QA197 QUESTION: In the past, whenever I made any progress on this Path, I’d get sick and I’d contract and I’d be very destructive. Right now I’m facing some pain, and I’m afraid that I could fall into that same old pattern of making myself sick. Can you help me?

ANSWER: Bring out that voice that says, “I do not want pain, disappointment, difficulties.” Let it out, really and truly and completely. Express it! At the same time know it is foolish, it is unfair, and it is the source of your suffering.

Since this voice claims something special, something cowardly, something arrogant, as it were, it therefore makes you feel unworthy of happiness – so that you find yourself in a vicious circle. You cannot stand pleasure and happiness – you push it away. And you subsequently are so deprived that you become more demanding of special privileges and more rejecting of the pain that you inflict upon yourself.

So my advice is three specific steps. Step number one, own up to the totally unfair demands of the child in you. Step number two, see clearly how unjustified and how demanding and how unfair this is – and how impossible it is and how it damages you. Even though you may not connect it in your consciousness, you can try to make the connections, since it is an unfair demand issued into the universe. You must then realize that you deny yourself pleasure and feel uncomfortable with pleasure; you feel unsafe with pleasure.

That second step of connection will then lead you to the third step, and the three steps can be done alternately at the same time and check yourself out on all those steps. The third step would be that you state, “I do not wish special privileges. I have the things in me to feel my feelings, to pay the price, to get through residual feelings that I accumulated in me. I want to give up negativity, and I am capable of pleasure and happiness. I open myself up and I ask the universal spirit in me to help me be acclimatized to happiness so that I do not cling to unhappiness and suffering.”

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