrite messages that equate sexuality with sin. By associating "feeling good" with "being bad," we create a short-circuit in our psyche and imprint a subtle but very untrue message.

As the Pathwork Guide teaches, it's important we pay attention to the power of the word.

Because this notion that God opposes our pleasure drive is not in truth. Our sexuality is a God-given gift, and expressing it fully is our birthright. To diminish this essential aspect of our lives is to put a lid on God's beautiful creation.

But whenever we shut out God, we block our own light.

As part of my four-year training to become a Pathwork Helper, I visited a retreat center in Virginia, called Sevenoaks, many times. My first trip there was for a four-day workshop that involved working with sexual fantasies. I was apprehensive.

Much of my training was done experientially. Meaning, the people in class were guided to do their own work. Then the teacher would show us how she guided the healing process. In other words, we weren't there to just talk about this topic. We were going to dive deeply into it.

Right away, my mask of shame came up. This, of course, happened for all of us. The teachers were skilled at wading us slowly into these deep waters. No one jumped in before we were ready.

Nonetheless, it felt like a leap of faith to go into this delicate work—with other classmates present—in order to learn some things about myself. Well, I did it. And the experience was profoundly healing. 

One thing I learned was that we all have the same fear of opening up. We believe that if we are seen, in our twisted inner place, we will be rejected, laughed at, or not loved. But no one was laughing.

Each time someone took the appropriate risk to share intimate details about their sexual fantasies—to expose themselves for healing—I felt compassion. When I saw how much some people were carrying, my heart opened to them.

So often, we don't see just how much another is carrying.

[If you do not want to read further details about this type of spiritual healing work, you can go to the next chapter.]

One person's work was about a desire to be urinated upon during sex. The pivotal point—the big turn on—was when it stopped flowing.

This person struggled in life with starting things but never finishing them. He blocked his own flow. He realized the connection with how his father had so often cut him off from his attempts to follow his passions.

There was also healing work about anal sex, involving a person's reaction to withholding. They had been withheld from and in turn withheld from others. So a great deal of life force was now blocked in that part of the body.

We all have misunderstandings in our souls. This is the human condition. And our psyches—as well as our bodies—are remarkably creative in revealing them to us. By putting words to any malady displayed by our bodies, we can often uncover great mysteries.

In the end, I came to realize two important things about doing this work with sexual fantasies. First, it is sacred work. It expresses both the pains and the longings of our most precious and divine selves.

Second, it is incredibly efficient. Looking through the lens of our sexual fantasies can lead us straight to the core of our wounds.

This is not a voyeuristic way to work. Rather, it's a way to expose the experiences that were laid down in the physical track of our bodies. Our sexual fantasies reveal these secrets by showing us the way we activate our life force—how we experience pleasure—during orgasm.

One technique for exploring our work, in general, is to turn things around. To look at our problems from the opposite position. Because in duality, it's not uncommon for our psyches to flop sides.

For example, if we can't understand why we feel so fearful—why do others create so much fear in us?—it may help to investigate how we make others fear us. For these are two sides of the same coin.

Here's how this might look in exploring a sexual fantasy. It's like looking at the negative of a picture, turning the black into white. In the following example, a man has had a difficult relationship with his father. This is revealed, when we turn things in his sexual fantasy around.

First, let's look at the fantasy:

"She comes up to me, unasked, out of the blue, and as I'm standing there she falls to her knees, opens my pants, and devours me. She sucks me, licks me, fondles my balls, and hungrily sucks me until I cum in her mouth. She keeps sucking and eagerly swallows. She keeps gently licking and sucking until I get soft."

Now let's look at each phrase when we turn things around:

She comes up to me || unasked,
He turns away from me || when I ask him something, when I am talking to him

out of the blue, and
daily, frequently, all the time

as I'm standing there || she falls to her knees,
as I am on the floor, sitting || he stands (towers) over me

she opens my pants, || and devours me.
he won't take "me" in || and ignores me, he covers over my person, he rejects my "self", he closes himself

She sucks me, licks me, fondles my balls, and || hungrily (eagerly) sucks me
he ignores me, stares blankly, doesn't feel me, || coldly ignores me, doesn't touch me, talk to me, hear me

until I cum in her mouth.
until I withhold from him all that I am

She keeps sucking and eagerly swallows.
He keeps ignoring me and coldly accepts my withholding

She keeps gently licking and sucking until I get soft.
He keeps coldly staring blankly, ignoring, not talking or touching until I am hard inside.

Here is the exposed view of this man's relationship with his father:

He frequently turns away from me when I ask him something or am talking to him. As I am on the floor, sitting, he towers over me. He closes himself, rejects me, won't take me in, covers over my person. He ignores me, stares blankly, doesn't feel me, touch me, talk to me, hear me, and coldly ignores me until I withhold from him all that I am. Even then, he keeps ignoring me and coldly accepts my withholding. He keeps staring blankly, ignoring, not talking or touching me until I am hard inside.

In our healing work, we are unwinding the kinks in our inner wiring. Because we want to enjoy the full intensity of our life force. And want to do this without feeling this somehow makes us bad.

The point is not to give up our pleasure.

Our goal is to bring our awareness to what's gotten twisted in our psyche. By unwinding our inner darkness, our sexuality can become more pleasurable and satisfying.

We can have all this, without the negative spin.

Note that working this way may be efficient, but that doesn't mean it's quick. In this example of seeing the scope of his wound with his father, the person was able to see more clearly the scope of his work. It would take several decades of methodical, step-by-step work to walk through his pain and unwind his full pleasure.

Considering the alternative, this is a walk worth taking. This is the effort worth making.

In Scott's Experience

There are two things I want to point out. First, sexuality isn't somehow separate from a spiritual path, it's a powerful and beautiful part of it.

In fact, sexual energy is life-force energy. It is a chord woven into the rope that is our life force. The more we untangle all our inner knots, the more healthy and vibrantly alive our sexuality becomes.

That said, exploring our wounds by excavating our sexuality is swimming in the deep end of the pool. It may be better to start with simpler exercises, like a Daily Review. And be sure to work with a competent Helper, counselor or therapist.

Second, I recommend holding whatever comes up lightly, and just be present with it for a while. Remember, it is the most painful childhood experiences—the ones we couldn't bear at the time—that get most stuck in our energy system and thus in our sexuality.

It may take time and patience to work down to and through them. Because these pieces may not be on the surface to work with directly. But this can become a doorway to understanding why we incarnated and what we came here to heal.