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. For 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 would always resist crying. Over time, I learned that that is not the right approach. In fact, that very approach is what had made my life so painful. Because resistance to feeling pain, that's the real problem. 

One experience really shifted my understanding about this. It happened early in my training to become a Pathwork Helper when I attended a workshop that was both profoundly challenging and incredibly insightful. We were learning to heal deep wounds by exploring the material in sexual fantasies.

The day I arrived, 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 me deeply. As my tears began to flow, my whole being 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 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.