Disharmony is always a sign that we are not in truth. If we start paying attention to our disharmonies, we'll discover that, in some way, they look and feel like something we've experienced before. For they repeat the patterns created in our childhood. 

Our work is to unpack these painful patterns. Because our mistaken beliefs about life, that fuel them, are powerful.

Our wrong conclusions about life, drawn at a young age, are called "images." And they draw experiences to us that seem to validate them—to make them appear correct.

Their magnetic nature is part of the grand plan for us to bring our soul dents to the surface for healing. Once we understand this, we will go in search of these patterns. For they reveal a lot.

The best tool to use for this excavation work is called a Daily Review. At the end of each day, we simply write a few notes about what we experienced that day. Where was there disharmony? And what were the feelings and thoughts that came up? How did we react?

This isn't journaling. In our Daily Review, we want to be brief and to the point. Then over time—perhaps two weeks—we can look back through our collection of days and start to pick out the patterns.

For we can't fix what we can't find.

Once we see them, we can search for the words or phrase associated with them. What do we think is "the truth"?

It might sound like this: "I never make the cut,", or "I must do everything by myself," or "Everyone I love leaves me."

Our images won't contain complicated words, because we formed them when we were young. And they may be elusive to capture, since we believe them.

This is where it really helps to work with someone. They can help us see what we've become blind to.

In other words, they can help us see and sort out the contents of our unconsciousness. 

Surfacing our main split

There is a particular kind of image we want to find, called our main split. For it's a key reason we are still involved in the cycles of incarnation. 

Keep in mind, our psyche is made up of many fragments. Our work of incarnating as humans is designed to allow us restore ourselves to wholeness. At the heart of all this fragmentation we will find a core split.

It connects with our deepest wound. And it tears us apart, from the inside, with two opposing beliefs.

Generally speaking, half of our split is out-pictured through our mother and the other half through our father.

For example, let's say we have a father who was very demanding. We feel like we must excel—to succeed—to gain his affection. But if our success gains us too much affection from our mother, he feels threatened by this and ignores us. Our hidden belief, then, might be: "If I do well, I will be rejected."

Meanwhile, the mother also has high expectations for things like getting good grades. Then the competing belief might be: "If I don't do well, I will be rejected."

At the level of our split, we simply cannot win.

We anxiously alternate between two opposing beliefs in which both side lead to pain. We must bring this dualistic trap to the surface of our awareness and begin to see it in action.

Note, there is a very real tendency to bring an image or split into our awareness, only to lose our grip on it. Then it slips back into the depths of our unconscious. This is another reason it helps write about our experiences—to track them in black and white. 

Also, our thoughts are often less clear than we realize. When we start to write them down, we see the confusion and contradictions. 

Once we uncover a hidden belief, we can start to notice where and how it shows up.

Be prepared to start seeing it everywhere. Because what's buried in our psyche has wide-reaching effects throughout our lives.

We have been looking away from ourselves a long time. This, in fact, is what creates the unconscious regions of our psyche.

By now, we are blind to these untruthful aspects. So they are out of our awareness, yet they are running the show. 

The divine quality of humility

Our images, or misunderstandings about life, are not the actual cause of our problems. Our Lower Self is.

In these dark layers of our psyche, we use our images to justify our destructive attitudes and behaviors. 

Humility is a divine quality that the Lower Self twists into arrogance and self-righteousness. We pin all this into place using hidden untruth.

The way out—the way to restore our divine selves—is to discover where and how we have been wrong. 

In any disharmony, knowing the truth—including the truth that untruth lives inside us—removes the wedge our Lower Self was leveraging to keep us separate.

Once we uncover the untruth, we must then discover the truth of the matter. Next, we need to imprint this truth in our soul substance. We must pray to fill the dent with light. 

What's the truth? That we are lovable and we are loved—by God and by our own Higher Selves. Further, we can love and be loved by others—albeit imperfectly. 

Our Lower Self, however, is not so lovable. That said, we can always transform it back to its Higher Self state.

No matter what we do or don't do—no matter what we have done or not done—we are never locked out of heaven. 

For that is our true home, and it exists within each of us. We've just lost sight of this eternal truth.

We have spent our lives resisting and avoiding, reacting and destroying. We behave in ways we hope will prevent us from ever feeling pain again. We fear humiliation, so we don't embrace humility. 

Yet humility is the pathway to the divine. Instead, we stand on the wrong position that says, "But this is how I believe life is. And based on this, I must defend myself, so I stay safe."

If our hidden beliefs were true, this would make sense. But they are not true.

Worse, they cause us to behave in negative ways that others respond to, from their own hidden negativity. When our destructiveness bounces back to us, we conclude that our untrue beliefs are true—that we need our defenses.

It's time to lower our weapons.  

In Jill's Experience

Over the course of doing my work, I have surfaced a number of images. These mistaken beliefs act like truths that become self-evident.

My life, then, became this ongoing drama in which I recreated the offending "truth." But inwardly, I was hurting deeply over how painful it is to keep doing this. This, in a nutshell, explains how it actually works to be human.

A few of my images are:

• I'm not enough and I'll never be enough.
• People intend to be mean to me.
• I didn't make the cut.

So, for example, when I didn't get recognized at work for my contribution, this activated my belief that this was intentional. Because people, I believe, intend to hurt me.

Further, it underscores my belief "I'm not enough." And no matter I do, or don't do, "I'll never be enough." What's more, I believe this pain will go on forever. Each time it happened, that is how it felt.

At one point, I began to uncover my split. I was journaling about my childhood hurts, writing about something that had happened and why it disturbed me so. While writing, I caught the thread of my own Higher Self, and I found myself writing out my split.

First was the part about the pain I experienced when I was seen. I was raised in a Midwest farming community. And while I, myself, never lived on a farm, both of my parents were raised on farms. Children on farms, as I saw with my cousins, did a lot of farm work. 

This showed up in my life by being put to work, at a young age, to help clean the house. For me, it seemed that if I was seen by my mother, I was put to work. I didn't receive much attention or affection from her, so this became my main point of contact with her.

I hated it, and as a result, I hated her. So I tried to hide myself from her. 

Note, there are plenty of children who work on farms, or who help around the house, who don't react the way I did. What matters here is our reaction. For it's related to our particular soul dent—the distortions in our psyche created prior to this incarnation, and which we came here, in this lifetime, wanting to heal.

What matters, then, is our take on things. And this was the environment that brought my soul dent to the surface.

The experience with my mother set up a conflict with the other side of my split, which I got from my father, who was an alcoholic. This side was about not being seen. And, of course, that hurt as well.

Our split is a needle we can never thread—a riddle we can never solve. The only way out is to die into the pain of it.

When something rubs me the wrong way, I need to pause and ask myself some questions. Does this problem involve my not being seen? Is it about how others treat me when they see me?

In doing my work of personal healing, I have needed to release the residual pain bound up in my inner contradictions. Doing this changes how I feel about the world, which affects how I show up in the world.

Then I can get curious about what's happening with the other person. Why do they act toward me as they do? Is it about me?

Ten out of ten times, the other person is a human being who has images of their own. And I draw the ones to me who are a match for mine.

This is the hand of God at work. God helps me see what I must, in order to heal what does not align with truth, and therefore with God. For God wants me to be close to God. 

When I hold this perspective that a loving God is helping me heal myself, I become grateful—for all of it. Even for the parts of life that hurt. 

In Scott's Experience

The thing about images I can't say strongly enough is that they are unconscious beliefs. The thing about the unconscious is that most often you have no idea of it.

In fact, images are often buried so deeply we can often only first find them indirectly, from the outer evidence of life. Even in writing about my images I wonder if anyone would seriously believe this coming from a fairly normal, competent human being.

Yet, after talking with many peers on the path, they too have found crazy beliefs in there. That said, shocking as they may seem at first to the conscious mind, once an image surfaces, we also realize it's what we have long believed to be true, albeit unconsciously.

In the first chapter, I wrote about an image I found: "If I am strong, I will be loved." I think this one became set around age 13, during a difficult time in my life following the death of my mother. Well, it gets even more interesting…

Growing up I had one nagging, won't-ever-go-away health challenge related to my sinuses. Starting at a really young age, like before age two, I had terrible sinusitis. I was put on prescription decongestants almost year round in order to keep my nose clear. Several times every year I would develop full bronchitis and have a few weeks of misery.

None of my doctors could find anything wrong. I was allergy tested a few times, and always came back negative to everything. I even had my sinuses scoped once, hoping they would find something up there. Like, maybe a pencil eraser from the late '60s or a Hot Wheels car tire.

This continued into adulthood, and I thought it was just my lot in life.

Then, in my early 30s, I started getting some clues that sinus congestion wasn't just a random thing, nor was it purely a medical condition. After all, I had some periods of a few months with completely clear sinuses.

I began to get curious about what could actually be driving this. I began stacking up all the clues in my life, of when I was breathing clear and when it changed back. Of when it stayed a low level of clogged and when it developed into sinusitis.

And I began praying to know the truth.

Then one day I had a powerful knowing that I held a hidden belief: "If I am sick, I will be loved." I was shocked. I was also confused, due to my opposing image: "If I am strong, I will be loved."

So part of me was driven to be strong, to keep with my Ironman training. And just when I would get strong, the other part would kick in and I would become sick. This would set back my training.

My belief that I must be strong to be loved would foil the part of me that intended to be sick. And the belief that I must be sick to be loved would foil the part of me that intended to be strong. Around and around I would go. I shake my head thinking about it.

It was only through a process of deep listening—and not judging—that the clues to the next stage of healing arose. I came to realize that as a toddler, I would stop breathing or pant with shallow breaths.

When I still did that as an adult, I simply wasn't moving air, or chi, up high into my lungs, and they would clog up. When I changed those things, my lung function improved dramatically.

About six months into my relationship with Jill, we had a fairly major issue surface. In the middle of our struggles, my lungs went into spasm. I was in pain for days with a deep ragged cough, even after we had resolved our difficulty.

To my body, I was re-experiencing an old trauma and my habitual way of coping and reacting kicked in. Healing can be a long and painstaking process.