The Pathwork Guide teaches us that every disharmony in life stems from a misunderstanding of truth.

The good news: this means that every negativity can be unwound to find its original positive essence—once we uncover the truth of the matter.

The bad news: we must come to terms with the fact that in some way, we've been wrong.

Wherever we experience disharmony, we are not in truth.

Truth is a spectrum that stretches from one end of anything to the other. Therefore truth is able to hold opposites.

When we can experience this unifying level of truth—when we can hold opposite truths—we feel at peace. 

More often, what happens is that something appears to be true. Yet it is in opposition to—in conflict with—something or someone else.

When we experience life in this way we are overly aligned with our limited ego. We are disconnected from our greater Higher Self and following the life-limiting ways of our Lower Self. 

In that moment, what we must come to realize is that we are not yet seeing the whole truth. We are lost in duality, due to our inner limitation and distortions.

Earth, then, is a sphere of duality. That's our current reality. But this limited reality is not the only reality—and it is not true reality.

Duality, then, is an illusion.

To realize this is to start to wake up.

When we become aware of this, we step into more truth. This is a step in the direction of unity, or Oneness. In this deeper, or higher, dimension—at the level of the Oneness, or the Higher Self—there is no conflict. For at this level, the highest good of one person does not conflict with the highest good of anyone else.

Meaning, when we experience disharmony or conflict with others, we are not living in true reality.

The true origin of our struggle, then, is inside us. So this is where we must turn our attention. 

We must learn to fight the darkness of our own Lower Self. 

As we tell our stories about our struggles in life, we can start to tune into the way we are trapped in duality. Whenever we see the world in black and white, with only two options… or when we discover that all our options are now bad… these are signs that we are lost in duality.

We are not living in truth. 

When we see that somehow—in some way we don't yet understand—we are trapped in an illusion, we move a little closer to the truth. The part of our being that observes our life from this broader perspective is not caught in the illusion. 

It may only be a small speck at this point, but that's more than we had access to before now.

Regardless of how convincing the illusion of duality may be, it's simply not true.

In this state of illusion, our vision has narrowed and we are only seeing a sliver of true reality. From our distorted perspective, we struggle against life, against other people, and against our own best interest.

Because from this limited viewpoint, we fail to see how we are all connected. We don't yet know this greater truth: That if I hurt another, I hurt myself. That if I help someone else, I help myself. 

Our work is to find our way out of our self-created separation. And doing so takes effort. 

The work of healing is always a struggle. 

The question is: are we ready to start fighting the good fight?

In Jill's Experience

No question, duality is a beast. We're caught in it from the get-go, and the more we veer off course, the more we find ourselves up against lose-lose choices.

This is the state I was in when my 10-year marriage—to a person who was as lost in the illusion as me—came to an end. For we were both locked into our defenses.

Mine was to run, on an inner level, as far as I could. It's no surprise, then, we were destined for divorce.

We weren't present enough with each other to create a connection.

I was far enough along on my spiritual path to know that whatever our issues were, if I didn't work through them, I would face them again with someone else. But it takes two people, working in the same direction, to get anywhere.

We were lost and getting nowhere. Our years in therapy were not moving us closer—to each other, or to happiness.

I had reached that sinking realization that no matter what, this is going to hurt. If I stay, it's going to hurt. And if we split apart, it's going to hurt. What a heart-sickening place to be.

This is why duality is so painful. I had built my life upon a faulty inner foundation. Now I was stuck in a corner, with no good way out.

With great sadness—and deep regret for the effect it had on our young boys—we decided to end our marriage.

I wish it could have gone differently; I wish I could have been better.

But I'm getting there now. I have dedicated myself to resolving the hidden issues in my psyche that led me to making such a hard choice, and that hurt people I dearly love.

In Scott's Experience

I was in my late 30s when I took my first big career leap. I left GE, where I was part of a highly structured jet-engine design organization, for a boutique firm that provided engineering design services work to GE—the same GE I had just left.

I was the engineering VP, with 45 people reporting directly to me. But because we were so small, I also had client development, proposal writing and profit/loss responsibilities. In each moment, I wore any hat needed to run a medium-size business.

I was also, suddenly, very visible. Every day a hundred people were watching every last thing I said and did, no matter how small. It was like being thrown, upside-down, into the deep end of the pool.

I encountered all manner of challenges and trials: budgets, deadlines, hiring, jobs won, jobs lost, teams squabbling. Every day had a laundry-list of disharmony for me to look at.

And after looking very closely, I began to see that some of the disharmony happening among my team reflected my own issues.

I noticed that any place I sent negativity into the organization it would bounce around among people. Eventually, the ripple would reflect and come back to me, sometimes from a different direction or with a variation in theme.

This was life changing. When I took the role, I thought I my task was to manage the problems and challenges happening in my team. Then I realized that this team of 45 people was a mirror for me, and an effective one at that.

Together with my business coach and Pathwork Helper, I began to look at my leadership from a combined business and spiritual perspective. I wanted to understand what the mirror was telling me.

I selected the most insightful people in the organization, my family, and my community to be interviewed about my leadership. We designed interview questions that would give me the best insight about how my inner problems were showing up in the organization.

Later, they interviewed me—including asking me how I thought each person answered every question. I told them what I thought the person said. Then they read the person's actual response.

Where I got their responses right—meaning that I saw the situation for what it was, however difficult or painful—they wrote the answer on a green post-it note. Where I did not—I was blind to the situation—it went on a red post-it note.

I answered correctly about 80% of the time. Still, there was quite a bit happening that I was simply blind to about myself.

Next, we began grouping the answers by themes and I started to get a big-picture view of what my main challenges were as a leader. The red/green variation helped me visualize what I could see and where I was blind.

Finally, I began grouping the themes in relation to each other. They felt a bit random, but I wanted to explore connections between them.

As we worked, a new understanding came to light. One of the themes was that sometimes I was inappropriately soft and yielding. When a task was late, a commitment missed, or an infraction made, I would yield on the matter in a way that wasn't firm or appropriate.

Other times, I was inappropriately hard or abrupt.

Sometimes the pattern came sequentially: I would be over-soft and yielding until something had to change, and then I would come down overly hard.

It was just sometimes. Not enough for me to clearly see, but often enough to be maddening to my team.

My team didn't know what to expect from me. Then their frustrations spilled out and bounced around. And around.

I had a soul split between compassion and mercy on one side, and power and accountability on the other side. My compassion was lacking an appropriate firmness and power, and my use of power was lacking an appropriate compassion.

This is an example of Truth being a spectrum that stretches from one end of anything to the other. Compassion, mercy, power, and accountability are all part of one whole. I was caught in the duality of a split among them.

Knowing about a dualistic soul split like this is the first step in healing it. But healing doesn't happen with a snap of the fingers. I had to look even more deeply at the disharmonies in my life to find the roots of the split.

Disharmony is a signpost that something, somewhere is not in truth. And it involves more than just surface-level unpleasant feelings and situations.

I began learning in real time how I manipulated my feelings by artificially suppressing, amplifying or distorting them in order to not feel old wounds. Finally, I could see how this, in turn, created the instability in my leadership.