QA192 QUESTION: For the last three weeks I’ve been feeling very good, better than I felt all year. And now I feel myself contracting and becoming very frightened again. I feel that in some way it has to do with pressures to go further. But I feel pressures from outside and from inside. Could you help me understand this?

ANSWER: You can ask yourself once again: “Do I feel I have to produce and keep up the progress in order to prove something to others, in order to fulfill anyone else’s expectation?” For this would be such a pressure that it would paralyze you.

And then you can ask yourself, “Do I want it for my own sake regardless of what others may or may not expect?” And then you can ask yourself, “If such expectations exist of others, do I want to defeat those others because I do not face my anger against my elders?”

Then when you feel that and see that, you can switch the motivation and say, “I want it for my own sake and not because I want to please; nor do I want to resist it because I need to defeat.” The moment you can meditate for this attitude toward your own further growth, you will be relaxed about it. You will not have to feel now that you have to put up and prove and keep up and so on and so forth, which would instantly inhibit you and contract you.

You see, your good feelings – your feeling of progress and of being more within yourself and more whole these last few weeks – was an exact relationship in proportion to your willingness and ability, and to your having followed through to expose the worst in you. By owning up to certain aspects you had concealed before, you freed yourself.

Now, there may, of course, be many others – the same on a deeper level in different ways as well as other directly or indirectly related attitudes. It is therefore essential to follow through again and again and again, “I commit myself to the truth that already is in me; I can only realize the best when I face and realize the worst, and this I’m going to do no matter what.” And when you take the reins in that way, compulsion will diminish, and you will let it develop in its own pace.

QA225 QUESTION: Earlier this fall I was experiencing a very good feeling about my life, feeling that I really was expanding. For the past several weeks, I’ve been feeling very weak physically. I feel as if I have no energy at all. I have been experiencing some lower back pain – just a general feeling that this contraction is just so much that it doesn’t seem like I’m going to be able to move out of it. Somehow I do trust I will, but I wonder if you could give me some help in this?

ANSWER: I would like to remind you that each contraction that follows an expansion offers the individual a stepping stone. It offers new material that is necessary to explore, to find out on the Path. My specific suggestion to you here is two things really.

The one is that you very, very specifically ask, “What can I learn from this negative energyless state. There is something in me that I do not know and that I ought to know, and the moment I know it I will be energized again and expand again.” In other words, take the contraction as a gauge that shows you that you are blind to something – that the contraction wants to reveal a message to you.

If you truly decide from all of your being to want to know it, if you pray fervently with all your heart and all your mind to want to know the meaning, the meaning will reveal itself. That is the one suggestion.

The other suggestion is that there is also a purely physical level of contracted energy where you need to overcome specific resistances on the body level. Give yourself every possible chance to work on the physical body, so as to express the energies and dissolve the blocks there.

QA225 QUESTION: Lately, I’ve been feeling very withdrawn from my friends and from the Path too, in a certain way. I know that probably one of the reasons is because of an expansion, but I feel now in a place where I’m really longing for my good feelings to come back for the people that I love. I want to feel love again. I feel like I’m really stuck in a place where I feel very sad about it, and I feel that I’ve been praying very hard to come back into life but I really don’t know what to do.

ANSWER: Yes. It is very important that you too bring out the lower-self intent where you do not want to love, where you do not want to expand further. In conjunction with the prayer, on the positive level, you have to bring this negative intentionality out into the open in order to be fully connected with that aspect of yourself. Then you will be in your energy flow again, and you can take direction. Do you understand?

QUESTION: I feel that I am aware of that.

ANSWER: Well, if you are aware of it, then you can truly make a decision. But if you make the decision and it does not click, then you are not aware at that moment of the other side that says, “No, I will not do it.” In other words, you have to have dialogues with the two sides.

But I also say another thing to you – that you really must have faith. As you have done it before, you will do it much easier even now. Perhaps one of the greatest hindrances is your doubt that now you will not be able to make this transformation again. You need to assert your faith in your ability and in the involuntary, divine process to do it. As you assert this faith, this truth, this fact, it will also be easier.

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