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 this happens, we are overly aligned with our limited ego, 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. (See more about duality in Gems, the chapter called Surrendering to the double-sided nature of duality.)

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 reality, 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. For 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. (See more in Bones, the chapter called Overcoming our negative intention by identifying with our spiritual self.

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 our 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 starting 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 got my first management role, with 45 people reporting directly to me. I had left a big corporation for a small firm. I was now the engineering director, the process improvement director, and also had sales/proposal development responsibility. It was crazy too much, but a huge learning and growing opportunity, especially spiritually.

I had to stand up in front of 45 people every day, not only learning a leadership role but also doing my personal spiritual work. Previously I had been doing my spiritual work with some shelter; I didn't have too many people watching. Now it was time to take it to the next level, to the fire of a new crucible.

I encountered all manner of challenges and trials. Budgets and deadlines were made and sometimes missed. I hired fantastic people and a few miserable ones. My teams worked well and sometimes squabbled. Jobs were won and sometimes lost. There were plenty of instances of disharmony for me to look at.

Disharmony is not really about feeling unpleasant feelings, it is becoming aware of when you manipulate feelings by artificially suppressing, amplifying or distorting them. These are signposts that something is not in truth. And I want to see every place I am not in truth.

By looking at the places in my work life that were difficult and challenging, I noticed that much of the disharmony in my team was a reflection of my own issues. I was directing 45 people's work lives, and thus putting energy into the system, and the system was bringing its problems and challenges back to me.

I began to notice that any place I sent negativity rippling into the organization, however slight, it would bounce around and be reflected back to me, maybe from a different direction.

This team of 45 people was a mirror for me, and an effective one at that.

Early on, I hired a Pathwork Helper, who was also an organizational change expert, as my business coach. I still had my personal Helper too. Together we began to look at my leadership abilities from a combined business and spiritual perspective.

After a year in the role, I asked my coach and Helper to go interview people around me about my leadership qualities.

I wanted to understand what the mirror was telling me. We spent a month designing interview questions, to give me the best idea where my work remained and how I could grow. Then I selected the most insightful people in the organization, plus family and community people, to be interviewed.

After my coach and Helper completed the interviews, I took a two-day private retreat with them to hear the results. We started the retreat by going through the interviews, person by person and question by question.

They would ask me how a particular person answered a particular question. I would tell them what I thought the person said. Then they would read to me the person's actual response.

If I got the response right, they wrote the answer on a green post-it note. If not, it went on a red post-it note.

I guessed correctly more than 80% of the time. They wanted to see how well I knew myself, and I did pretty well at this first step.

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

Having a lot of perspectives come together made it easier to see a theme more completely, and it told me something about their strength.

Finally, near the end of the two days, I began grouping the themes in relation to each other. Previously 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. Sometimes, if something was due, or a commitment missed, or an infraction made, I would yield on it in a way that wasn't firm.

Other times, I came down inappropriately hard or abruptly. It wasn't all the time, it was sometimes, which made it hard to see.

Often 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 just often enough to be maddening to my team.

In this way, my team didn't know what to expect from me.

There was a duality here I had not seen in myself before. I had a soul split between compassion/mercy on one side, and power/accountability on the other side. My compassion was lacking an appropriate firmness and power, and my use of power was lacking an appropriate compassion.

In reality, compassion, mercy, power, firmness and accountability are all part of one whole, and I was caught in the duality of a split between them.

Knowing about a dualistic soul split like this is the first step in healing it. But it doesn't happen with a snap of the fingers. It takes a lot of intention to consciously choose to feel the feelings and examine the associated hidden beliefs.

And also, to do the work to close the gaps.