About: What’s hidden in our own being
Just as we need to rotate our internal mirrors to catch the reflections of our Higher Self, we need to become accustomed to looking for other less desirable hidden parts of ourselves. For example, we each harbor misconceptions about life that we are not even aware of.
Where do these hidden misconceptions live? In the unconscious.
What do they do? They create disharmony in our lives.
How do we uncover them? By paying attention to our emotional reactions, which lead us back to what’s hidden.
The unconscious isn’t empty. It is simply the part of ourselves we have not yet become aware of. Our greatest misconception is believing that what we don’t know about ourselves cannot affect us.
Disharmony is attracted to us because somehow, in some way, it lives inside us.
Why looking away doesn’t work
Denial is a key defense we use to avoid trouble, but it leads to nothing but more trouble. It acts by stagnating our energy so that feelings cannot move. The result is a kind of inner inertia—we feel lazy or unable to move.
As a result, one of the best ways to surface what’s lurking in our unconscious is to look around and see what’s bothering us.
Where are we stuck?
Where is there disharmony?
What keeps provoking an “emotional reaction” in us?
This is our key that there is something in us that needs to be addressed.
Emotional reactions are responses we have to people or life events that are bigger than the situation would seem to warrant. In short, we’re triggered. We need to learn to bring reason to our emotions and discover the real root cause of our reactions.
Unlike a normal emotional response, these don’t move through with a natural peak and release. Emotional reactions get stuck in us, because we have actually bumped up against a stuck, or frozen, place within us.
Whatever it is, we can’t let it go—it seems to have a hold on us.
Our first immature reaction is to blame something or someone outside ourselves for having caused our reaction. This gives the other person all our power. We then feel we have no boundaries because we are powerless.
This is how we make ourselves a victim.
What we don’t want to look at is the way in which this troubling thing lives inside of us. That, in fact, is the last thing we want to consider. We believe that if the offending person or situation would stop or go away, we would be OK.
But that’s not the way life works. In fact, it’s just the opposite.
This thing has actually shown up in our life because, in some way, it already lives within us. It causes us to behave in ways that bring about whatever we hope to avoid.
Now we are face to face with our disturbance. This is where the work begins.
“This path demands from an individual that which most people are least willing to give: truthfulness with the self, exposure of what exists now, elimination of masks and pretenses, and the experience of one’s naked vulnerability.”
– Pathwork Lecture #204
Seeing ourselves in action
This distortion inside us is a twisted stream of energy and consciousness that has gotten frozen in our bodies and in our beings. What was once a positive force has somehow gotten blocked and distorted into a negative force.
If we can’t see this negativity in ourselves, our focus will go onto something outside ourselves, and we will see it there.
If we choose to turn away from looking at it, what we will find is that much to our dismay, unpleasant situations will turn up again and again and again. It may look somewhat different each time—different people, various aspects of our life—but eventually we can begin to realize there is a pattern.
One of the simplest and most powerful practices the Guide recommends is the Daily Review. We simply jot down a few words about where we felt disharmony during the day, and what our primary feelings or reactions were.
Over time, these patterns will begin to reveal themselves to us.
It is true that wherever we go, there we are—complete with these inner distortions. They keep attracting people and circumstances to us that are designed to help surface the inner distortion. This is how we see it and heal it.
This is the loving plan of God’s laws. All negativities will bring about results that will motivate us—eventually—to turn and face the real origin of the distortion, inside ourselves.
We need to find the courage to see our hidden places. Usually, we can’t see them without someone holding a mirror up to us. Such a person is not really our enemy.
They may be one of our greatest teachers.
How to avoid a crisis
Disconnection is painful.
In fact, nothing is more frightening and tormenting than feeling the effect of a cause we ourselves have set in motion but do not understand. It is through our commitment to working with whatever arises in life that we come to see how cause and effect are linked.
This is how we begin to take on a new level of self-responsibility. Gradually, that’s what turns the tide.
In the end, truth is love and love is truth. So in areas of our life that are working well, we have already resolved inner misunderstandings. Our Higher Self is shining brightly—we are in truth and love is able to flow.
These positive cycles naturally continue because they are rooted in truth.
Where our light is blocked, that is the place to turn our attention—without losing sight of the fact that this dark area is not all of us. But this is where we are still separated from God and our own Higher Self.
This is where we are not currently in truth.
Ignoring these areas will not help them heal, nor will they just go away. In fact, the longer such areas are ignored or pushed aside, the greater the likelihood that a major crisis will erupt in our life.
This is not the result of an uncaring universe or a punishing God. Rather, it is a natural effect of a cause we have set in motion by continually turning away from what calls for our attention, and which needs to be healed inside us.
“The personality must see eventually that all eruptions, breakdowns, crises, mean to tear down the old structure so as to re-erect a new and better functioning one. The ‘dark night’ of the mystics is such a time of the breakdown of old structures…
Crisis can be avoided by looking at the inner truth when the first inklings of disturbance and negativity manifest on the surface. But a tremendous amount of honesty is required to challenge one’s tightly cherished convictions…
If difficulties, upheavals, and pain in the individual’s life, as well as in the life of humanity as a whole, were viewed from this point of view, the real meaning of crisis would be understood and much pain could be avoided.
I say to you now: Do not wait for crisis to come in an eruption as the natural, balance-establishing event that takes place as inexorably as a thunderstorm must take place when certain atmospheric conditions have to be altered and clarity in the atmosphere is to be re-established.
This is exactly what happens within the human consciousness. Growth is indeed possible without intense painful ‘dark nights,’ if honesty with the self becomes predominant in the personality. True inner looking and deep concern with the inner being as well as giving up pet attitudes and ideas must be cultivated.”
– Pathwork Lecture #183
Learn more in Pearls, Chapter 15: What’s the real spiritual meaning of crisis?
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