Jill Loree
Why is it so hard to let go of our negativity?
It may help to understand that our negativity is a defense. It arises out of duality, which is the tragic misunderstanding that splits all of life into either/or. Either it’s me, or it’s you. From here, we believe it’s a question of our own happiness versus the happiness of someone else. Because in duality, supposedly only one side can win.
Secretly, we feel that if we give anything to others, we will be at some kind of disadvantage. So, we grab for what we want, on the one hand, and hold ourselves back, on the other. This, we think, will increase our advantage.
What it really creates is a terrible conflict.
As such, if we want to get out from under all this negativity, we must find another approach.
The layers pile on
There was a time, in our spiritual history, when we did not have layers of negativity in our soul. When we were moved by creative forces with no inner barriers standing in our way.
But at a certain point, our own consciousness removed itself from its own divine kernel. This started a chain reaction in which we began to strive to get away from ourselves. This, in turn, kicked off a whole host of wrong ideas, destructive reactions and bad feelings.
In short, we became spiritually blind—because we were now covered in negativity—and thus very unhappy.
Suffering was sure to follow.
Each time we added distance from our own divine kernel, we created a new dark layer of consciousness in our psyche. Each new layer covered over the previous one, until we’d built up a thick inner wall.
Now, instead of being nourished by our inner source, these new separate layers of consciousness started functioning on their own. And they were fed by the same error that brought these layers about in the first place.
Fast forward a few clicks and now here we are, seemingly going in circles. If only we could once again connect with the freshness of our original source. For if we could get back to that divine kernel, we’d find the way to solve all our conflicts and unify all our splits.
In other words, we’d have no more negativity.
Negativity is not new
So how do we get past all this negativity and get back to our divine center?
The answer: By slowly working ourselves back through those dark layers of negativity. The road is long and the work is painstaking. But believe it or not, we’re making good progress.
At the dawn of our development, according to the Pathwork Guide, humans were not much more self-aware than animals. At that time, we freely acted out our destructive feelings. We had no self-control, and we didn’t even feel bad about this.
Because at that point, we had no sense that we shouldn’t hurt others. Our blindness led us to suffer, and in our suffering, we were blind to the pain of others. As a result, we indulged our impulses to be destructive.
Eventually, we figured out that our destructiveness brought us into lots of conflict. As our consciousness expanded, and as our reasoning minds developed, we started to see that if we blindly acted out our destructiveness, we would cause more pain for ourselves.
This is how our social conscience developed. It stemmed from our instinct for self-preservation. We were still a long way from sensing a real connection with others. But at least we learned to tame our urge to destroy them.
Down through the ages, after experiencing a multitude of lifetimes under varying conditions, we further developed our ability to reason. We can now connect the cause and effect of our actions. And with our will, we generally have enough self-discipline to keep from hurting others, at least in a primitive way.
It’s important to appreciate this step of developing our reason and our will. It’s been a vital phase of our evolutionary journey. Along the way, though, the development of something else that’s important has gotten left behind: Our feelings.
Why we hold back our feelings
At this point in time, the realm of our feelings is essentially a mass of denied pain. This pain leads to other things, like hate, anger and violence. For feelings are alive. Meaning, they have the ability to create.
In fact, feelings are self-perpetuating. Hence, if our world of feelings is mostly negative and destructive, they will create the impulse to cause damage. That’s why we fear them so much.
The only thing keeping these powerful feelings in check is our ability to reason—using our mind—along with our self-discipline—using our willpower—to hold ourselves back.
After all, as our consciousness keeps growing and evolving, the negativity of our feelings becomes more obvious. What happens next? We do our best to cover up these destructive feelings, denying them and trying to inactivate them.
Here’s the big rub: This process pushes us even further away from our spiritual center, or divine kernel. For our spiritual self sits right in the middle of this realm of feelings.
Yes, friends, even if they are currently manifesting in a negative, destructive way, this creative mass of feelings inside us is the divine.
Hence, when we use our reason and will to erect an inner barricade around our feelings—hoping to keep ourselves safe from this self-perpetuating machinery that creates negativity—we also cut ourselves off from our best self.
The current state of things
Each person must go through the following phases. First, we must learn to control our destructiveness and stay safe. Then we must unlearn these things so we can unravel and transform our feelings, which are still quite primitive.
Up until now, our saving grace has been that our reason and will have been able to control our feelings. But now we experience ourselves almost entirely as our egos, which is the part of us that reasons and wills.
We didn’t make a wrong turn. All this was necessary.
But now we must go another way, and this seems threatening to us. For it is against everything we think we’ve learned. Letting our feelings out seems entirely too dangerous. After all, they are primal, selfish, destructive and seemingly bottomless.
This, briefly, is where humanity is at today. We’re stuck right here, facing emotions that seem far more negative than positive. And if we’re honest, due to our efforts to deaden difficult feelings, it may seem we’re already half-dead.
This is why our technological and scientific advances are out of proportion with our ability to feel. And this is why our capacity to experience our own spiritual nature seems foreign to us.
Here is our great predicament: To reach self-actualization—to reach the truth of who we are, at our core—we must learn to cope with the realm of feelings.
But how?
Relax, you’re safe
This longing to know ourselves at a deeper level—at the level of the divine kernel itself—means we must access the realm of feelings. We fear, however, that this is a bottomless pit of bleakness, unknown terror, unreasonable violence and selfishness.
Yes, such layers of negativity do exist in us. But they are a thin veneer compared to our true unlimited depths.
The even better news is that once we’ve learned to exercise some self-discipline and to think for ourselves, we’re no longer in danger from our feelings. Any fear we have that they will swamp us—once we become conscious of them—is unfounded.
This means, we must now do an about-face. Instead of holding back our feelings, we must now learn to let them be. We must make them conscious and observe them, without being afraid of them.
What we’ll discover is that we can let negative feelings exist, without acting on them. For we can now deliberately choose how we behave.
You could call this a built-in safety measure for doing this work of self-discovery. For even if there are still some weak spots in our reasoning and self-discipline, these will be strengthened by the courage and self-honesty we must marshal just to arrive at this point of self-confrontation.
As such, there is nothing for us to fear in feeling our feelings.
“When you have the courage to experience the pain, agony, anger, violence and helplessness, you will truly come to see that it is not bottomless or endless, and that this is not all there is to your inner life of feelings.
“You will see that there is an end. The end is when the living energy of all those feelings you wish to avoid becomes a vital, living feeling of love, joy, and pleasure.”
– The Pathwork Guide, Lecture #166: Perceiving, Reacting, Expressing
The goal: To feel alive
If our will and reason are well-developed but our emotions are thwarted, it’s going to be very difficult to connect with our own divine kernel. Because the divine kernel is alive. It’s a living, pulsing, energizing mass that has the highest consciousness and wisdom.
It’s also self-perpetuating and self-creating. There aren’t any words that can adequately describe how intense and potent this aliveness is.
When we deny our feelings, then, we are also denying our aliveness.
What we must do, if we want to come fully alive, is to the meet our feelings as they are. Even if they currently include destructiveness and pain. But when we allow ourselves to fully experience the hate and pain within, without flinching, we will by surprised by what happens next: They dissolve, giving way to a new aliveness.
The only danger we must face right now lies in the difficulty of admitting that we are not yet who we want to be. But we pay a very high price to be living life as if we are.
How we kill negative feelings
In an effort to deal with difficult feelings, we overemphasize our ability to reason. Using our mind, we try to fit our feelings into tidy little pictures, building theories about why we feel a certain way. We’re so used to using our mind this way, in fact, we think we need a reason to feel a certain feeling.
In other words, out of fear of our feelings, we concoct a reason for feeling them, as a way to save ourselves from them. We work so hard to explain why we feel a certain way, that in the end, there is no feeling remaining. We just have theories and explanations.
What we must now develop is the art of self-observation. For we must see how we do this and then see through these “explanations.”
For example, let’s say we feel hurt. Sometimes we’ll just deny the hurt, even to ourselves. Other times, we’ll manipulate the hurt into an elaborate accusation. We’ll distort the facts as needed and build reasonable sounding explanations that no longer match reality.
Now this denied hurt turns into anger. Then we deny or explain away the anger using theories about what caused the hurtful thing to happen. But all this theorizing and explaining makes it impossible to actually experience the hurt.
The problem is, we can’t really put something behind us when we deny the actual experience of it. As a result, we can never be done with it.
Which is why we so often build an artificial exaggerated hurt on top of this structure, that says, “Look at what you have done to me! My hurt will now force you to act differently toward me.”
Soft pain versus hard pain
This exaggerated hurt is built from all these false layers we use to separate our consciousness from the original hurt. But feeling this false hurt just leads to unbearable pain, and that leads to desperation. It never brings us to a satisfactory conclusion.
If, on the other hand, we would just feel the original hurt, we would find it is a soft, gentle experience. It’s not unbearable. And it leaves our essence intact.
If we will allow ourselves to simply feel such a hurt, we can create a new pattern. We do this by stating the fact of why it hurts us, without embellishment. In this way, we deal safely with our feelings, and also with our surroundings.
What we are also doing is establishing a new lifeline to our divine, creative nucleus, which is our true identity,
Folks, we can all do this. We can endure the real hurt and just let it be. We can do this, even if we don’t fully understand what hurts us. We don’t have to get angry or become destructive. These are merely reactions we have to feelings we don’t want to go through.
Alternatively, we can stay in denial, building layer upon layer upon layer of inner structures. But these layers are the negativity—the hard pain—that alienates us from our own true self.
It all starts with honesty
The way forward is to develop the habit of being more honest, with others and with ourselves. What we must eventually learn to do is to honestly register and endure what we’re feeling.
At first, it may seem that the gentle hurt is harder to bear than the dramatic, exaggerated hurt we manufacture. After all, we often like the promise of a little drama. But if we can accept the soft and gentle original hurt, we won’t feel so destructive. And then soft and gentle good feelings will begin to arise.
We can start by saying to ourselves, “I want to know what I am really feeling.” Don’t try to talk yourself out of your feelings because they might be irrational. Also, don’t talk yourself into feelings by building a case. Both stem from a mind that is too active.
Rather, let your mind become quiet and passive, and gently allow your feelings—whatever they may be—to come up. The calmer and more relaxed we can be, the more likely we will engage with the original feeling, not the feelings covering it up.
When we let ourselves feel the original impact of a feeling, we draw closer to the divine kernel. This is the center of our soul from which all goodness flows. Ask for guidance and pray for the strength to endure a little real pain.
Walking the walk
No human being who is born into this difficult dimension is free from these built-up layers of strong negative feelings. Here on earth, we experience hopeless agony as well as violent rage. We also have absolute helplessness.
At first, we aim these negative feelings at the world. For that seems to be the cause of our agony, and therefore our rage. Later, we turn them toward ourselves. Because our ego simply doesn’t know how to cope with these hard feelings.
Now, as we talk about accepting and unraveling all this negativity, it’s important that we don’t torture ourselves with it. We don’t need to court negative feelings, and dwell on them. But we also shouldn’t shrink from them in fear.
“Here are some negative feelings,” we can say to ourselves. “I will let them be. I am not going to fight against them or reject them. I want to truly dissolve them by just letting them be.”
There’s no need for morbid wallowing.
Feeling dead inside
In our current state, due to these layers of negativity, we are cut off from the live center of ourselves. In fact, by now we’ve been denying our inner pain for so long, we may feel quite dead inside. The reason is that we anesthetized what was once a shock to us, from a childhood hurt.
Although our goal was to avoid feeling hurt, we now experience an inner deadness. And this is far more distressing.
This deadness was originally meant to protect us from the pain and fear, which we were not able to cope with. For when we are very young, this self-numbing strategy is all we have in the way of a temporary solution. As we grow up, though, this temporary anesthesia turns into a habit, and an extremely harmful one, at that.
Now, the anesthesia must be undone. And as we thaw out our deadened feelings, we are bound to experience pain. This is the pain that, at one time, we froze. This pain cannot heal, though, unless we have the courage to feel it.
Our work is to accept the real nature of our pain, without denying it or exaggerating its intensity. For both of these options are painkillers that don’t work. If we can do this, the pain will diminish and disappear.
It should be emphasized that, when we talk about accessing, accepting and expressing our negative feelings, this doesn’t mean we act out our destructiveness. We must choose, for ourselves, the best way to express these difficult feelings so that no one, including ourselves, gets hurt in the process.
Our pain hides our treasure
If we lack the courage to experience all that is currently inside us—not wanting to own up to it—we don’t permit ourselves the luxury of finding our inner wealth. For in our divine kernel lies all the richness of our feelings. This is our inherent strength.
It’s not enough to admit, on an intellectual level, that this exists. We must have an actual emotional experience of it. And we must make the effort needed to be able to express it.
This is our living spirit. To free it, we must meet that in us which freezes it and paralyzes it. Otherwise, it will not be possible to be moved and lived by our own living spirit.
If we are holding ourselves back, in any way, we are squeezing the life out of ourselves.
“My friends, to make the deadness alive, you must first feel it in you. You have means at your disposal to bring it to life again…You can decide whether or not you want to be fully alive and feeling and thereby come to experience the best that life is, the best that you are. Be life, be God, for that is who you truly are.”
– The Pathwork Guide, Lecture #166: Perceiving, Reacting, Expressing
– The Guide’s wisdom in Jill Loree’s words
Adapted from Pathwork lecture #165: Evolutionary Phases in the Relationship Between the Realms of Feelings, Reason, and Will; Pathwork Lecture #166: Perceiving, Reacting, Expressing; Pathwork Lecture #167: Frozen Life Center Becomes Alive
