QA240A QUESTION: Lately there have been some times when I have been feeling very good, very well, unlike many times over the past few years. The problem is that when this happens, I feel like I fuck up in certain little ways to get back to normal, so to speak. Either I have a commitment or my body is adjusted to feeling bad – I just cannot feel whole and together and good. I can’t sustain it.
ANSWER: Of course you cannot sustain it. This is what I am saying. Here, your attitude to losing it is unrealistic, and that creates more of the problem than the fact itself. This is what I’m saying all through – that the conscious commitment to change brings about very gradual results because the other layers of personality cannot immediately follow suit.
The positive results you are now beginning to experience are the effects of thoughts, of change of intentionality and actions and activities on your path that you have instituted months ago – it only begins to appear now – and sometimes much longer ago than that. By the same token you have to continue this process and see and accept that there are deeper levels here.
It is the spiral movement; the relapses and the old conditioning are instituted on these deeper levels; it is a habit pattern; it is acclimatization, as I always say. You have to learn to reacclimatize your whole soul system and that takes some time. And that is the Path.
QA241 QUESTION: I feel I’m being asked to grow as a man, be responsible and give more in my life, especially in my job. And I really want to do this. At the same time, I find I’m acting out and being destructive from a very unconscious place. I’m working on this destructiveness. I find that I don’t have a clear view of what’s happening, and I ask for your help tonight to give me such a view.
ANSWER: What is happening here is that you do not realize how much more consciousness you have awakened by the mere fact that you are even aware of the acting out – that you are perhaps able to listen to it and believe it when your friends and Helpers point it out to you. This would not have been possible before. The raising of awareness can only be a very gradual process.
It is important that you view the road – the winding road that you take in this specific awareness – with realism, and do not despair about that aspect that is still disconnected. The most important thing you could do – how you could help yourself most meaningfully – is to be prepared that you do not know at the moment what you are doing and why you are doing it, that you meet a cutoff place or aspect of your personality.
This may happen after perhaps only a few days, which was not at all possible before. That, in itself, is progress. Do not expect from yourself that you are immediately aware. Do the best you can after you become aware. Then you will see how there is a part in you that struggles against truth; that does not want to know the goodness of truth; that has a stake in staying blaming of life; and that, at the same time, is very angry about the misery that is thus imposed upon you.
Now, this unreasonable part cannot become more reasonable when you are frantic and unrealistic about meeting it. My suggestion here is that you much rather be prepared every day to meet retrospectively – delayed – some aspects. Observe them and know that they will manifest for a while, and accept this, and be ready to learn from it.
Then an entirely new attitude towards yourself will be established. The franticness and the self-rejection that is a compounding element here will be eliminated and thus you give yourself breathing space.
QA242 QUESTION: I’ve been experiencing the tremendous withholding I’m doing of all the things that are closest to me – my music, my writing and my relationship. And yet when I try to reach the place in me that wants to change and visualize a place that I can change to, I feel as if I’m manipulating myself and putting something over on myself. I understand why I might want to hold back my negative feelings. It’s really getting into my positive feelings at the same time. I don’t quite understand what’s going on.
ANSWER: Before you can truly mean and feel confident enough to give expressions to the positive part in you, you first have to explore a little more what your false beliefs are about life and about yourself and about your fears – and the fear that you have of your lower self. You often confuse your higher self with your mask self and all of this is still very new territory for you. So I say to you, the upheaval and the turmoil in you is always there. It has gone on and on for many incarnations.
You are now just becoming more aware and more attuned to it because the need of your soul is to make this known to you so as to explore it, to give yourself time – your worse enemy is your impatience – to you truly settle down in your path and begin exploring the many complicated systems you have established in you: belief systems and the will system that manipulates itself but in perhaps quite different ways than you suspect.
It is even that you talk yourself out of the truly good thing by suspecting it so that you will not have to endure the positive feeling, which you feel you cannot yet sustain. Because on a deeper level you do not trust yourself that you deserve it. Do you follow? {Yes}
So I say to you, there’s no need to be discouraged. Quite the contrary is true. Embark yourself on this journey with the spirit of adventure and rejoicing that this journey deserves. It is a very intense commitment to your path. It is the most beautiful step, the most beautiful decision you could ever wish to make. Reinforce this decision.
Create the truthful, mature, constructive thought in which you tell yourself “It will take time. I go into the woods of my confusion and find my way in it. I will not find my way immediately. I have to realize I have to explore the mazes of my mind and of my feelings.”
But it will be an adventurous exploration if that is the spirit you choose to do it in. If, however, you think it should already be behind you, it will be very frustrating.
QA257 QUESTION: I have two questions and I feel they may be connected. The first is about my body and my health. I have a variety of physical problems. I am partially deaf in my left ear; I’ve had numerous infections in my ovaries and tubes; my right side is shorter than my left and has had a series of problems in the neck, hip, leg, and arm. Whenever I have worked on these areas in my sessions, the work always leads to the need for me to be vulnerable, listen to my heart, and generally learn a new, gentler, more compassionate, easier way of living and loving myself and others. I feel I have worked on this a lot but there is still a major obstruction to my really changing and experiencing that other way for more than a few moments at a time. I want to know if there is any help you can give me to get through this barrier and if I am right about what these physical problems mean.
The second question is about my work and my task and my relationship to the Path. There was a brief period of time when I was working at a school on Long Island when I felt I knew what my task was, I felt incredibly joyful and satisfied and happy to be alive, and sure I was on the right Path, which also included this Pathwork. Specifically, it involved working with children, and as I worked on the difficulties I had, I resolved simultaneously my own childhood hurts and distortions. The method that was used was somewhat different than the Pathwork but very much in harmony with much of it.
I left that school and that way of therapy partly to be with a man and partly to be closer to this Path. Although I have times of great satisfaction and growth and feelings of commitment to this Path, I have never again had that same experience of sureness about my task and my process. I often wonder if I should go back and work with that school and method of therapy in addition to the Pathwork. It once was a longing of mine to combine the two as my own special contribution to the Path. I usually see it as a way of splitting off for me – my fear of commitment is very strong, but I also long to have that connection to my task and to my process that I felt then. Can you help me?
ANSWER: The key you need at this time is your impatience. With that goes a certain immature unrealism. The change that you are working on is a major transformation. It is a total restructuring and reconversion of the personality. The fact that you experience this new state even for short moments is already enormous. It is a clear indication of your process truly working.
You must give it time to ripen. There is a rhythm involved, and your impatience can be likened to the gardener who cannot wait for the flower to grow and tears open the earth constantly to convince himself that the seed grows at least underground. In that way he disturbs the growth process every time. You must learn to trust the process to ripen in its own time.
Flow with it, listen into these finer rhythms of which you are a part. If you are really stuck, if you really escape, as long as you stay connected with your Helpers and peers and friends on the Path, you will be guided and aided by them to make you aware, so that you firm up your intentionality to go all the way. More you cannot do. From there on, you need to accept the ripening process. Realize that change happens gradually.
The same impatience is also underlying your second question. In your work with children, you could often detect results immediately. Now that you progress toward a new phase, a new task, and this task has not yet clearly evolved, you are impatient, distrustful toward life and your own process, toward God who holds you and has plans for you.
Be more realistic and learn to wait in peace. Going back is exactly what it says. It not only would split you, but it could never be the same now, for what is right at one period may not be right at another juncture of one’s life. Please trust and pursue your Pathwork in confidence that you will become who you really are. And even before that, you will experience much joy and fulfillment.