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.

But 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. And 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 then, we learn to receive the blessing of our tears. For then we find the gems that they also are holding.

The blessing of humility

Over time, the quality of our crying may change. We will go from "life, don't do this to me" tears, to "just let it out" crying. The deeper 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.

It takes many tears to completely empty the well. It won't happen quickly.

Over time, we'll develop the spiritual stamina to tolerate these difficult feelings. This is a necessary step for getting all the way through our work. For if we can't stand to feel our feelings, we can't endure the work needed to transform them.

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, we will stay stuck.

Next, we need to discover what the truth is. Here, the helper needs to trust and encourage our connection with our own Higher Self. For if we don't surface the truth from within, it will never really land.

Even if what the helper tells us is true.

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, we need to backfill our soul dent with light. We do this by praying.

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 start by praying about that. At every turn, we can be praying for help.

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.

Keep in mind, 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. Because, 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

I think socially it's harder for men to enter the realm of feelings, at least in the US. There aren't many social settings where men get together and cry. This may be socially "normal" for men, but it's not natural. Feelings take some time to re-learn for us.

I still vividly remember the first time I tried to stand up in front of a group and process through a difficult emotional place in me. I knew I was stuck with a particular issue and I wanted to move through it, to feel the feelings and pain involved there.

I had seen my peers take this step, and with a gulp of courage I stood up to take my turn. I froze. To an outside observer, it looked like a complete non-event.

On the inside, I experienced something completely new. One part of me stepped forward and, in front of a group, tried to access my feelings. Another part of me stepped back and tried to hide.

In that moment, I felt the separation and realized there were multiple parts of me. I was a bit embarrassed at not "succeeding," but it was an epiphany.

The way forward for me was to use my positive will. I created a deep prayer affirmation that said, "I want to feel my real feelings, without either suppressing or embellishing them. I want to feel what I really feel."

I said this prayer morning and night for perhaps a month until the dam burst. I cried multiple times a day for a long while. Turns out I had built a lot of dams over the years. I had to release them one by one.

But that first one was the toughest.

One of the dams I had built was of grief and sorrow over my mother's illness and death when I was young. I had created an emotional sterility around her. When I came into that inner space again and again, I encountered an acute pain of grief that was very difficult to be with. It felt like I was being gutted like a fish, and that the hurt would never end.

I kept working with it, and one day, I felt sorrow. It was cleansed of the hard pain of resistance and was just pure sorrow. I was surprised to find that sorrow, in its pure form, has a vibrant aliveness to it.

In an astonishing moment for me, I realized that pure sorrow is quite bearable, even in very large doses. It was the hard pain—from resisting my real feelings for so many years—that was difficult to bear.

Why go through all this effort? Why not just be with the joys of life instead? While it would be nice to be able to feel vibrant joy while being able to bypass acute grief and sorrow, it doesn't work that way.

Turns out, you either feel your feelings, or you don't.

You can't select one and bypass the others. If you clamp down on grief, the lid shuts tight on it all, and you can't feel joy in the next moment. I have learned then that the way to become able to feel boundless joy—which is a growing experience for me—is to become capable of feeling intense sorrow.