About: Finding the gift inside our faults

It is an error to believe that if we follow a spiritual path such as this one, bad things won't happen in our life. This is an imperfect world. People will continue to do imperfect things. Bad things will happen.

Plus, what we have set in motion will take time to resolve. We have already wasted considerable time—quite possibly, many lifetimes—and some of our issues have become tight knots. But they can be loosened and unraveled with patience and good work.

The Pathwork Guide teaches that whenever there is disharmony in our lives—something bothers us deeply—there is something in us we overlook.

This is true, no matter how wrong the other may also be.

The key is to learn to identify the areas of distortion within ourselves, but not identify with them. Whatever it is, it is not all of us. And it is definitely not the core essence of who we are.

The famous triad of faults

Our goal is to make substantial and lasting changes. For this to happen, we must become willing to look closely at all aspects of ourselves.

We can start with finding our faults.

All human beings have faults, which are places in us that are in distortion. Our faults serve separation and not connection, and that is how we know they are under the domain of Lower Self.

All faults fall into one of three main categories: self-will, pride or fear. Pride encompasses both the attitudes of being better than and less than—we wouldn't have to make ourselves seem better than if we didn't feel like we are less than—and is the opposite of humility.

Simply recognizing pride is often enough to begin loosening its grip.

Fear is an emotion. So if we feel it, it changes.

On an unconscious level, we can "smell" fear in another, activating our own unconscious fear. But resolving our own fear will open up our intuition. We will then be able to sense when another could benefit from our calming presence.

Along the way, we must learn to "feel the fear and do it anyway," which is essentially a little ego-death experience. For if we collude with our fear, it will breed more resistance. And resistance breeds more fear, including fear of truth. When we align with fear, then, we are denying our own Real Self, which is truth.

Self-will is a compulsive forcing current that does not come from a free act, but rather from a feeling of "I (you) should, I must, I ought to." It is a superficial current of tension, anxiety and pushing.

Healthy will is free and relaxed, acting for the sake of truth and integrity.

This triad of self-will, pride and fear can always be found together. So when we identify a fault in one of these areas, we can be sure the other two are nearby.

It is always good to look for all three once we identify any fault.

In accordance with our Personality Type, discussed in the chapter about the Mask Self, one will likely be easiest to find: self-will for the Will Type, pride for the Reason Type, and fear for the Emotion Type.

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Learn more in:

• Bones, Chapter 12: Finding out the truth about ourselves, including our faults
• Bones, Chapter 13: The ubiquitous faults of self-will, pride and fear

Why face our fear

Let's look more closely at fear. While it's true we need to be able to stand up for ourselves—even defend ourselves, when necessary—we don't need to be in fear to do this. More to the point, it's our fear that prevents us from doing this effectively.

Fear is the feeling that tells us something "out there" is going to hurt us. It casts a net over everything we see, looking for a scene that is somehow reminiscent of something hurtful that happened in our childhood.

"Aha," it says, "I've spotted it. See, I needed my fear to keep me safe."

Armed with this type of defensive strategy, we see the world through a hypersensitive filter. This perpetual pinging of everything crossing our path keeps our system on semi-alert.

It keeps us in an elevated state of perceived stress.

Our physical body joins this hunt for hurtful things by constantly putting low doses of cortisol into our bloodstream. Just in case. Because, you never know. We might need it. At any moment.

But cortisol does things to the body, like reducing bone formation—which can lead to osteoporosis—and weakening the immune system—which can lead to sickness. Worse yet, should we find ourselves needing to think and defend ourselves in a truly unsafe situation, all this "preparation" has made us less capable.

Because when we're living in fear, we're running on a depleted system.

Fear arises from that part of ourselves that wants us to stay separate—and to stay very afraid. The inner child (Little-L Lower Self) says, "I'm scared." Behind this, the Big-L Lower Self says, "Good. Stay scared."

By whispering in our ear about a past that haunts us, our Lower Self keeps us out of our current reality. It leverages our own buried wrong conclusions so that our attitudes and actions cause monsters to seemingly materialize.

This is how we create our own frightful reality. We then turn around and claim it was our fear that kept us safe.

The way out is by finding the courage to face the ghosts of our own hidden painful past. We must untangle our fears if we want to calm the anxiety we perpetually feel.

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Learn more about facing fear in Blinded by Fear: Insights from the Pathwork Guide on how to face our fears.

Find the original face

It's important to realize that faults are always a distortion of an original divine essence. The pride, fear and self-will inherent in every human being will eventually give way to humility, love and the willingness to have God's will done in all respects.

We want to unearth our faults, then, and reconvert them to their original glory. Following are a few negative qualities and their original divine essence:

Defiance; Spite; Stubbornness; Rigidity | Being centered within; Being firm, self-assertive and standing our own ground; Being secure in our own self, rather than being constantly swayed and influenced by others and thus losing autonomy.

Rebelliousness; Going against authority | Courage and independence; A fighting spirit against submission to conformity.

Abuse of power, of a position of authority | True leadership, which means taking responsibility and paying the price for leadership.

Judge others | Great capacity to distinguish, to differentiate; Honestly and constructively see the truth in ourselves, with keen perception of others; Recognition.

Lack of faith; Do not want to believe in God | Healthy, realistic attitude regarding self-responsibility and self-dependence; Know that there is no authority that will do it for us; Surrender of the ego to the deeper, wiser Godself to bring about true selfhood, autonomy, independence; Willingness to keep all doors open in search for truth.

Fearfulness; Anxiety | Caution; Awareness that something is amiss; Anxiety is a gauge that tells us something is being repressed that we don't wish to see.

Avoid taking responsibility for one's life | Quality of letting go and letting flow, of not letting the ego-control take over and blot out the eternal flow of being; Not being cramped and tight and overactive with the ego forces; Giving in and surrendering to the flow of being.

Playing the victim game; Self-exoneration at the expense of making others guilty | Longing for the perfect state we contain in our nucleus, which is not a fixed perfectionism, but the ever-moving, changing perfection of the innermost soul.

Competitiveness; Self-centeredness; Wanting to be the center of attention; Vanity; Egotism | Centered within our divine self, not the separated ego; Being the best that we can be.

Removing yourself; Being "cool;" Pretending to be different | Self-containment, self-sufficiency, impartiality, serenity; Harmonious balance between intimate sharing and solitude to refuel from within.

Asking for reflection

If we are not aware of our faults, or character defects, consider this a good opportunity to begin to get to know ourselves better. We can do this work of self-discovery by asking someone who knows us well to sit down and tell us what they think our good qualities are, as well as our faults.

This is truly a sacred gift if someone is willing to take the risk of being honest with us. We need to do our best to just receive, without defending or rebutting.

Know, too, that some of the others' issues could be coloring some of what they say. Still, what a gift to be shown how another perceives us.

Our deeply entrenched faults have been with us for many lifetimes, so they won't dissolve in a day. And they won't resolve themselves just because we know about them.

We need to bring our healthy will to bear on the situation, identifying them in action and taking steps to make another choice. Doing this requires rigorous self-honesty.

As we go through our list of faults, we will see that we really do not like some of them. Others, we sort of cherish in some way.

When we see such an attachment, we can ask: "How would I react if another person were to display the same fault, either in the same way or perhaps in a slightly different way?"

In fact, we are often quite irritated when someone else displays the same fault we are somewhat proud of. This will help loosen the pride we take in our fault.

We also rid ourselves of pride when we have the courage to stumble a thousand times over the same faults and keep lifting ourselves up to try again.

Then we are truly on this path.

"Fall seven times, stand up eight."

– Japanese proverb

Feeding our soul

The Pathwork Guide tells us that when spirits observe human beings, they can see how badly we need spiritual nourishment. We nourish our bodies and our brains and even our emotional nature, although not always with the best possible food.

But when it comes to spiritual nourishment, we starve ourselves.

Spiritual nourishment does not merely mean to read, hear or learn about spiritual truth, or about God and his creation. It does not even mean prayer and meditation, although that's a part.

The most important substance of spiritual food is self-development. What we need to become happy is right in front of us, but we often turn the wrong way.

The same work or effort is not expected of everyone, for each of our tasks and levels of development are different. But anyone reading these words has sufficient means to acquire this food.

The Guide suggests that 30 minutes a day is all that's needed for doing the work of spiritual development.

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