We can divide people who embark on a path of growth and healing into two camps. In the first group are those who are aware they have painful feelings they would prefer to avoid. These feelings connect with stories from childhood that point to the source of this residual pain, in this lifetime.

In the second group are those who are not in touch with painful feelings. They just want to get more out of life.

It's not that those in the second camp don't have problems in life. And it's not that these issues won't bring up their work as they go along. But in the moment, they are less aware there was so much lacking in their childhood.

Nonetheless, they have an itch for more and they haven't yet figured out how to scratch it.

In all cases, we have thoughts and feelings inside us we aren't yet fully aware of. And we have created avoidance strategies designed to keep us safe and help us get our needs met.

And these strategies don't work.

Why? Because they cause us to sidestep the very thing we would most benefit from: taking a closer look at our problems. And that keeps us spinning in a perpetual state of dissatisfaction.

One universal strategy is our tendency to freeze our feelings. One way we do this is by holding breath. This is how children block painful feelings they can't yet deal with.

This is a survival mechanism, if you will. But let's not tell ourselves that "this is what I had to do to survive." That's simply not true.

The defense mechanism

Here's how it works. The thinking of the children is dualistic in nature. Meaning, to a child, everything is black or white, good or bad, life or death.

So to a child, feeling pain is comparable to death. And since children have limited coping skills, blocking our pain was the best we could do at the time. 

Now, as a result, there are young parts of our psyche that are frozen and split off. And these parts are holding that old pain that is now stuck.

The mistaken belief of this still-hurting part of ourselves is that we needed our defenses to save ourselves.

Yes, we thought that was true. But now we are adults, with more adult reasoning ability. So now we can realize that, in truth, painful feelings won't kill us.

We just don't like them.

It's our own Lower Self that uses the helplessness of the fragmented inner child for its own negative intention—to cut off life. The Lower Self justifies our defenses, which were originally designed to keep us safe from pain.

But this is not in truth.

These same defenses, which are now are firmly and habitually in place, are now the problem. They separate us from ourselves, from others—from life. 

Our defenses cause us to act in ways that create painful experiences for us. And these rub against our old wounds.

In this way, defenses create more painful feelings. And these cause us to turn away from others, as though in defense of ourselves.

This pain we feel now is a mixed bag. It includes new painful feelings, which as adults we have the capacity to feel and move beyond. But there is also old, residual pain that has gotten stuck.

It's this last bit that causes so much trouble. If the petrified residual pain weren't frozen within us, life's problems wouldn't affect us the way they do.

And they wouldn't keep repeating.

Facing into what's gotten stuck

Here's where the spirit-mind-body connection comes in. In our spirit, we have soul dents we incarnate to heal. One aspect of these dents is our faulty conclusions about life, that have sunk down out of our conscious awareness.

The Lower Self uses this hidden wrong thinking to justify our behavior and our subsequent efforts to keep ourselves separate from others.

Our bodies are the vessels, or vehicles, for this journey we're on. They carry and hold these energetic blocks, which show up in the various ways our bodies armor themselves. There are five basic character structures that result from the wounding which happens at the different stages of child development. 

In our healing work, our Helpers will guide us to correlate our feelings with where we are physically storing them in our bodies. Where do we hurt? 

We can learn to identify where the energy is frozen in our energetic field. For it shows up as pain, tension and disease in our bodies. Then we can re-enliven these stuck places by bringing our awareness—and our breath—into the areas of discomfort.

This is how we let the wisdom of our bodies open up and talk to us. 

When we breathe into stuck energy, we bring our life force to deadened areas. We created this dead spot because we didn't want to feel a painful feeling. Now, when it wakes up, we will feel it.

There will be tears.

This is not the end of the world. Quite the opposite, this is the beginning of becoming more alive.

The healing water of our tears releases a dam that has been longing for movement—for life.

Before any of this happens, what we are more apt to notice is…nothing.

We numbed our feelings long ago. And until we do the work of freeing up this blocked energy and understanding the false conclusion about life it's holding, we may not feel anything.

We must come to see how that this stuckness in our beings makes us feel stuck in life. 

By successfully cutting us off from our own selves, the Lower Self seems to have succeeded. But in winning this way, we ultimately lose.

More and more, we hear our Higher Self knocking at our inner door, saying, "Wake up. There's more to life."

If we're ready to consciously walk a spiritual path, we've heard this call.

We want more.

Numbness is a dark pit

Feeling numb feels completely different from feeling clear or feeling empty. Becoming clear is enlightening and energizing. And this positive energy is self-perpetuating. By contrast, the highly unnatural, frozen state of numbness deadens us and makes us feel lazy.

To be numb, then, is to be lethargic. And our desire to do nothing—to align with our negativity—is also self-perpetuating. 

This is the pit we have fallen into when we are depressed and feeling hopeless. It may seem, at first, like it will feel good to let ourselves wallow in darkness and despair.

But this is a prison of our own making.

Realizing this may motivate us to start finding our way out.

Recall though, we got ourselves here over the course of a long, gradual fall and getting ourselves out isn't going to happen quickly.

In fact, there is a spiritual law regarding this: we can't skip steps. We must each do the painstaking work of putting one foot in front of the other and searching in the dark.

Numbness is a big hurdle and we must overcome its inertia. We must become willing to undo what we ourselves have done.

If we have been in deep darkness for a long time, we may not even feel we have enough of a foothold in the land of light to cross back over the line.

But remember, in the same way that Lower-Self energies are self-perpetuating, so is Higher Self strength. When we pray for help in aligning with our light, new resources arrive.

Living from our Higher Self can be characterized as living in effortless effort. We become willing to pay the price to have what we want.

Doing so connects us with an everlasting source of wisdom, courage and love that continually replenishes us.

To make this connection, we need new information and a new source of nourishment. 

In Jill's Experience

On the morning of July 4, 1997, I got one of those phone calls no one ever, ever wants to receive. It was my brother telling me that Sarah, his 18-year-old daughter, had died in a car accident early that morning. Your heart just stops and you know things will never be the same.

Her leaving was a tragedy of immense proportions, but in it there was also a gift. It opened me up in a way I had not been before. To be fair, this didn't happen right away.

I was eight years sober at the time, but still a frozen Popsicle of energy. I was out of the deep freeze but still hadn't graduated to the refrigerator. So it was several days before I could even feel the pain of her passing and start to cry.

The pain of grief is one that has the ability to heal us in deep places we never thought we'd have to go. And while no one would wish for the experience, I can say in hindsight that I'm grateful, on some level, for the passageway that opened when Sarah left.

The morning of her funeral, I sat in the stillness of dawn and looked out over a gently flowing river. With the brand of spirituality under my belt that one absorbs in AA meetings, I had developed a modest rapport with God. But sitting there that morning, I said to no one in particular, "Her spirit has gone to heaven and I have no idea what that means. I want to know."

Those words resonated through me like the depth charge of a prayer they were. And just one month later I was guided to read my first Pathwork lecture. It was called The Forces of Love, Eros & Sex, and it resonated deeply with me. Because my marriage was as devoid of depth and presence as my childhood had been.

This lecture opened a door to a whole new world.

As I'd worked my way through the Twelve Steps of Alcoholic Anonymous, there seemed to be a lack of instructions for undertaking a Fourth Step. This is the process of taking a "searching and fearless moral inventory."

When I found these teachings from the Pathwork Guide, I found an entire library of instructions. There was a lifetime of spiritual healing work embodied in this amazing collection of spiritual teachings. Soon after, I started working with a Pathwork Helper, joined a Pathwork group, and later went on to become a Pathwork Helper myself.

Sarah was a lovely light who left this world far too early. At the same time, the Pathwork Guide's teaches that no one leaves here unless, on some level, they have agreed to go.

Why she died when she did, I cannot say. But in her leaving, she gave me a valuable gift for which I am deeply grateful. 

In Scott's Experience

I vividly remember the first time I stood up in front of a Pathwork group to process through a difficult situation I was experiencing. The format was that you stood with a Helper in the center of a circle of peers seated around you. And you felt the feelings around the situation in question. You drop down through the layers of consciousness and feelings until you find the core of the situation.

I had watched other people do it without too much difficulty. Their work was intense to witness sometimes, but the process seemed straightforward. I stood up… and froze. No amount of coaching helped. I had no idea I was that numb.

I faced a dilemma: how do you learn to fully feel your feelings if you can't fully feel?

The answer: you firmly—and gently—use your positive will. Every day I stated an intention to fully feel my feelings. And I prayed and asked for help.

I directly used the Guide's words and advice to create a daily prayer  for myself to set a positive intention for change. After a few weeks, the dam opened in a flood. I found myself spontaneously crying throughout the day.

Eventually the initial deluge slowed. But that river had been backed up a long time, and feelings kept bleeding out in a steady stream for a year.

Later, I experienced other, different ways I was interrupting—and thus numbing—my feelings. Blocking them altogether was the most extreme, but I was also doing quite a job of manipulating them.

I found places where I damped my feelings. For example, if someone canceled plans on short notice, I struggled to feel the full depth of my disappointment.

I also found places where I over-amplifyed my feelings. When someone cut me off in traffic, I felt outrage instead of what was really just mild annoyance.

Then I found places where I substituted one feeling because I didn't want to feel another. If lust isn't ok, then I covered it with shame. But I didn't like feeling shame, so I hid it with guilt. Then I buried the guilt feeling under anger. Finally I pushed the anger out of sight.

I found that it was much better to simply and directly feel the lust. I needed to learn that feeling lust won't kill me, regardless of what some outer moral rules may say.

Feeling lust didn't mean I had to act on it. And just by feeling it, I opened enough space inside to explore what was underneath the lust.

Learning to feel my real feelings was quite a long journey. It was part of my daily prayers for eight years before I felt like I really got the hang of it.

Today I treat this practice like a fundamental sport skill that a professional athlete continuously hones in order to master their craft.