QA165 QUESTION: My problem has to do with the physical work we are doing in our group, the difficulty I’ve been having with the new exercises as well as difficulty in the physical contact with other people. Can you help me?

ANSWER: Yes. The answer to the first is so obvious that I think I hardly need to comment upon it, because it expresses truly in your entire life. You have the greatest of difficulties to assert yourself. As a substitute for the self-assertion, you use passive resistance in a quietly hostile way.

You are in the imbalance that, on the one hand, you are afraid of even truly thinking, “I deserve the best, I can have the best, I want to extend and express myself and experience the best in life because I also want to give my best.” He who is ready to give his best will have absolutely no hesitancy to have this positive expectancy of life – that he can experience the best and is not blocking it. Therefore he can say No to anything that prohibits him, whether this No is outside or within himself.

This is manifest in your life in many, many ways – how you hold back, how you settle for often second and third and fourth place, in many respects, regarding the good things in life. Or how you do not dare to speak up in certain ways, or bring through, even toward yourself, your own real opinions.

This has improved greatly in the last year since you are on this Path – there is no question about that – but there is still a tremendous holding back in this respect. And I would say your future Pathwork has to be concerned with the fact that this balance structure must change.

Instead of making passive resistance, you become more unresisting, and instead of being hostile, blindly, you look at the issue and say, “Here is where I want to say No and I do not need to be hostile if I say No, but here is where I will say Yes, because this is what I want.”

This, in turn, can only happen when you have the courage to truly acknowledge the tremendous anger that is pent up in you. As long as this anger is pent up in you, you cannot want positive contact with others, nor can you want positive experience for yourself, not wholly, not completely – only half.

So my answer is meditate. Say to yourself, “I have the courage to face the anger in me. I can deal with it in a way that no harm will come to me or anyone else.” Therefore, these exercises will fulfill two things at the same time.

It will offer you an opportunity to let out your anger and to come in contact with that anger in you. As this happens, gradually, gradually, the feeling, the emotion, the atmosphere of that inner movement – because of the outer movement – will change, so that from hostility it will become a clear feeling of self-assertion.

But the self-assertion cannot come when you are not ready to confront your rage that now is only there in a very indirect and therefore really destructive way that is mostly self-destructive.

QA165 QUESTION I started thinking, while you were answering this question, that I am exactly the opposite. But when you explained the passiveness, then I identified with it and then it became a blur, and I couldn’t follow it any more. How would it apply to me?

ANSWER: Of course it is always basically the same, but it would apply to you more in the following way. The passivity is hidden behind pseudo-activity. If we want to make the comparison between you two, with him, the hostility and the aggression and the rage and the anger exist in a very indirect, inner way. It comes out surreptitiously, as it were.

With you, it comes out on a more surface level that makes you apparently quite aggressive, but it is hindered by inner doubts and emotional weakness in not being able to follow it through, because the aggression that isn’t quite faced hinders you on that. Can you follow that?

QUESTION: Yes. In other words, I’m fooled myself by my own outer aggressiveness.

ANSWER: Yes. And therefore you do not quite see that it covers with a sort of veneer, a passivity that is there in a deeper-rooted way.

QUESTION: What do I have to do?

ANSWER: The same thing. You have to allow yourself to really express – as for example in these exercises – the total aggression. Then you will see that the point will come, after a superficial movement, where you will feel a paralysis. That paralysis is fear, and the fear is of your feelings – of the depths of this rage.

QUESTION: I was doing the exercises today, and I thought I was doing them well – I was getting to a frenzy.

ANSWER: That’s very good. That is very, very good. That is very good if you can let yourself go.

QUESTION: Is this the inner self, or is it the outer expression?

ANSWER: Well, it is neither completely inner nor completely outer. At a certain level, it’s deeper than you were. I would say that part of your frenzy, if you allow it more to unfold, is precisely a frenzy because you feel somehow paralyzed – there is a feeling of futility there, and a feeling that you are bound – and that has to be faced too.

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