Prayer and meditation are vital for seeing new truth and gaining a new perspective. They help us become quiet within so we can hear the voice of our Higher Self.

Typically, though, before that happens, all we can hear are the anxious parts of us—especially when they are activated. This inner clamoring, in fact, is often so loud, we must put great effort into ignoring it.

Our goal is to banish these parts from our lives. To make them go away.

Yet their angst stems from this very thing. Because, in an effort to stop feeling pain, we have cut off a very real part of ourselves. These banished parts hold our essence.

Now, to continue to avoid feeling our old pain, we must distract ourselves, numb ourselves, escape ourselves.

In the end, we are controlled by what we avoid.

On top of that, we now feel angry all the time.

This anger is not healthy anger, although such a thing does exist. Instead, this is old anger. We use it to hide the uncomfortable old feelings we want to avoid.

The way out is to learn to express this old anger in an appropriate way. When we do this, it shifts. Then the painful feelings underneath can come up. By expressing these unfelt feelings, which by now are lodged in our unconscious, we begin the process of self-transformation.

While our old anger often becomes a problem—it tends to come out sideways, easily provoked by unrelated things—it is not the original problem. Rather, it’s a beacon. It’s a blinking light, telling us we have work to do.

When we follow it, it leads to hidden treasures.

It’s not all bad

When we tap into our inner reservoir of pain, it may feel like a bottomless pit. Indeed, our well of old pain can be vast. It’s been accumulating our whole life—plus many before this one, too.

If our pain were isolated to this lifetime, the work needed to heal it would be small. We typically find, however, that our wounds are quite deep, and the associated wrong conclusions are entrenched.

Meaning, we haven’t faced ourselves in the past, so now we have more work to do.

The Pathwork Guide explains that our work follows the movement of a spiral. As we go along, then, it may seem like we keep passing through the same material. But if we are truly doing our work—not just recycling old stories and spinning in circles—we will travel through deeper and deeper levels of our wound.

Eventually, if we face each layer as it surfaces, we will come out the other side.

What does it look like when our work surfaces?

First, it doesn’t feel good. Second, it doesn’t look pretty.

But let’s be honest, is this really worse than when we were running from it? That doesn’t feel good either. The difference is that now we are turning and facing it. Now we are conscious about what we’re doing.

Now we are going to get to know this part of ourselves. And it’s not all bad.

There is an expression, “in our wounds lies our wisdom.” When we heal, transform and re-integrate these hurting parts of ourselves, we restore ourselves to wholeness. In the process, we receive the gifts that have also been buried and hidden.

For these split-off parts also hold the essence of God.

As we learn to do our healing work, we learn to receive the blessing of our tears. Then we find the gems that they also are holding.

The blessing of humility

The more deeply we let ourselves feel, the more we empty the well of old pain. The more we do this, the more we come back to life. Slowly but surely.

As we express our old pain, we need to discover the untruth that pins it in place. This is where a Helper comes in. We need to work with someone who can guide us in uncovering our buried untruth. Without this outside help, we stay stuck in old patterns.

Then we need to discover what the truth is. Here, the Helper needs to trust and encourage our connection with our own Higher Self. If we don’t surface the truth from within, it will never really land—even if what we hear or read from outside is true.

Finally, we need to backfill our soul dent with light. Prayer is one way.

We’ve mentioned several times about the need to “make an effort.” Praying is an effort we can make right away, today. Even if we don’t know how to pray, or don’t believe in it.

Even if we don’t like it.

Especially if we don’t like it.

We can pray about that. We can ask for help in knowing what to pray about. We can pray for help in seeing what our work is. If we’re ready, we can pray to find someone to help us.

In the midst of any struggle, we can pray and ask for what we need. This may be humbling for our ego to do—to admit that we don’t know.

Humility is a divine quality. It is not easy to come by, but that’s what makes it so precious.

In Jill’s Experience

For several years, when I first started doing this work, I kept resisting crying. This, I have learned, is not the right approach. As I have also learned, nothing melts a frozen heart like a bath of tears.

The day I arrived at that workshop about healing through sexual fantasies, I was a rock. But not in a good way. My body was tense, my shoulders were stiff, and my energy was out the door and down the street.

To say I was beside myself with trepidation would be generous. Parts of me were nowhere in sight.

Then someone started sharing about a difficult experience. The pain of it touched my heart. As my tears began to flow, my heart began to soften and melt.

The more I allowed my feelings to surface, the more alive I felt. I felt myself arrive. There was now much more of me present in the room.

Tears, I realized, are my gateway to finding myself.

That palpable and visceral experience was pivotal for me in my work. No longer did I think of crying as the problem. I saw that it was the solution. It’s what needed to happen for me to come back to myself. To restore myself.

This connection with my own Higher Self gives me a resource from which I can give to others. For we can’t give to anyone else what we don’t yet have for ourselves.

In Scott’s Experience

One of the dams I had built was of grief and sorrow over my mother’s illness and death when I was young. This dam was so watertight that I had created an emotional sterility around her.

When I came into that space again and again, breaking through the dam, I encountered a pain of grief so acute that it was very difficult to be with.

It felt like the hurt would never end.

I kept working with it whenever it came up. It got easier in the sense that I grew more confident in the knowledge that I could bear strong feelings. That they would not kill me. But it wasn’t easy.

Then one day, I felt the sorrow and sadness. Really felt it, cleansed of the hard pain. All the grief, anger, bitterness and resistance had dissolved. What was left was just pure sorrow.

I was astonished. The sorrow was unimaginably alive. Sadness sparkled in a way I had not conceived possible.

I had always conceived of sadness as being kind of mopey or depressing. It is not that way at all.

Sadness and sorrow are easily bearable, even in very large degrees. It was the hard pain, from resisting my real feelings for so many years, that was so difficult to bear.

My inner work with my mother felt complete. It came to an organic conclusion on its own.

I learned in the process that I either feel all my feelings, or I don’t feel much at all. By clamping down the lid on grief, I shut everything out.

I had been so afraid of my sadness and sorrow. And I didn’t need to be.