QA250 QUESTION: It has been pointed out to me that I keep an invisible wall around me to protect myself. During the intensive of last summer, the wall came down and I was able to give love and take it in. Over the months, the wall has reestablished itself, though not as entrenched as its former position. This wall of separatism keeps me from having the contact and relationships with people that I desire and yet do not allow. I feel like an outsider to some exclusive club that my heart wants to enter, while my ego pulls back in an effort to shield myself from rejection. I pay a painful price for the separatism and exclusivity it affords me. How many times I go through this revolving door of opening and closing myself without fully emerging once and for all!

Secondly, I do experience confusion about my spiritual path and the Pathwork as it unfolds. Sometimes they mesh and sometimes I feel pushed into conforming into what is expected of a good dutiful Pathwork person. Then I become resentful. Am I asking for the rewards without giving true commitment?

ANSWER: The two questions are really quite connected. There is an aspect in your soul in which anything that is recommended, desirable, good, productive, fruitful, is interpreted by you as an authoritative admonition. Therefore, it becomes unacceptable to you, and you need to rebel in order to remain true to yourself. So you believe.

Perhaps many things have been told to you when you were a child, under the guise that they are good for you – and it was not always true. But whether or not this is the case, it is time that you examine this attitude and change it. You need to live truly for what is good for you in the most profound sense, according to the most durable and real values.

Your soul is yearning for contact and intimacy, for the elimination of this wall, but you need to act upon this yearning rather than upon the resistance to it. You need to express your deep desire and commitment, your intention to give to this in prayer and meditation. You need to ask for help specifically in this respect.

But you also need to do more than that. You need to act so that divine help can come through, for if you only wait in the same isolation, it can never happen. Now, what does such action consist of? It means that you connect more with your brothers and sisters on this Path. Allow them to help you and give of yourself to help them where they need it.

In spite of existing resistance, you need to make such connections, to seek contact – in groups, in common endeavors and tasks. This will present a direct opportunity to share your feelings of shyness, anxiety and inhibition with them, and thus dissolve these very same feelings by the very act of naming them.

There comes a time when prayer and meditation, when theoretical work and recognition must be reinforced by direct action, even though there may be resistance, fear, anxiety. These can only be overcome by going through them. I can promise you that this cannot help but dissolve your wall of separation. It cannot help but dissolve the illusion of your fears and hesitancies.

It will activate an involuntary current of feelings, of connectedness, that seems to be stuck and inaccessible now. It is up to you if you wish to follow my suggestion and in what spirit you will do so: as a good Pathwork follower, who can then resent? Or as an adult who independently makes a choice to follow a suggestion because this seems a reasonable course to pursue for the purpose of your own unfoldment and deeper experience of life?

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