To be in harmony, we have to walk straight in three areas: physically, mentally and emotionally. All three sides of our nature must work together, like two people running a three-legged race, for a human personality to find unity through growth. Having any one area underdeveloped will have a crippling effect; it will take the entire personality down. Our feelings are often left in the dust…

In every child’s life, there will be circumstances that are unhappy; disappointment and pain are the human common denominator…We each draw a similar conclusion: “If I don’t feel, I won’t be unhappy”…This is one of the most basic wrong conclusions that people draw about life…

We bury our feelings in the backyard of our awareness where they stay stuck, destructive and inadequate, even though we have long-ago forgotten we even hid them…But if we don’t let these experiences be felt and moved along, they will stagnate and create a dull climate of vague unhappiness that we’ll be hard pressed to later put our finger on…We shut down the factory of our feelings and along went our intuition and creativity. From there, we limped along on a fraction of our potential, and often, we still don’t realize how big a hit we took…

We grabbed a wrong solution like it was scissors—hoping to cut out what hurt—and we ran…This blocking action doesn’t prevent us from feeling the painful feelings forever—it just defers them…So as we grow up, the unhappiness we seemed to have avoided will come to us in a different, indirect way that is much more painful. We will suffer the bitter hurt of isolation and loneliness…We fail to see how we willingly choose our current painful isolation when we chose to defend ourselves this way…

If we numb ourselves to any pain, can we truly love? Isn’t love, first and foremost, a feeling?...In the end, we can’t have it both ways, both feeling love and not feeling anything…Whatever blocks us from looking at the negative in ourselves is the exact same thing that’s blocking the love….

There’s nothing inside us we need to run from…Once we move through that first painful release of what we’ve been sitting on all these years, it will feel like a poison has left our system…Old unfelt immature emotions are like a stopper holding back genuine good feelings…

We need our feelings to guide us—that’s what well-functioning, mature people do…With strong, mature emotions, we will be able to trust ourselves and find a security beyond what we’ve ever dreamed of…

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Bones, Chapter 1: Emotional Growth and Its Function

Read Original Pathwork® Lecture: #89 Emotional Growth and Its Function

Our defenses work by blocking access to our emotions, so they choke off our ability to get to our feelings. We’re going to need to lower our weapons…Every tear not shed is a block. Every protest not spoken sits like a lump in our throat, causing us to lash out inappropriately. These emotions feel like bottomless pits...

Feelings, which are moving energy currents, will change and transform as long as the energy is flowing. But freezing our emotions stops the movement and therefore stops life, making us feel lazy…When we stagnate, becoming lazy, passive and inert, we desire to do nothing, and then often confuse this state with the natural, spiritual state of just being. But there’s a big difference…We have to feel the fear that’s under the spell of the poppies of our laziness...

No matter how undesirable an emotion is, we compound our pain when we won’t feel it, and that secondary pain is all bitter with no sweet…We must commit to go in and through, and not around. Humans, by and large, have a strong preference for going around...

We can ask for extra help and guidance, which goes a long way toward loosening up some of that stagnant matter. It’s like a rototiller for the soul…It may seem counterintuitive, but we’re more in touch with ourselves when we admit our fear than when we deny it…We won’t realize that the fear is not real—it’s truly an illusion—until we feel it and go through it...

We'll find our strength by feeling our weakness; we find pleasure and joy by feeling our pain; we find true and justified hope by feeling our hopelessness; and we find fulfillment right now by accepting the lacks of our childhood. If we walk through these gateways, we’ll step into life…Any spiritual path that encourages us to reach the Holy Grail without going through the weeds is full of wishful thinking.

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Bones, Chapter 2: The Importance of Feeling All Our Feelings, Including Fear

Read Original Pathwork® Lecture: #190 Importance of Experiencing All Feelings, Including Fear – The Dynamic State of Laziness

One of the subtle bodies in every living person is the Higher Self, or divine spark. The higher one’s spiritual development, the faster these vibrations will be…Ever since the Fall of the Angels, our Higher Self has gradually wrapped itself in various invisible layers of more dense matter that is somewhere in between the density of the physical body and the Higher Self. Say ‘hello’ to the Lower Self…

The Lower Self, which also varies from soul to soul, is made up of our faults and weakness, along with laziness and ignorance. The last thing it wants to do is change and rise above itself. It always wants to have its own way, without having to pay any price for this…

There is another layer that is quite significant but often overlooked, that we could call the Mask Self. We create this false covering because we realize we’ll likely bump into trouble with our surroundings if and when we give in to our Lower Self…Our mask is not our divine spark, although we’re hoping others will believe that it is, and it’s not our Lower Self, although we’re hoping it will work to cover up our shadow side. It’s phony. And it’s fake. It’s not real…

The mask can be sickeningly sweet. For an artist, it would be the difference between a good, genuine color and artificial coloring. It’s like the word we use to describe bad art: kitsch…

When a thought or intention emanates from the Higher Self, it often gets polluted by tendencies from the Lower Self…Whenever the right act is not supported by purified feelings, there is a war going on within…Self-deception is one of the hallmarks of being a human…

We are alienated from ourselves—we’ve lost our connection to the truth of who we are…We convince ourselves that we’re not really selfish, fooling ourselves about what we really feel and our twisted motives, not wanting to see what’s what. After a while, this mess sinks down out of our awareness and starts to ferment…We actually convince ourselves that we need to be selfish, which is not in alignment with our true nature. So we’re living a lie…Being true to ourselves, though, doesn’t mean we give in to our Lower Self. Rather, we need to become aware of it…

It will be far easier to face our Lower Self if we realize that underneath it lives our Higher Self. That’s the absolute reality of who we truly are and ultimately we are going to reach this part of ourselves…We have to fight for enlightenment. If we’re not willing to do this, let’s at least not deceive ourselves.

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Bones, Chapter 3: The Higher Self, the Lower Self, and the Mask Self

Read Original Pathwork® Lecture: #14 The Higher Self, the Lower Self, and the Mask

Our spiritual work, which comes in answer to our prayers, arrives in the form of a conflict or a friction which then activates some combination of the three personality types in us. Something happens that makes us feel we’re being treated unjustly, so we will have a chance to recognize our inner errors and purify our souls…The moment we say a prayer asking for help and strength, all hell is going to break loose. That’s when we know our prayers are being answered…Yet we think the frictions in our lives have nothing to do with us…

Any prayer to know the truth will always be answered—if we knock, the door will be opened—and the newly arriving recognitions will cancel out the disharmony, our feelings of injustice, and our misery and defiance. Frictions with our brothers and sisters will then melt like snow in the sun; we will unite with understanding and with love. There is no other reason for life on Earth than to do this, and it’s never too late to begin…

If we are the Reason Type, we govern our lives primarily using the reasoning process, making us prone to neglecting our emotions. Frankly, we’re afraid of our feelings so we thwart them. In doing so, though, we cripple one of our most important faculties: intuition…The Reason Type tends to miss out on a lot of life experiences due to fear and pride. Because we basically fear any emotions that might lead to an experience we don’t think we’ll be able to handle…We, the Reason Type, like to keep everything in shipshape order, always “knowing” where we stand. But avoiding emotions leaves us adrift from our core…

The Emotion Type is equally one-sided. We pride ourselves in being capable of truly feeling, so while we may find it easier to connect with inner divinity, we easily become carried away by our emotions…As Emotion Types, we secretly look down on Reason Types, perhaps derogatorily labeling them “intellectuals” and losing sight of the fact that reason is as God-given as emotions…If we’re an extreme Emotion Type, we will impact our surroundings with our uncontrolled emotions…

None of us can exist without the use of our will, and the Emotion Type uses will in a chaotic and impulsive way, without careful consideration…Our will should always be the servant and never the master. So ideally, our will should equally serve our emotional, intuitive faculties and our reasoning processes. But the Will Type makes a master out of the servant, which pulls us out of focus in a dangerous way…If we’re a Will Type, we will tend to throw caution to the wind, losing sight of the many essential considerations needed to discover the truth in any situation…

In their highest state of perfection, the Reason Type is the Angel of Wisdom, the Emotion Type is the Angel of Love and the Will Type is the Angel of Courage. These three basic personality types are all aspects of divinity that each of us can develop, and which can all work together in harmony…For most of us, we’ll see how two of three faculties dominate and a third is crippled…We’re wrong in thinking that our extreme is better than the other extremes. Extreme is extreme, and it’s never in the middle of the road, which is where we want to be.

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Bones, Chapter 4: Three Basic Personality Types: Reason, Will and Emotion

Read Original Pathwork® Lecture: #43 Three Basic Personality Types: Reason, Will, Emotion

An important difference between our superficial intellect and our real self is that we can direct, manipulate and govern the intellect using our will; we can’t do this with the real self. Of the two, the real self is the more intelligent one. We are conditioned to put a laser-like focus on the use of our thinking ability and willpower. So we believe we can reach self-realization through an act of sheer will; we think we can use our minds to develop spiritually…It’s our real self that connects with the living spirit of a word, whereas unfeeling repetition comes from our intellect…

If we boil it down, what obstructs the real self are our layers of confusion and error/ On top these sit our lack of awareness about our confusion and errors…What intellect and will can be used for is cleaning up the errors and confusion that they themselves have created…When we know we are confused, we are closer to our real self than when we are blind to our inner confusion, even if we don’t have any solutions to our problems...

So what, we should turn off our brains? Not at all. To do the arduous work of following a spiritual path, we want to use our intellect to understand our errors and confusion, and to see how we have misdirected our will. Doing this will indirectly birth our real self, with all its spontaneity and creativity, into our reality…We have to understand our current situation if we ever hope to grow out of it. We can’t struggle our way out by covering up what we don’t want to see...

Trying to reach the mountaintop of the higher state of being by using intellect and willpower causes us to construct images—wrong conclusions—of how we think we should be and of how life should be, according to our limited past experiences…We can’t force ourselves to love. We might think we can, but in reality we can’t. Which doesn’t mean we don’t love…

So we can’t just make up our minds that we’re going to be good people who love and have compassion and humility. We can, however, make up our minds to figure out what’s causing us to not be all that…What we don’t realize is that if we were to see ourselves as we really are, we would see that there’s nothing to fear. We need to realize that hanging on for dear life won’t bring us to the doorstep of the real self. We simply cannot find ourselves that way…

In truth, we always self-produce our misery. No matter what we may think or how much we want it to be otherwise, it’s always an inside job. And so too is finding the solution…The problem isn’t one of morals…

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Bones, Chapter 5: Intellect and Will as Tools or Hindrances to Self-Realization

Read Original Pathwork® Lecture: #104 Intellect and Will as Tools or Hindrances to Self-Realization

There’s a direct correlation between being unhappy and not believing in ourselves; our self-confidence takes a hit that is proportional to how badly we feel. Our idealized self-image is supposed to avoid all that by supplying the missing self-confidence. This, we think, by way of our unconscious reasoning, will lead us straight down the road to pleasure supreme…

We simply can’t be more than we really are in any given life situation…What we can do is have a genuine desire to better ourselves, which leads to accepting ourselves as we are right now…Once we’ve done a significant amount of personal work, we’ll start to see the difference between feeling a genuine desire for gradual improvement, and the pretense of the idealized self that just wants to click some ruby slippers together now and look better…

The very notion that, as human beings, we can be perfect is an illusion…Since our nutty standards are impossible to reach—and yet we never give up trying to uphold them—we create an inner tyranny of the worst kind. We don’t realize just how impossible our demands are and we never stop whipping ourselves to meet them, so we feel like complete failures when we prove, once again, that we fall short…Someone or something else must be to blame for our failure…

The idealized self is a phony, rigid face that we invest with our real being. But it’s an artificial construction that will never come to life. The more we invest into it, the more strength we sap from the center of our being…Only by seeing what’s going on can we color inside the lines of our being, and fill in our missing sense of self…

Believe it or not, our feelings will become every bit as reliable as our intellect. This is what it means to find ourselves…The idealized self wants to be perfect right now. The real self knows this isn’t possible, and this doesn't bother it one little bit…

From our real self, we function from our wholeness, instead of from “hole-ness”…When we learn that we can squander ourselves into life, the same way that nature squanders herself, we will then know the beauty of living… In reality, having genuine self-confidence gives us peace of mind…Remember that no one can do this work alone.

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Bones, Chapter 6: The Origin and Outcome of the Idealized Self-Image

Read Original Pathwork® Lecture: #83 The Idealized Self-Image

There are three major divine attributes—love, power and serenity—that in the healthy person work as a team. They maintain flexibility amongst themselves so one never drowns another out…But when they are in distortion, they step all over each other. Then love, power and serenity get distorted into their evil twins: submission, aggression and withdrawal…

In our efforts to master our difficulties, largely created in childhood and then perpetuated into adulthood through our wrong solution choices, we find ourselves increasingly bound up by the straightjacket of a vicious circle…It never occurs to us that our real problem is the solution we have chosen…

For a child, it is valid to need to receive protective love. But if such a need is carried over into adulthood, it’s no longer valid…When we’re so dependent on others for love, we become helpless; we won’t stand on our own two feet…These attitudes become so ingrained in us, it’s like they’re part of our nature. But they are not…

When a person is inclined to choose love, or really submission, as their pseudo-solution, they have the basic feeling that ‘if only I were loved, then everything would be OK’…We cringe and we crawl, complying with others demands—whether real or imagined—and selling our soul in an attempt to get the help, sympathy, approval and love we crave…We use a fake weakness as our weapon in the battle to finally master life and win…

To avoid getting caught, we hide all this falseness behind the mask of our idealized self-image: we put on a Love Mask…We submit as a way to dominate…It’s not hard to imagine that living this way will keep us estranged from our real self…Our conclusion: the world takes advantage of our “goodness,” abusing us and stopping us from reaching self-realization…Being submissive is a caricature of what real love looks like…

In the second category is the pseudo-solution of seeking power through aggression. Here we think that the answer to all our problems lies in having power and being independent…We believe the only way to stay safe is by becoming so strong and invulnerable that no one and nothing will be able to touch us. Then we cut off all our feelings…Warmth and affection, communication and caring for others—all these are despicable…

The power type is just as dishonest and hypocritical as the submissive type, because in truth, everyone needs warmth and affection. Without these, we suffer…Power seekers are wired to never fail. Ever…We will always be competing and trying to one-up everyone...

The Power Mask requires us to live more independently from feelings than a human being possibly can. So we constantly feel like a failure for not living up to our ideal self…Our pride sticks out like a sore thumb. Heck, we’re proud of our pride…We, the power type, will take pride in how “objective” we are, as opposed to being gullible. And that, we say, is why we don’t like anyone…To show our true loving nature then is a crass violation of all we stand for, and doing so brings on deep shame…

We often choose the pseudo-solution of withdrawal when first two options have so torn us apart that we had to find a way out…Underneath our withdrawal is a false attempt at serenity…

Both the power type and the withdrawn type have something in common: aloofness…Whereas the power seeker likes being hostile and glorifies their aggressive fighting spirit, the withdrawal type isn’t even aware of having such feelings…

Our underlying conflicts rise up with a vengeance, showing just how artificial our serenity really was; turns out, we built the whole structure on sand…As always, we will fall woefully short of the dictates of our Serenity Mask, leading to self-contempt, guilt and frustration…

If we start to view our problems and our emotions in this ligh

Children have more than just a desire to be loved; they want to be loved exclusively, without any limits. In other words, every child’s desire for love is unrealistic…Since they seldom receive an adequate amount of warmth and mature love, children remain hungry for it throughout their whole life…Essentially everyone—even the most diligent spiritual seekers—overlooks just how strong the link is between the unfulfillment of our childhood longings and our present-day problems. This isn’t just a nice a theory…

They may not have been as perfect as we thought and hoped they’d be back then. But there’s no reason to now reject them because they had their own immaturities and inner conflicts…Once we’re free of this repetitive cycle, we’ll stop crying over the spilt milk of not getting love the way we wanted it…We need to release the pain we feel now, which is attaching to the hurt of then. Next we’ll see how we thought we had to choose this situation or admit defeat…

We can turn our painful feelings into healthy growing pains whenever we become ready to rid ourselves of the bitterness and tension we’ve been hiding…Forgetting and forgiving will become a real thing that we won’t even have to think about doing. They will naturally occur…

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Bones, Chapter 8: How and Why we Recreate Childhood Hurts

Read Original Pathwork® Lecture: #73 Compulsion to Recreate and Overcome Childhood Hurts