Expressive Art Inspirations

Creativity as a Spiritual Path

Spontaneous creativity can be a relationship to that which is beyond our ordinary consciousness. When we listen deeper inside and let our self-expression lead us into what sometimes can seem like chaotic and random directions, we are led into a larger, more passionate and alive part of ourselves.

Sometimes we need to express things in a picture or a poem that is beyond our normal comprehension. Sometimes we need more than words to describe the multidimensionality of what we are feeling.

Authentic creativity is something that we have not thought of before. It comes a surprise and it moves us in unexplainable and mysterious ways. Spontaneous expression is a way to honor and access your intuition and open you up to what you do not know about yourself yet.

May your creative spirit bloom through the inspirations on this site.

I offer online expressive art e-courses to help you get started on the road to authentic, spontaneous creative self-expression at:

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Expressive Art Inspirations Blog is cited as the Top 100 Counseling Resources on the Web by the Masters in Counseling Information Guide

Attunement to Children

Children Change Themselves to Get Love

All parents do their very best to love their children, given their own family history, generational background and life circumstances. And when children feel deprived in any way - emotionally, psychologically, or physically - they have uncanny ways of understanding who they need to be in their family to get the love, attention and care they need. Children are profoundly intuitive and will focus on the needs of their parents before their own in order to get the care and attention they need.

For those of us who are parents, we know we love our children intensely, but understanding how to attune to our children is different than love. As Gabor Mate writes:

"Attunement is the real language of love, the conduit by which the pre-verbal child can realize she is loved. Attunement is a subtle process. It is deeply instinctive and is easily subverted when the parent is stressed, depressed or distracted. A parent can be fully attached to the infant - fully "in love" - but not attuned. Children in poorly attuned relationships may feel loved, or be aware that love is there, but on a deeper and essential level they do not experience themselves as seen or appreciated for who they really are."

Attuning to children requires that we know who we are as parents. To attune to our authentic self as parents, especially if we have not felt seen and understood as children takes great care, tenderness and sensitivity. When my daughter was born - 18 years ago this month - I was determined to mother her in a way that would let her True Self shine unhindered. I had the best of intentions. I studied attachment parenting, I was dogged about nursing her. I joined a mothering support group, and I read reams and reams of parenting books. I wrote studious journals filled with inspiring parenting quotes and ambitious parenting manifestos. However when I was a young mom, I was still struggling to understand myself and my relationship with my own mother. I had inner work to do.

Attuning to Ourselves

As human beings we seem born to lose ourselves. And then we have to spend a good part of our lives finding out who we authentically are again. We all have a beautiful, tender preverbal self that resides, trembling on the very edge of the expression of our soul. This tiny, intensely emotional and feeling self is on the very "edge" of who we were born to be. Our authentic self was so tenuous when we were children, so vulnerable to outside influences  - both affirming and negating - it often barely peeked out. Most often our authentic self became heavily covered up with our familial and cultural conditioning - which formed our personal map on how to try to "get" love from the outside.

When I became pregnant, I felt the deepest urge to attune to myself. I think it was at that time that I started to parent my own "preverbal child" inside of myself - the place in me that was forever seeking love on the outside by changing myself to fit in and be approved of. I cried a lot during my pregnancy. I think I was crying for my lost sense of tender awareness of myself. At the time, I felt muffled to myself in relationship to my own mother. Our emotional boundaries were muddled. I felt like I knew my mother inside and out, but I did not deeply know myself.

When my daughter came into the world, even though I spent nearly every minute of the day with her, nursing her and caring for her, I was inconsistently present for her. I started writing poetry when my baby was little to try to know myself. I still remember my daughter in her highchair, contemplatively eating her banana, as I pounded out poem after poem on an old typewriter that I had bought for five dollars at a garage sale. I was so fed up with my "life of appearances", I pulled all of my artwork out of the top gallery in the city. I started to paint, collage and draw intuitively. I was trying to understand myself. Up until my pregnancy I was focused on how I appeared on the outside. After my baby was born, I wanted to know who I was on the inside.

The Gifted Child

One of the many books that I read when my daughter was a baby that really struck a chord for me was "The Drama of a Gifted Child." In the book she speaks of how as children, we often become more intimate with what our mother and father emotionally need rather than express what is authentic for ourselves. This is how we lose attunement with ourselves. In our search for love and attention on the outside, most of us try to take the journey of trying - all through our lives - to seek attention from the same kind of people that we felt emotionally deprived with in the first place.

Until we learn how to love who we really are, we will feel a habitual pull to accept ourselves only as we were accepted in childhood. And we will attract people to reflect those same pattens of self-love within us. Without a connection to our authentic self and feelings, we will automatically look for where love isn't instead of where it exists right now. We can spend a great deal of time trying to make our past lack of attunement "right" again - most often with people who will repeat similar gaps in attention as in our past. Or if we are lucky enough to be loved in our neglected emotional places, we may not notice that love or feel able to take love in. 

The interesting gift that happens for the child that has had to attune to their parents instead of themselves is as Alice Miller shares in this story, " There was a parent who at the core emotionally depended on their child to behave or act in a certain way. The child had an amazing ability to perceive and respond intuitively to the need of the mother. This role secured "love" for the child. She could sense that she was needed and this, she felt, guarantees a measure of security. The ability is then extended and perfected. Later these children not only become mothers (confidants, comforters, advisors and supporters of their own mothers, but eventually develop a special sensitivity to the unconscious signals manifesting in the needs of others."

The gift of attuning to our parents is that we can become deeply sensitive at a young age. As adults, once we learn proper boundaries about what we can and cannot give, our sensitivity and intuition can become a great gift. The challenge for the gifted and intuitive adult becomes finding a solid sense of core authenticity so that giving becomes true, pointed in necessity, edifying and truly helpful, rather than draining, inauthentic and self-negating.

Attuning to our own "Inner Child"

Looking back, I can see that my mom was trying to heal her inner child in her mothering relationship with me. Having an 18 year old daughter myself, I now feel great compassion for this process. While I may have been more attuned to my own daughter than my own mother was with me, I was still "trying to find myself" during my early parenting years with her. I was trying to love myself in the places that I felt separate, alone and unseen.

Well-meaning, I gave my daughter what I wished I  had growing up. My mandate was free self-expression. I wanted my daughter to express herself in ways that I felt unable to as a child. I tenderly set up a shared art studio for the two of us with a little painting table for her.

We spent lots of time together for a while - being me - and spending time painting in our little attic studio - until she asserted herself at age three. She said, "Mommy I don't like painting! It makes my hands dirty!" She then asserted  forcefully, "Write this down!" She proceeded to dictate her first of many short stories to me.

I appreciated and was surprised by her early assertion of herself as a different kind of person than I was. It made me realize that my dreams for her may not be what she needed. When we neglect our own inner attunement to our very youngest parts inside, we demand that everyone constellate around our emotional struggles and needs - even our own children. Yet as adults, we are the ones that continue to deprive ourselves of the love and attention we crave. When we are patterned to cut off from love and nourishment within our own psyches, we ignore ourselves in exactly the same places that our parents ignored, rejected, or simply did not have the emotional energy to notice us.

Our "set-point" of self-love can often remain unquestioned. We unconsciously choose to not let love into certain parts of our being because our self-love is conditioned from our early years. We can turn away from love, connection and nourishment habitually until we learn to attune to ourselves. And in our smallest, most preverbal selves - the personality parts that are the youngest and closest to our souls - we require the tenderest of attention, much as a good mother might nourish her newborn baby.

Attunement is not Fusion

When we do not develop a strong sense of self as children we remain undifferentiated from others. When we do not become individuated we look for other people to complete us. When my daughter was in middle childhood I began studying Family Systems Therapy. I finally understood that while my mom and I had a seemingly close relationship while I was growing up, I did not know where she ended and I began. We had muddled emotional boundaries and I often changed myself to fit her moods.

I noticed similar pattern of fusion with my own daughter and I began to point it out to her. Fusing with another feels like you are going outside of your core authenticity. For me, it feels like I am leaving my own center of consciousness, entering into someone else's body to intuit their center of self - to please them, to make them happy, or to complete or console them. This feeling of fusion was so comfortable and familiar to me, it took me a long time to demonstrate to my daughter what two separate authentic selves - joined at the heart could feel like.

In some ways if you are used to fusion in your relationships - joining in the heart as two differentiated people - often feels less close at first. An anxiety can arise around having to take responsibility for having a self that is individuated from others. Fusion is intense closeness but there is not much individuality within it. Fusion muddles the healthy boundaries in a relationship because each person is trying to get their emotional needs met from the other.

There was a milky comfort in fusion for me in that I did not have to find the strength to be a whole and expressive self on my own. I had my constellation of people who would soothe me and complete me. If I didn't have fusion, I was longing to be "taken care of" within fusion. I did not want to assert my authentic self. I was patterned to go along with others so that I would feel "taken care of".

In fusion we alternate between taking care of others emotional needs and requiring that our emotional needs get met. In the past, if a friend felt needy to me, I automatically would find myself leaving my core of authenticity and merging with her. It felt easier to not really be a self and just complete and be completed by other people. To have a whole self involves growing up in ways that feel difficult. It often involves speaking personal truths that do not always please people. It avoids feeling the pain of being different from others. We do however have to "grow up" our inner child parts that want to merge with other people if we are to have vibrantly healthy relationships.

Presence to Self and Others

Our authentic self comes to the fore when we can be present with everything that we feel inside. We become inauthentic because we fear the insecurity we might feel when we are not pleasing others. From a child-like place we try to build up our idealized self so that we might be perfect enough to "get" the love we need from the outside.

Even as parents we may want our children to adore us. We can need that adoration and thrive on it for while - until they begin to differentiate as teenagers! In my later parenting years, I have been able to come to some moments of authentic attunement with my daughter because we made efforts to respect each other's differences. I realized that her dreams for her life are her own, and may not always involve what I emotionally needed.

As I became aware of my own authentic self, I have had some deep moments of meeting soul-to-soul with my own mother as well. Each of us expressing our personal truths in our relationship as she has begun her journey with cancer has feIt like a treasured milestone for me. In my journey with my mom, I have had to learn how to tend to my own emotional needs.

In my maturity, I realize that no human being can perfectly meet our emotional needs and it is pointless to demand that they do. We so often confuse need with love. We demand that other people love us where we refuse to love ourselves. Cultivating self-love is the primary journey to maturity. It takes great courage to re-parent ourselves and to carefully attune to the preverbal, painful parts of ourselves that are certain they feel unloved, unsupported, unseen and misunderstood.

Going to the most primal parts of ourselves that feel separated from love most often takes intense presence to feel the irrational and difficult feelings that we regularly shut down. It also takes a connection to something larger than our human parents. Finding our connection to Spirit is often the only way to find the nurturance and love we crave.  With practice, presence, and a connection to something larger than our fallible loved ones, we learn that we can trust ourselves to be strong enough to feel and grieve the feelings of loss and deprivation that we could not withstand when we were younger.

With maturity we can discover that we are strong enough to touch into the places where we felt separated away from love as children. We can tenderly touch our aching need and our perpetuated self-rejection with a mature strength of presence that other human beings were unable to give us when we were younger. When we grow to this exquisite level of presence and  self-attunement, we become more deeply available to ourselves and others.

True Generosity

The Fear of Being Drained

I did this drawing several years ago on my lunch hour when I was trying to let go of my inner complaining about how much energy I had to give to my full-time job. This drawing seemed to illustrate a tentative new belief in giving that went beyond my habitual self-concern. I was starting to consider the possibility that I could be enriched and revitalized by true giving.

Generosity was flowering in my mind. I pondered how I withheld my fullest generosity from the typical ego fear that if I gave too much I might become depleted. This depletion through giving is a strange and untrue logic that our protective personalities like to purport.

There is so much more that we can give in a day but what we give must come from an authentic and empowered place within. Perhaps it could be said that we can learn to give to the truth of life and not to other people's ego systems. We can learn to be generous to the truth of what needs to unfold in a healthy and balanced way.

This balance often requires us to say "no" to people's unreasonable ego demands. It requires we set healthy boundaries about what we can and cannot give. As we learn how to discern between genuine and false giving we become much more alive and alert as to where to place our gifts and attention.

False Giving

"My mother or father needed me to be happy" is a simple formula that trained many child - later stressed and depressed or physically ill adult - into lifelong patterns of repression." -Gabor Mate

False giving feels wrong in our bodies. We often give in a way that is not genuine. When we hear a "I should give this" in our heads and a "no" in our bodies we should be alert to the truth that something is not right. Most of us are conditioned by familiar family of origin pressures, for example, to give in ways that are not genuine. This can fund a lifetime of confused giving where we give in a way that feels comfortable in its familiarity, and yet requires we make every effort to ignore how drained we feel.

The more we are generous from a genuine heart place, the more energy and loving stamina we build. When we give from a sincere intuition of where to give and where not to give, we build a mature and satisfying strength of love that can meet the most challenging dilemmas of life.

The Authentic "No"

Often false giving feels easier because it is more comfortable in the short-term to not disturb the ego status-quo. We need to discern where we can genuinely give and where we cannot. Most of us are confused, especially if we had to compensate and give untruthfully to compensate for our parent's emotional struggles when we were growing up.

If our parents were unable to attune to our authentic truth as children, we may need to take a period of our adult life to get in touch with our truth, our feelings, and our personal rights and boundaries as developing human beings outside of our family system - before we can understand what we can truly give. This might involve finding the courage to say "no" to emotionally taking care of our parents so that we can tend to our own healthy development and give attention to our love relationships and our own children. This differentiation away from false giving can bring up a tremendous amount of guilt, low self worth, anxiety and family resistance, especially if our worth is based on how we care-take and sacrifice ourselves for others. 

True Giving

"For many people, the higher power need not be concerned with a deity or anything spiritual. It simply means rising above their self-regarding ego, committing to serve something than their own immediate desires."  Gabor Mate

When I realized how often I had been giving to win approval and plump up my own ego, I started to understand why I was so drained at the end of the day. I was extending my energy out to be "good", well thought of, and this was how - from an inner child place - I tried to "win" the love I craved. What was dawning in my mind and heart was that through true giving to others - giving that was inspired by what was truthfully needed - I could heal the hurt and unmet needs in my own psyche. I started to understand that I could extend to other people - even when I was hurting emotionally. I received in proportion to what I gave - when I listened to my intuition and to the truth of the moment. I understood that I could practice becoming larger than my hurt through genuinely giving. Genuine giving is inspiring.

Most of of us give to try to prove that we are good people and rarely allow the warmth, richness and power of authentic giving. Giving in this wholehearted way is surprisingly energizing and healing. By giving through my own hurt, for example, I learned to give what I most needed. If someone was unkind to me, I gave kindness to everyone around me. If I felt unseen or misunderstood, I gave understanding to each person I encountered. Developing a wider and more giving heart became a rich experience of healing for me. In my drawing I could see that I was building the muscle of mature giving. I realized I could find my own genuine power by giving what I most needed. 

When we genuinely give from an intuition of what is ppointedly needed in each situation, we are enlarged beyond our own feelings of emotional pain and inadequacy. When we give other people what we most need, we find out how to give it to ourselves. When we forget our small self-concerned selves and give wholeheartedly, we go beyond our limited mind and preferred emotional capacities. When we give truthfully, we are always rewarded with a personal healing. We become energized with our own spiritual power and the ability to go beyond ourselves.

Here is a quote from Sakyong Mipham that deeply speaks to me:

"Helping others represents a new approach to life. We often draw a blank about how to help, because our caring energy isn't flowing outward yet."

"Care and warmth invites a different energy than thinking we should give. When we think we should give...we'll feel tired because we are not really thinking of others. We're thinking of ourselves. "Enriching our thoughts and actions with love and compassion releases tremendous positive energy. When we churn "What about me?" into "What about you?" we are consciously changing our molecular structure by engaging the big mind chromosome."

Creatively "Forgetting Ourselves"

There are many ways that we can transcend our limited psychology and giving wholeheartedly is one way. All forms of transcendence involve "losing ourselves" in some form of passionate, all absorbing activity - whether it be falling in love, genuinely giving, deeply focused creative work, or some form of intense physical activity or sport. We "forget ourselves" to find our True Self. This self-forgetting of the small and defended self can lead to heightened and visionary states of consciousness.

True giving can take many forms.  So often true giving is finding the courage to say "no" to the ego demands of others. Giving to what is higher in another - by refusing to indulge in what is smaller - can make people angry or upset initially but ultimately it serves a larger healing that we may not be able to see in the immediate. 

We can learn discern where our gifts and strengths are needed and where we need to set healthy boundaries. The minute we give to another person's demanding ego system - so as not upset them - we become diminished and drained of our own truth. My early childhood experience of false self giving was to smooth things over, not ruffle feathers and in essence, to have no self or feelings of my own outside of being "good". It this way, I disappeared into niceness as a way of untrue giving.

As we learn how to understand true generosity, we understand that we actually do not always have to "do" as much. We do not have to make so many demands upon ourselves to extend ourselves in ways that feel false. We can relax. Life does not require us to spread ourselves thin untruthfully. It does require however, that we intuit where our gifts are needed. We are each called to uplift the quality of life for others in some genuinely helpful way.  We can feel enlarged and even enlightened in the process of genuine giving. 

Learning to Love

Love as a Lifestyle

"We cannot live only for ourselves. A thousand fibers connect us with our fellow men and women; and among those fibers, as sympathetic threads, our actions run as causes, and they come back to us as effects."

-Herman Melville

Once in a while I meet a very luminous elderly client in the art studio who glows from the inside - whose eyes are clear and bright - who sits solidly in his or her own soul with a peaceful countenance. When I do, I am always immediately curious about how they have lived their life. I met such a man a couple of years ago on his 87th birthday. He told me when he turned 40 years old he decided to dedicate his life to loving.

When I asked him to describe his life philosophy, he sounded like a wise sage that was tapped into the Universal wisdom. He said: "We are only human and everyone has certain weakness in their character. Some people do not get the basic thought pattern of love and are not ready to live the truth of love in their lives. At any cost we should forgive others. This is the workings of the universe. We are meant to play our part in making love stronger in the world. Love is a quality few people will turn down when they are offered it. There is a thought pattern to loving and caring about others that puts us into the right frame of mind. We build inward strength by loving others."

Just at we were finishing our conversation he softly said. "It should be said that many have a hard time being loving all of the time because they feel so hurt. You have to learn love through the hurt." This felt profound to me and taught me that it is possible to approach our relationships without expectations or goals of any kind. There can be no need to be made safe or make the other safe. We can approach another metaphorically naked, honest, and without fear if we are willing to give love. It is only when we are seeking to "get" our needs met in some specific and demanding way that we feel hurt and disappointed by love. When we are not afraid of being hurt, and are no longer clothed in self-protection, we can love others unconditionally. Love becomes safe when we are ready to give to another without expectations or demands.

Loving Through Hurt

Most of us have hearts that open and close depending on how we are treated in the past, how we feel about ourselves, and how our life experiences are going at the moment. Loving on a continual basis takes a deep commitment to honestly and continually look within at what is blocking our fullest expression of love. Often our beliefs about love are still based in the past and are about how we experienced love as children. We all have an ingrained love toleration point. This "love set-point" closes down enormous areas of relating to the world.

We may not realize that as a mature adult, it is possible to stand open and loving even with others are attacking us. We can get to the point where we no longer have to avoid getting hurt because we have done our inner work and we know that we are not guilty or bad. We have forgiven ourselves and have cleansed out most of our own guilt and self-punishment for all the times when we did not bring our best integrity to our life circumstances. We metaphorically have gone back and imagined our highest and most loving self handling all of our difficult life situations. We have forgiven ourselves and others for acting from fear and need. We have claimed the gifts we could have brought to the past, and we live those soul gifts now in our present day life.

We have forgiven ourselves for all our mistaken choices and made inner amends. We know that we can take care of ourselves even when someone is attacking us emotionally. When we love and accept all parts of ourselves, we know we will not crumble with hurt. We can move towards people and take risks in extending more love than we may have considered before. Suddenly, a person we have been afraid to approach feels accessible and even beautiful in their human vulnerability and our whole world opens up to love. Whatever beliefs we have in our psyches that block our loving will come up to be looked at when we dedicate ourselves to move closer to Unconditional Love and towards more connected relationships.

Cleansing the Heart

My experience is that if I keep my heart open for an extended period of time, often a layer of hurt or heartbreak from the past will come up to be cleansed. We store old pain in our hearts and often when we make the move to get closer to someone, we have to stop and let the searing pain of past hurt and rejection burn off from the past. The parts of ourselves that do not believe in love form an entire constellation of defensive behaviors that run underneath of our conscious understanding. Most of us have many parts of our psyche that turn away, resist, and reject love.

Psychologists Hal and Sidra Stone put it this way, "It is important to learn about how sub-personalities operate within us. Without this understanding, we are in the powerless position of watching different sub-personalities drive our psychological car while we sit in the back seat or, worse yet, hide in the trunk." It becomes a matter of great importance to discover who these selves who avoid love are and how they operate within us. This journey towards love is the evolution of our withdrawal away from love. It is a journey into the parts of ourselves that we have rejected and buried along the way. It is helpful to notice when we withdraw away from people for fear of being hurt because these are the places that we still hurt ourselves inside. Once we learn how to love ourselves in our rejected and hated places - in the places where we have not felt love before - we can gather up our courage and re-engage in love and connection once again.

It many seem strange to think of our "car"/psyche being driven by different selves that feel hurt and unloved, each demanding its turn in our consciousness, yet this is exactly the truth we must deal with on the path back to unconditional love - of ourselves and other people. We have usually been so conditioned to withdraw away from the possibility of unconditional love by the time we reach adulthood, we have lost connection to our True Being. We no longer know who we are or what we feel because we are trying to keep our rejected parts of self out of our awareness. Ultimately the goal is to bring every disowned part of ourselves into alignment with love. This takes a kind of constant and daily intention to discover the many renegade and upset parts of ourselves that run counter to our deeper desire to love.

Learning to Love

So as we re-learn how to love, we need to approach Love in two ways. We have to be willing to dedicate our lives to love - and we must be willing to feel the pain and rejection of love lost, and love disappointed. We have to be willing to feel our own hurt and self-rejection, as well as our anger and bitterness towards other people as we open up to love. As our hearts release its deep storage of accumulated heartbreaks, it is important to remember that hurt always arises first to ready our hearts for deeper loving. Our hearts cleanse and open in layers. We can choose to lean into and move into each progressive layer of our hurt with courage and determination instead of avoiding it. As we "burn through" the layer of hurt over our heart can see what we were trying to "get" in our quest for love in the past. By feeling our own unmet needs, we can peel another layer of disappointment off of our heart. We can set about giving ourselves what other people could not give us in the past.

I offer you this meditation on Love from spiritual teacher Aster Barnwell:

Love the Ultimate Spiritual Practice

"I am often asked what daily spiritual practice I engage in. My answer to this question is that I practice LOVE. To attune oneself to Love is to attune oneself to God, to the energy that holds the Universe together. This is why Love is the ultimate technique; if we attune ourselves to love in this physical dimension, we become attuned to Love everywhere that Love is observed. That way we use Love as a "carrier wave" to expand our consciousness. We cease to feel separate, cease to feel insignificant, cease to feel disinherited and disenfranchised."

Seeing Psyche and Soul

Creative Vision

Creative Vision is seeing life through spiritual eyes. As you see your life through spiritual eyes, you will start to see each person in your life as having two distinct selves. Our psyche/ego self has many parts - and our souls self is whole. In our psychology we feel need, lack and a concern for our survival. In our soul we feel fulfilled and ever willing to give.

When we look through our human psychological eyes, we see only the faults and weaknesses of others - and they can be quite complex and confusing depending on how split away a person is from their self-love, strength, and wholeness. When we look through our spiritual eyes we can learn how to see what is uniquely strong and beautiful inside of every individual we meet.

People Live Mostly in their Psychology

If you really look at people, you will start to sense their particular kind of heavy emotional conditioning sitting on top of what is their unique soul energy. Each person that you turn your gaze towards will often show themselves as having distinctly different weak and strong energies. The choice always arises - what qualities will you choose to focus on?

For example, if someone is ugly, victimized, or selfish in their ego stature - they may be - in contrast, quite beautiful in their soul gifts. If need be, you can do some detective work to see where people are good and what strengths they have. Every single human being has strengths. If you are determined to see what is good in other people - you will be given insights about their gifts and purposes. It can be a revelation to notice how each person struggles with their particular conditioned human weaknesses and limitations, and to sense into how this often contrasts with a surprising soul power that is distinct to them.

Building Connection with the Good 

People are the sum of their light and dark choices, and although a personal darkness of guilt and self-attack may be sitting on top of person's unique spiritual core - it can feel like a miracle to recognize and glimpse their unique spirit shining through - even as their behavior is still quite selfish, difficult or limited.

My experience in dealing with people who are deeply struggling in their own psychology is that I cannot pretend that their offensive behavior is not there - but I can choose not to indulge in their ego directives. This may involve speaking up with love and saying a firm "no", or simply choosing not to react. The love can always remain - and at the same time - there must be a "looking beyond" what is difficult to the deeper goodness.

There is a richness and a delight to seeing people in their layers of psyche and soul. It is a miracle to communicate with the strong parts of people rather than focusing on and judging what is weak and struggling. Each person is a complex interplay of dark and light. It is heartening to watch how you can draw a person's strength forward more fully into life just by speaking to it, focusing on it, and building connection with it. There is a joy of never giving up on seeing the light inside of people.

I feel it is possible to love everyone we meet. I do not feel it is not possible to maintain steady friendships and relationships with everyone we meet. If you choose to meet people in their strengths it might not be possible to sustain a steady and ongoing real life, practical connection. Often we can only love people  - mind-to-mind and heart-to-heart - on a soul level.

Since on a deeper level our minds and hearts are all joined we can love people profoundly on a soul level. They will be nourished on a subconscious level by our love and forgiveness. On an actual physical level however - love must meet love for there to be rapport. Loving through people's ego "stuff" requires their allowing and consent.

You can only really love and interact with each person to their level of self-love. To love people to the level that they love themselves is profoundly honoring. If a person that you love is in their strength and self-love - for example 10% of the time - then you can only authentically meet in that 10%. The other 90% of the psyche will be blocking the rest of the connection - but the level that they can take in love will been honored. 

Letting Go of Sacrifice

It is possible to love people - and not react to, judge or pander to other's ego needs for control. Finding sustaining energy in my connections with others is something I have pondered deeply. I interact with many people in my full-time working life. I have found it is possible to love and honor people on profound levels without invading their personal psychology with an ego "need" to prove or show off my love.

In my family we check in with each other after our work day is done. We ask each other, "Did you "panda" today"?" The joke and the question is, "How much did you pander to other people's egos today?"  When we pander to other people's egos - we are trying to get something from them - whether it be approval, a pay check, or some sort of emotional fulfillment. It is exhausting to pander to people's ego needs. It is energizing to love.

When we do not feel needy, we can just love and enjoy people in their struggles and in their light. We can develop our creative, spiritual vision and start to see people in their multi-dimensionality instead of in black and white. Most of us have many shadows to deal with. We all have layers and layers of psychological inner conflicts that struggle between wanting to give and needing to get our needs met.

Spiritual vision is always available, but we must let go of our own guilt, darkness, and victimization in order to see the light in others. There is always a profound and distinct beauty or goodness that flows underneath all that seems dark and difficult. We are not making anything up in our spiritual vision. We are simply sensing and intuiting more deeply into every human being and each situation that we encounter. We can learn to consistently see the creative and spiritual forces running under everything that happens. We can find and engage with what is good in each person that we meet.

Our Creative Multiplicity

Our Psychology Has Many Different Parts

Years ago when I started exploring my psyche through spontaneous collages, writings, drawings and paintings, I was astounded to discover all of the different parts of self that I had inside of me. As they all spilled out in visual form, I saw that not only did I have parts of different ages and temperaments inside, but also I had male and female aspects of self that were all struggling for expression.

Many parts that I had so expertly tucked away out of sight in the aim of living a highly functioning life, were often the younger, more hidden and hurting parts. There were many parts that I had exiled away because they felt unacceptable sorrow, loss, shame, fear, hurt, and anger.

Often popular psychology will not readily acknowledge that we all have a host of different characters inside of our psyches. Perhaps people fear the notion of having many different parts inside of the mind because of the stigma of multiple personality disorder, or as it is now called, dissociative identity Disorder.

 All of us of us have part inside of ourselves that want different things, and we also have access to our True Self - our Core Self - that can witness our multiplicity with great care, creativity, and curiosity. Our Core Self is a dynamic and powerful force that can not only witness our parts, but can also lead them, re-parent them, and re-mentor them to heal, integrate, and give the gifts and strengths to our life that they were meant to bring.

No Part of Yourself is Bad

Because we repress what we cannot accept about ourselves, those hidden parts of ourselves beg for self-expression and tend to distort themselves into what we might call our "inner demons". I am grateful to "Inner Family Systems" author, originator, and therapist Richard Schwartz for explaining how the family system of our inner parts interact so clearly.

Unfortunately most of us silently struggle with our repressed "inner demons" and secretly fear that we are crazy when the various repressed parts of ourselves become activated. It is common to hear people say after they do something extreme, "I just wasn't myself."

Most of us live highly controlled lives with only occasional emotional lapses into our inner pain. As we navigate through our lives, we develop very honed managerial parts of self that keep us functioning, working, paying the bills, and navigating our family dynamics. When we do something "crazy" or become flooded emotionally, our managerial parts of self become overwhelmed and lose control. We feel like we were "not ourselves".

Understanding that we have many selves inside can free us to explore and balance ourselves. Our multiplicity, once harmonized and accepted, makes us into one whole integrated piece. All of our parts are a valuable part of our inner ecosystem and they all want to play constructive inner roles. Problems arise when our inner parts are forced into extreme roles, especially if our lives have been influenced by trauma, difficulties, repression, disapproval, or challenges in our outer family system. Current challenging life events can activate our inner parts in an extreme way as well.

The theories encapsulated below are based on my understanding of the excellent work of psychologist Richard Schwartz:

Multiplicity

Multiplicity is the inherent nature of the human mind. We all have an indeterminate number of sub-personalities, each having their own age, desires, temperaments, desires, goals and talents. These sub-personalities form our inner family system. Each part of ourselves - when accepted, listened and tended to - has a powerful gift to bring to our daily functioning in the world. When you create a life that allows safety of self-expression, you can begin to creatively map out how you work on the inside. You can learn how to be inclusive of all of your parts and discover the gifts and strengths inherent in the currently extreme and protective behaviors that wreak imbalance in your life.

The True Self is Larger than its Parts

In addition to the collection of parts that make up our psyches, each and every one of us has a True and Authentic Self. This is the wholeness that you are born with and the wholeness that you will return to when you die. The Authentic self has all of the potentiality to be a good leader of your internal system of psychological parts. If the parts of your personality can come to trust your True Self - you can experience a life of harmony, creativity, and profound self-love.

A beautiful and noble truth is that the inner parts of your personality are not bad or dangerous. Your inner parts love you and organize themselves to protect your Authentic Self at all costs. They will sacrifice themselves and their own safety to remove your Core Self from the awareness of emotional hurt and painful secrets. They will hold difficult emotions for you so you can function. They will help you disscociate from danger in the face of trauma. The tricky thing is your sub-personalities will often blend their extreme feelings and thoughts with your True Self, so that you think that you authentically your parts.

This is especially true of your "manager" parts of self. We all have very concise and controlled parts of our selves that manage a major portion of our functional lives.  Our job is to differentiate our Authentic Self from our managing, protective, and emotional parts. Once the True Self has separated away from the feelings and thoughts of your personality parts, the parts regain their trust of the True Self and Authentic Self-Leadership and inner harmony is restored.

Self-Leadership

You can think of your authentic self as a mediator that seeks to depolarize the conflicts of your inner parts and helps to sort out all of the varying needs that you have inside. Our parts of self do not disappear when our True Self takes up leadership. They simply become less extreme and they begin to reveal their unique gifts and purposes within their less extreme roles. Sometimes particular parts of ourselves can develop their gifts so profoundly they can even step into the leadership at times when given permission from our True Self. They will also withdraw from leadership when the Self requests it.

Polarization

When outer influences intrude, either from our current life or from our family of origin, such as in outer derogatory attitudes, prejudices, unrealistic expectations - or when unkind or traumatic interactions happen - our inner parts can take over leadership from our Authentic Self. These inner parts can also take on historical family losses and burdens and outer family system depressions and emotional heaviness. As one part of self takes on an extremely protective role it unbalances the entire inner system and takes over the leadership responsibilities from the Authentic Self. When the parts of self become polarized, intense inner conflict and inner competition ensues within the psyche.

Trauma

When the people that we love primarily live, identify, and express from one extreme part of themselves - we will find ourselves adjusting our personalities to balance them. This throws us out of balance - or off center. When our outer interactions are unbalanced and non-inclusive, we move out of our center Core Self to compensate and harmonize with our group or family system. The same thing happens in our inner system. When trauma occurs and we are abandoned, rejected, shocked, scared, or abused physically, sexually or emotionally - our inner systems polarize as well.

It is quite profound how the parts of our psyche mobilize forces to protect the precious Authentic Self. As Richard Schwartz explains it - any human system will mobilize to protect its leadership - which is the the Core Self. "Imagine a tribe of inner people of various ages and degrees of vulnerability, led by an Core Self." Schwartz writes, "In the face of danger, the tribe moves the Self to a place of safety and certain parts come forward to deal with the danger."

The Three Group Ecology

Highly polarized inner systems are very rigid and defended. To try to change any part of yourself without considering the inner system that it operates in - will activate resistance. It is helpful to be respectful towards the parts of yourself that feel scared and defended as they are just trying to do their job to keep you safe. Most people are polarized in their internal systems. Here is how Swartz describes the Three Groups:

Exiles

Any part that was hurt, rejected, scared, or shamed as child will often go into hiding and be repressed. These highly charged emotional sub-personalities become the exiles of our inner family system. These exiles are often overwhelmed with feelings of rejection and unlovability. Like any exiles, these parts become desperate to express themselves. They long for opportunities to break free and share their stories and their pain. They desperately want to be loved, listened to, accepted, and cared for. Often exiles also carry most of the feelings for the inner family system, because the other more managerial parts of self often dump their unwanted feelings onto the exiles to get on with the process of functional living.

These hurt and rejected inner parts are very vulnerable and if they are not brought forward into the light of consciousness with care and maturity they can flood us with uncomfortable feelings and memories. They are also in danger of looking for love in unhealthy ways. They tend to want to look to redeem their inner pain in same kinds of unhealthy situations that hurt them in the first place. These hurt and exiled parts of self will seek love, acceptance, and protection from the very types of people that cannot give it to them. This sets up a hopeless and repeating pattern of both inner and outer rejection.

Managers

Many people mistakenly think that their manager sub-personalities are their Authentic Selves as they can often be quite highly functioning and even inspiring at times. Managers however, live in constant fear and dread of the escape of the exiles. It is important to note that manager parts of self do not accept all parts of the self like the Authentic self does. Managers try to control life in such a way as to avoid any person or situation that might trigger the pain of the past. This control and repression can often look very noble, spiritual, creative, and highly achieving. Highly functioning manager selves can fill our lives with edifying and creative activities that in the end feel empty, because they are done from avoidance, instead of self-acceptance.

Managers can be highly functioning and efficient in the world. They can accomplish great things - but in an unbalanced way - that is out of touch with the Authentic Self. Managers in contrast are a forced and extreme role that polarizes away from inner pain and inner self-rejection. Managers must expend enormous amounts of energy to keep the repressed need, hurt, fear, and painful memories and sensations buried. From this managerial place we strive, control, try to be a perfectionist, or to gain approval, or we live in a rigid denial of what is arising within.

Managers must sacrifice themselves for the internal system and they can rarely relax. The more competent these managerial parts become, the more the internal system relies on them and the more the Authentic Self is denied. Most often from a managerial part we can feel lonely, overwhelmed, and exhausted. Like the exiles, our managers need love, balance, nurturance, fun, acceptance, care and rest. These managers - only being a part of self - come to believe that everything depends on them. The more they accomplish the less they believe in - or are willing listen to - the wisdom of the Core/Authentic Self.

Firefighters

When our managers become overwhelmed and exhausted with all their responsibilities, the exiles can become activated and can threaten to take over our internal psychological system. When the exiles take over we can be uncontrollably flooded with difficult feelings. The emergency firefighters will then swoop in to help us dissociate, or to douse the dreaded exiled feelings, with little regard for their consequences. The techniques that the firefighter uses, include extreme and numbing activities such as self-mutilation, binge eating, drug or alcohol abuse, or excessive eating or sexual activity. The aim of your firefighter part of self is to engage in any dissociative, distracting, or self-serving activity that will take you out of your intense emotional pain.

This mode of coping with inner pain is the place that all addictive and obsessive behaviors come from. And while mangers are controlled and organized and highly rational, firefighters will use any means to numb our emotional pain. These extremely self-focused behaviors often leaves a wake of destruction in a person's psyche and relationships.  You can see why going within and feeling and listening to your inner pain is a necessary practice to incorporate into your life. Most people, even those who have not been severely hurt, organize around this three-group system. Most of us struggle against some form of self-rejection and repression and work within these three groups.

Restoring Balance, Harmony, and Leadership

Our psychological system already has everything encoded within itself to heal. Even the most conflicted inner internal psychological system can heal itself if the process of listening to all sides of your inner world is honored. When your Authentic Self takes It's true seat of leadership you will likely enjoy the process of seeing and expressing the creative multiplicity of yourself. Through inner self-acceptance, the gifts and strengths that you buried along with your pain are finally able to come to the forefront for expression in your daily life.

It is profoundly relieving to discover firsthand that all parts of yourself want to harmonize and contribute to your best life. Every part of us has a valuable role to play and each part will eagerly leave their extreme roles given the love, self-acceptance, and inner nurturing that you can provide from your Core Self.

It is most helpful however, to do this inner work when you are not living in a dangerous or triggering environment. Parts will have a hard time leaving their roles when they are continually be activated by other people. Often it is important to find a quiet time away from the stresses of your life to explore your inner parts.

Learning to unravel all of the different stories, imagery, and voices of my own and other people's inner landscapes is something I feel creatively passionate about. I have found spontaneous collage and free-form writing for example to be very effective tools for revealing the hidden and repressed parts of the self. Private journaling is often an excellent option to explore yourself in private to learn how to love and positively create from the profoundly designed and well-meaning multiplicity of yourself.

Our Unconscious Death Urge

We All Have Life Urges and Death Urges

A life urge is a gesture towards joining with Spirit, Love, Intimacy, Connection, Creativity, Honesty and Passion. A death urge is a gesture away from full and vibrant living. A death urge is a withdrawal into the wound pool where we do not feel loved. It is a separation away from Spirit and a descent into illness, depression, and a struggle with the will to live.

On a micro level, it could be said that we often alternate between life and death urges each day that we are alive. Even a negative thought or a judgment could be thought of as a tiny bit of separation away from Spirit - a tiny death urge.

Part of human life is about coping with emotional pain and understanding everything we do to avoid and deny it. Many of us carry not only inner hurt and self-criticism of our own, but also the unhealed pain and rejection from our families. Some of us, especially those of us with great empathy seem to carry the weight, rejection, and pain of generations.

Many of us have a part of our True Self that did not feel loved in our original families. When we perpetuate this lack of love, an unconscious part of ourselves may want to die. This is not to say that we will take our own lives, or will die, but we may become ill, depressed, addicted, or will suffer in a way that makes daily living difficult.

It is not so simple to say that we create our own illness. The roots of illness can run very deep. Often people who become ill are carrying pain for generations of their families. Perhaps we even can bring a propensity for illness into our life at the onset. Illness can often be a soul journey of great dignity and magnitude. I have come to see that illness can be a powerfully transformative process. I respect people who are called to go into the darker, more unconscious inner places to heal.

The death urge is not predictable and the unconscious has its ways of healing that go beyond our conscious decision making process. In my work with the elderly, I have been astounded that people at the end of life do not steadily and predictably decline. There does come a rightful time to die, but I have seen some very frail older people go right to the edge of death, and then come back more vibrant than ever. They often start painting again. They seem less burdened. My impression is that right up until death, we are shedding layers of our accumulated human heaviness.

The Part of Ourselves That Wants to Die Longs to be Loved

At this current point in our human history, many of us feel that we cannot show our entire selves, especially if what we need to express does not fit into the confining social scope of acceptability. We live in a narrow world of what is acceptable and "lovable". Having a teenage daughter, it is easy to see that if teens express difference, they will likely be bullied, feel unloved, left out, or ostracized in some way. Teens often feel the pressure to be exceedingly careful to fit in. It takes such courage to be different in our world.

Even as adults we can secretly flagellate ourselves if our body shape, or physical appearance, or our personal lifestyle is outside of the social norms. The broad spectrum of sexual desires, gender and sexual preferences also often remain out of view. If we are very sexual, or do not feel sexual at all, we tend to hide it. Even if we have a different kind of intelligence than what is celebrated in our culture; if we are exceedingly poetic, artistic, or are a different kind of visionary thinker, we can tend to feel lost and defeated when all we see everyone trying to conform.

Everyone seems to measure themselves on "normal", even though most of us have some quirks or difference that we hide. I remember walking down the street years ago and a deep realization came to my mind. As I looked at our multi-faceted humanity in all of it's shapes and colous, I exclaimed under my breath, "None of us are normal! We are all just pretending to be!"  I felt elated and encouraged for the vision.

The Part of Ourselves That Wants to Die Longs to Be Authentic

The parts of ourselves that cannot feel at home in our society tend to not want to live here on this earth. But the very reason that we came into our bodies in this human life is to bring our particular and distinctly needed diversity, uniqueness, and difference to earth.

What so many people do not realize is that our purpose in life is simply to be vibrantly ourselves, despite all inner and outer challenges to the contrary. Our task is to bring our authentic self-expression to life in some true and meaningful way.

If our True Self does not seem to fit - we are meant to summon our strength all the more - to bring our gifts and unique point of view to the community that we live in. We are meant to embrace our differences, and bring the love of our self-acceptance into the world.

Being authentic, especially when we feel different from the norm takes great courage because often it goes against what our families or the popular culture expects from us. Sometimes what we need to bring to life is something that our culture and conventional religions deny, repress, or have not accepted yet. Yet a powerful truth to remember at times of self-doubt is that we are each called to become and express ourselves honestly, so the world can become whole.

Our Inner Critic and the Fear of Being Hurt

Our purpose to express our truth scares our inner critic, and it is the exact opposite of what it wants. Usually we we inwardly criticize ourselves to protect ourselves from getting hurt, embarrassed, doubted or shamed. Consider that as young children - when we dared to show a true part of ourselves and it was not accepted - we felt like we would die from abandonment. Who wants to face that annihilating feeling again?

As adults, before we even realize it, we can feel saliently taken over by our inner critic. In my experience my inner critic arises full force when I am hurting inside and rejecting some truth about myself. When we are afraid that we are going to be hurt or rejected again, the inner critic rises to the fore to make sure that we do not step forward into our authenticity. Our critic will criticize us to keep us safe. Yet is goes about it in a child-like way. It will hurt and attack us and keep us small and safe before anyone else can even utter a word. 

As we grow and mature, the severe perfectionism of the inner critic starts to paralyze our lives and we become stuck, depressed, and afraid to move forward. Even when we are no longer in danger of being rejected, judged, or criticized, we can continue to reject ourselves, unconsciously, continuously and automatically. We might not even realize it as it happens underground and we may suddenly wonder why we are feeling so terrible inside. In my experience my inner critic comes upon me quietly. I can find myself losing my motivation and my inspiration quickly. Now, I can most often catch myself before I head into a downward spiral and ask, "What truth am I afraid to share and express?"

Asking for Spiritual Help

The parts of us that are sick and want to die are hurt and angry that we do not feel loved unconditionally for who we really are. In the task of loving ourselves and expressing our true purposes in the world, we most often have to ask for some Higher Help. This is because human beings are fallible. The people in our lives are often struggling with their own inner self-attack and criticism. Trying to get love and approval from other people is not always possible or available. 

We all have the job of learning how to love ourselves unconditionally. Loving ourselves alone can be daunting. For myself, I have had to find my loving nourishment on the inside through some kind of spiritual connection. Spiritual connection is necessary to re-bond to ourselves on the inside with love. For no matter how much we demand love from the outside, we will not be able to receive it unless we are loving ourselves first.

Having recently witnessed my partner traveling through a long illness - into powerful self-love and healing - I came to understand that we are loved at a spiritual level in an intense and all-abiding way. Often a death urge, a close call, or a life crisis will open us up top a level of openness to support that we have habitually avoided in the past. Because the Higher Support is always available, we can all learn to open up to this Spiritual Love that we feel unaccustomed to in our daily lives, and yet deeply familiar with in our souls. 

Spiritual Love can be connected with whatever vehicle God is for you. It might be Creativity, Love, Nature, Making Love, Dancing, Poetry, Sports, Animals, Service....anything that connects you to the Larger part of yourself is your God, and your Spiritual Connection to Love. When we ask for "extra help" to love ourselves, we can reach such profound states of well being that we wonder why we ever rejected ourselves in the first place. We can come to find that our unique of Self is infinitely beautiful.

"We were created to love the Infinite - and this is why, when we love, that which we love appears so perfect to us."

- Per Lacordaire

Finding Self Love

Self-Love is a Spiritual Practice

Self-love is a feeling of utter self-acceptance that is not influenced by what other people do or say. With self-love we are open to feedback, and we are no longer devastated by what people say to us. We become curious about how people see us. We use everything that happens to us as information to help us grow.

This bodily feeling of self-love stays with us when we are dedicated to seeing our life from a larger perspective. And yet it is often difficult to stay connected to a larger experience of life.

This connection to the larger life requires inner stillness and an unwavering connection to self-trust and self-acceptance regardless of outer circumstances. When we are inwardly still we can touch into a feeling of fullness and for maybe only a moment, we can know that we are loved and utterly sufficient, just as we are.

Our Soul is a Stranger 
 
Imagine a time when we meet ourselves, with elation, at the door, and invite ourselves in to become reacquainted with this "stranger
who has loved you all your life."

- Derek Walcott, Poet

How do we know and love who we are? Who is this stranger that has loved us all of our life? How do we know what our soul feels like? Thus "stranger" is the love that we always have inside of us, when we stop seeking love outside of ourselves. This stranger is our True and Authentic Self that loves us unconditionally.

The vast majority of human consciousness right now in the world is "me consciousness." In our "me" selves we are caught up in our various unfulfilled needs and are always looking for personal love and fulfillment from the outside. Often if we do not "get" love from the outside, we can feel devastated, even annihilated. We can live our "me consciousness" on a very broad level. We can actually appear quite self-loving even when we are not.

Our egos can become finely honed and yet we still may have no contact with the raw truth of our soul because we are still looking for people and circumstances to fulfill us. For instance we can have elaborate and interesting "spiritual egos" or opulent and "creative egos" and we still might not know the stranger - the all-encompassing soul and authentic self - that has loved us all of our life.

Difficult Feelings Take Us Out of Presence

It is one thing to say "be in the now" or "practice the power of presence" but to actually be stilled in our daily life is another thing altogether. In order to stay truly and deeply present - present enough to emerge into our spiritual wholeness and deepest self-love - until we meet the stranger that has loved us all of our life - we must face the "untamed" feelings that arise when the love on the outside seems to be missing. We must face the places in ourselves that do not feel loved. To find the stranger/authentic self that has loved us since before we have been born, we actually have to make the journey back through our stored pain, and through all of the places where we do not feel loved inside.

Our "stranger" is our soul self that lives and breathes unhurt and untarnished behind every difficulty and life challenge we have ever faced in our human existence. Consider that everytime you do not love a part of yourself, you will experience the same pain and agony - of the original separation away from that love - that you did as child. Richard Moss MD talks about the difference between tamed and untamed feelings. He writes:

"Very young children do not experience themselves as being in pain, rather all of reality will be pain.

Later in life, situations that represent a similar kind of threat have the potential to re-kindle these buried feelings and throw us into total emotional pain and chaos.

With a tamed emotion we readily recognize what we are feeling and usually believe we know why we are feeling it.

An untamed emotion so embeds us in the feeling that we cannot readily separate ourselves from it, even to name exactly what we are feeling.

We can have a sense of drowning, of dissolution, of devastation.

It seems like an abyss, a black hole that seems to suck us into oblivion. We may use words like dread, unnameable terror, annihilation and suffocation. The unnamed emotions amalgamate time and identity, creating a sense that they will go on forever, that this is all of who we are.

At the first sign of an untamed emotion, we activate ourselves into our survival personalities and divert into tamed emotions like anger or anxiety and assume the identity that is simultaneously generates.

It is far easier and far safer from the ego's point of view, far safer - to feel anger, or hate, hurt, or guilt, hope or fear than non-being (than the perception of not feeling loved).

The untamed emotions are the Now we are continually, unconsciously trying to avoid.

The untamed emotions are like guardians at the gateway to our wholeness. We must face our ultimate fears in order to develop a strong sense of self.

And when we have claimed that stronger sense of self, they become the guardians at the gate of self-transcendence into a higher level of ourselves.

Self-Love is Your Connection to Spirit

Our egos - our "survival selves" - protect us from the feeling of our lack of self-love. These protective parts are the selves that we formed to cope with the annihilation of not feeling loved when we were children. Yet paradoxically it is our survival personalities that stubbornly keep us in the emotional pattern that refuses the love that is here right now.

Self-love is an inner practice that requires consistent and persistent attention to the deeper presence that lives behind our pain. Self-worth is present to the degree that we feel the wholeness of our spiritual selves. When I began studying A Course in Miracles many years ago I wanted to live more consistently in my spiritual self. I was amazed to discover that when I was able to be deeply present to my divine nature, my self-doubt and my self-rejection would completely disappear for a time.

The more I sensed into what the ACIM daily lessons meant, the more I could see that we all really do have two selves. Our ego self has many parts that are ruled by fear, judgment, defense, guilt, and low self-worth. We can never feel loved in our personality defense system. Only our spiritually connected Self is inspired by love. The more separated we are from our Authentic Self spiritual essence - the more limited and lacking in self-love we feel - and the more we will try to manipulate and control the people and circumstances in our lives to try to get that love.

Our humanness is limited in love. We only love to the safe and protected level that reflects where we have felt hurt by the past. Our soul self is much more generous and trusting. Our soul swims in a sea of love. Tapping into our silent, spiritual self yields an enormous amount of power. Yet we give our self-worth away all of the time to family, to friends and even to the rules of society, when we look for others to love us where we cannot love ourselves.

Reconciling the Dark and the Light

"So the question we must ask ourselves is: What needs to reconciled? Is it the way we separate ourselves from our shadows? Perhaps it's how we hide from our light. It's like a teeter totter that moves back and forth, up and down, until the reordering is complete.

But in order to complete the process, we need to relax into areas of imbalance, darkness and trauma in our lives. We have to see it as a natural part of our evolution - an essential step of maturing into a whole new being where oneness is fully integrated. And to do so we need to reconcile all those diverging paths and all those seeming difficulties that make us believe we are not enough, we are not whole, or we are not loved by God."

-James Twyman

At a time when I was struggling to reconcile the light and the dark inside of myself and in my life, I made this collage. In the collage an older woman held a maturity that I was longing for. She was not naive, or willing to pretend life was only one-sided. Her powerful stance implied to me that she had seen and accepted many things. She appeared to meet the darkness with strength. She did not pretend to see only the good and ignore that darkness existed. I imagined, in her sweeping hand gestures that she was strong enough to hold both the dark and light within.

Many years ago, I had an inner urge to work with youth in prison. Soon after, I got a position in a summer art program for teens, age 13-17 in a correctional institution. I remember feeling terrified when I first started, yet determined to meet something unknown in myself. The kids I taught were skeptical of me at first. They asked, "Why do you want to be with us jail kids?"

Secretly, I wanted to believe that I could bring out the good in everyone. Not allowed to know anything about their crimes, I found myself easily seeing the best in them at first and we flourished as a group for a while. I was enthusiastic about thinking up new art challenges for them each week. They inspired me to reach for meaningful classes and challenging creative ideas. I found the kids to be intelligent and discerning and highly competitive. They were on high alert to every signal and nuance of danger or inconsistency, and they were honest in their creativity.

As the summer went on, some darkness was revealed. I found out that my favorite kid had raped a girl, and my stomach sank when I overheard that a benign looking boy had brutally beaten and killed a service station attendant. I found myself getting frightened. At the time I was only wanting to see the good side of life. I was having trouble seeing the living, breathing kids around my art table, in the darkness of their hurt and pain.

I wanted to deny that there was violence in the world. I wanted to deny that kids get thrown down the stairs by their drunken parents, and that many children get harmed emotionally and physically on a daily basis. As I grew more frightened, things started going amiss. One kid stole my ink pens. I got a call from my supervisor the day after class, and she told me that several boys had given themselves new tattoos with my art supplies. A few kids had vicious mean streaks.

One week someone covertly and cruelly covered up the all of our exquisitely detailed canvases with white paint. The rest of the group became defeated and demoralized and refused to paint again. It was as though they had to destroy the good compulsively over and over and I began to feel despair. In their own emotional pain, they sought to hurt each other, and I began to grow weary of my summer teaching post. Something in me felt irreversibly sad and hopeless. Like I could not hold onto my trust in the good. So when my three month post was over I said my good-byes. The kids in the group looked both defeated and nonchalant when I said told them I was leaving.

The night of my last class, I left swallowing my tears. I wanted it to feel so much better. I wished I could have made a larger impact. I felt strangely hollow and confused as I drove home. The night sky felt as dark as it had ever been, and the stars hurt my eyes. I felt shocked into silence, not knowing what I had just experienced. And just as I rounded the corner to my house, I sucked in my breath. Standing on the sidewalk was a black cat and a white cat touching noses. I shivered deep into my bones.

My summer "jail kids" art program was considered a success and I was asked to continue on but I could not quite completely meet everything within myself to stay. I would have had to love those kids enough to say no to their cruelty and victimization of each other. I would have had to stand for the good and know the power of love with more authority than I was capable of at the time.

Most of all, I did not have the strength to face all of the darkness within myself. I was too afraid of my own suppressed emotions that threatened to take me over. My doubt of my own universal basic goodness ate away at my light. I still wanted to believe that my light could shine if I focused only on the positive. I thought I could negate the "ugly" side of life by turning a blind eye and walking away from it - by pretending it did not exist. I still did not trust the deeper workings of life.

As I have matured, I have come to understand that we all have a choice to live to our full potential, or to wallow in our own shadows, but we have to be willing to see the whole truth of ourselves and others. Denial of any kind is darkness. There comes a time in our movement towards strength when we have to address the darkness of our own denial within, and in those around us that are being willfully disowning rheir own hurt and are hurting others. Learning how to say no to disowned and projected hurt with the firmness and authority of love, has been a long and strength building process for me.

All people are a mixture of dark and light. To deny the darkness in other people is to live life of naivete. I find that I fear other people's darkness only to the extent that I fear my own. When I find myself wallowing in my own darkness, sadness, or inner pain, I know that there is some feeling of old hurt that I am anxiously denying inside of myself. Always on the journey to the light there is a part of that is hurting, that unseen, and unaknowledged will lash out and hurt others.

I know now to make every effort to see where I am hurting so I do not seek revenge for my hurt. When feel myself lashing out, I will often inwardly say, "I know I can feel this." Soon after I am able to cry and release my darker, more disowned feelings. Often with such strength of witnessing, I can readily and suddenly see the deeper truth of my life. Just by becoming larger and more loving than my hurt, I can see more quickly how I am competing, controlling or seeking revenge to try to dissipate the hurt that I am afraid to feel all the way until it is gone.

Love and truth is always stronger than the darkness of disowned hurt, but it has to stand up and become strong. Love has to speak out. Love has to take action, and sometimes love has to say no. It is in these firm communications and interactions with the darkness of the shadow, of the unexamined, and of the avoided, that transformation happens. Speaking up and saying no with love and strength to my own, and other people's diswoned hurt and vengeful darkness is one of the most important lessons that I have learned. Spiritual writer F. Aster Barnwell describes this communication and interaction like this:

"Just as we use one hand to wash the other without being afraid that the soiled hand will dirty the clean, the transformational process in its collective scope is facilitated when the good and bad interact. The spiritually developed must become catalysts to help those of lesser understanding to evolve.  Actually the extent to which we separate people into good and bad categories is an indication of our need for further spiritual development. It is not that morality is not important; but if we have sufficient understanding, we would see that although individuals may act inappropriately in many situations of life, most only want the best for themselves. It is in seeing this good that people want for themselves that enables us to find bad people good."

Excerpted from the E-Course - 30 Days of Authentic Self-Expression

Victimization to Empowerment

Moving Forward Through Victimization

A while ago I made a series of drawings that made me feel uncomfortable. They reminded me of a painting that I had done many years before. In the painting was an image of a helpless woman with her legs and arms flailing in the air. As with all spontaneous, unconscious imagery, the creating of it filled me with a forbidden aliveness as I witnessed what was appearing under my brush. Something dark was moving into the light.

Spontaneous art often expresses the parts of ourselves that have been designated to the basement of the psyche. Very soon after I painted the canvas, I remember a sense of shame arising. In a rush of embarrassment, I quickly painted over the image. Later I deeply regretted it. As I closed off a part of myself and painted over it, I felt a part of myself was relegated to the darkness again. I rejected and did not want to recognize this feeling of helplessness.

Years later, the same image asserted itself again in my drawings. I often draw the same things over and over for years - a part of me wanting to see a less desirable part of myself - and then another part of myself wanting to close over the repressed imagery in fear again. When I realized this repeating image was a drawing of my inner victim I knew it was something that I did not want to admit to myself. After years of drawing this image I finally became willing to consciously see my victim consciousness in visual form. Once I realized it visually, I was able to change the belief that I was helpless to overcome my circumstances - that I could not quite reach my goals - and that "something" outside of myself was always holding me back.

Wanting to Stay Small and Hurt

Most of us have areas of stubborn and stuck emotional pain in our lives, and most of us have blamed our outside circumstances for holding us back. Victim consciousness is a universal archetype that we all carry within our human selves. A part of our mind will always try to convince us that we are not quite up to the task of life. Our defended ego mind loves to hold onto it's limitations. On some level, most of us feel that our circumstances of life are hurting us and keeping us small. We can find a million reasons for why we have to stay hurt and withdrawn, for why we do not have to give our gifts, for why we do not have to offer the strength of our fullest contribution to life.
 
Victim consciousness is at its root, a refusal to have the courage to move forward past our emotional conditioning into greater love and a greater life. Victimization is all about inner hurting from the past that is unhealed, and unintegrated - that we have not been able to go beyond.  The truth of victim consciousness is that many parts of our psyche want to stay small and separate, hurt and scorned. If we felt our inner hurt without resistance until it shifted inside and if decided to move forward with strength, who would we be then? Many of us are afraid of who we think we would have to be if we were no longer feeling hurt and held back by our past, and by our lives.

Becoming Stronger Than Our Pain

When we feel victimized we feel the regressed helplessness of our inner child. From an inner child place, we are not quite sure we have the muscle to feel our inner pain. Most of us have felt overwhelm and a sense that we just cannot cope with our current life. We can however find the courage to learn how to feel the hurt of our inner pain and move on. We can learn to become a larger witnessing presence to whatever arises in our consciousness with fortitude until it shifts into strength. When we feel old stored pain without rejection, all the way through to the other side, suddenly we are clean on the inside, and the light pours into the dark places in our body. It is on this other side that we discover what we are made of.
 
Hidden inside of the difficulties of our current life is always a larger truth about who we are beyond our old, hurt conditioning. If we feel emotionally triggered and victimized by our life, we are being pointed to a buried hurt that must be felt, grown through, and translated into a new strength.  Where we have felt victimized by life points to where we are designed in our essence to give our strength to life. Life shows us again and again that there is always an opportunity to give through our pain, and to feel compassion for people who are hurting, rather than to withdraw away from life in hurt, vengeance and victimization.

Giving Through Our Pain

The most creative way to move through feelings of victimization is to find the courage and strength to give to other people through your feelings of hurt and pain. In each situation you encounter, you can either choose to give and extend to life and to make it to make it better, or you can choose to withdraw into your cocoon of hurt.

If you can find the strength to extend with love to your current life circumstances, without needing to nurse your old wounds, you can prove to yourself that you are larger than what has hurt you in the past. This is true emotional maturity.
 
"When we choose to totally give ourselves through any negative feelings, or to be in service, we create a breakthrough. Whether we are feeling ashamed, embarrassed, hurt, jealous, afraid, in despair, empty, useless, futile or lost, where we give ourself, we create our birth. Where we give, we move out of deadness and into flow; we move out of self-consciousness and self-torture and into grace." 

- Chuck Spezzano
 

Loving Beyond Our Conditioning

We can learn to give beyond ourselves. This creates a feeling of genuine empowerment. We can learn to love beyond our hurt conditioning. We can remind ourselves that we are stronger than our pain and hurt, whenever we want to retreat and withdraw our energy from life in victimization. When we give though our own pain, we are immediately filled with strength and jubilation. When we give through our own inner pain, we start to see ourselves as creators, capable of contributing love and healing to every situation that we find ourselves in.

When we choose to give beyond ourselves, we are healing old pain for everyone in the midst of our current life. We can find the power to restore a belief in love in the world. When we love, suddenly we can know what our gifts and our purposes are. In our victimization we are endlessly afraid to give. When we are determined to not be victimized by our own hurt feelings, we realize we have an opportunity and choice to love even when we are aching inside. In this way we can save years of ponderous psychological work. We can spend a lifetime catharting and examining our fears and hurts. But at some point a choice needs to be made to give past our hurt feelings. When we are determined to love beyond our conditioning, we jettison ourselves into a vibrant, creative, engaged and passionate life.

Excerpted from the Daily Jounaling E-Course - 30 Days of Authentic Self-Expression

Feelings as Creative Energy

Sitting In Silence

It is difficult for most people to be still and silent, and to meditate. This is because the difficult feelings that we have been avoiding with all of our busyness arise first. We rarely feel peaceful when we meditate because we have so much under the surface that wants to be felt.
 
There are ways to meditate, such as with mantras that serve to focus or force the mind to be silent. This kind of meditation is more of a trance or a controlling/numbing of what wants to arise into our awareness, rather than a sense of open awareness that is creatively game to feel everything.

Repressed Feelings are Resisted Feelings
 
When anxiety comes up in the stillness there is usually a difficult feeling underneath the anxiety that we have stuffed, avoided or distracted ourselves away from. Anxiety most often indicates that something is arising from within that we do not want to feel. Repressed feelings are resisted feelings and they take a great deal of energy to continually push down.

Consider that most of the activity of our thinking and doing is designed to defend ourselves against resisted emotions. Emotions hold tremendous energy. Feeling your emotions as energy - without thinking about them or putting a story to them - is a powerful way to creatively accept whatever is arising in the moment.

Difficult Feelings Hold Large Amounts of Life Energy

Most people do not want to feel difficult feelings and yet the bigger the feeling, the more intense the energy. When you feel big feelings to completion, more life-force energy is made available to fuel your passionate and creative life. You might notice that whenever you have a difficult or an unwanted feeling you immediately assume that something must be wrong. You may begin to look outside of yourself for the cause. Your anxiety might try to attach itself to any given thing such as a person who was irking you, a situation at home or at work. We can always find many things to attach our anxiety to.

When I did this collage several years ago I had been struggling intensely with difficult feelings. I always feel my emotions hugely, and at that time I was feeling overtaken by them. I felt engulfed with suffering and resistance to my sadness, my anger and my fear. I was having a hard time being present for what was arising within. The roses surrounding the skeleton seemed to perfectly express all positive affirmations that I was superimposing on top of my life to keep my repressed feelings at bay.

Not Projecting

I was still wondering what I was doing wrong to be feeling so much, so deeply, and so intensely. I was intent on discovering what I needed to change in my life to have my feelings go away. I decided to go for a long walk to meditate on the source of my anxiety. After a long while, I finally realized with utter certainty that that there was nothing outside myself that was the cause of my heavy feelings. Outside events can only trigger what is already inside of us. So as I stopped projecting my emotions out onto my life, my feelings intensified inside.

Finding something or someone to to blame and project our difficult emotions onto seems to relieve our anxiety for a time but only serves to create havoc in our outside world. We can choose instead to hold our feelings, and allow them to intensify inside until they become more intense and then dissipate. Repressed feelings often become stronger at first and then they begin to move as they were originally intended to move. Energy in motion = emotion. When we allow the energy - the pressure of repressed feelings - to have their time in our witnessing awareness we are always made larger. We suddenly can handle more of life.

The Release

Holding and allowing difficult feelings to intensify, peak and release into a state of relaxation is an exhausting process at first because we usually try to resist, or distract away from the feeling process. Feeling fully stretches us our capacity for witnessing presence enormously. When you resist the temptation to find a cause for anxiety outside of yourself, your fears and anxieties will burn inside of you with nowhere to go. This is often highly uncomfortable - if you resist the process. If you go along with the natural energy flow of your feelings it can be a very creative and enlarging experience instead.

We are used to expressing or projecting our emotional energy outward to try to get rid of it. You might, for example, be tempted to start a fight with a loved one to let off some steam. You might try to get extremely busy trying to "solve" your "problem" so as to dissipate your energy. Or you might find a reason to hate your life and want to make grand gestured to change it drastically and unreasonably.

But today, try to feel everything that is arising with an open heart and with as much inner strength and presence as you can muster. Keep your heart open to your fear, your sadness, your anger, or your despair as long as you can, without distracting away from or denying your feelings. Feel the energy of your feelings move and shift through your body with as much curiosity as you can muster. Make it a creative process. Does the feeling have a shape, a location, a color, a sound, or a visual symbol? Try to sense your feeling as energy.

Creative Energy

There are infinite rewards on the other side of your strength and willingness to feel your feelings without the goal of changing them or resisting them. They immediately become unfrozen and begin to move and change of their own natural accord. Feeling deeply with no intention to change a feeling can always be exquisite if you can learn to ride the energy of the feeling. Eventually there is an integration, an inclusion and a release. There is always an end to a difficult feeling.

It is hard to verbalize how it feels to come through on the other side of a difficult feeling. It is like coming clean or feeling newly born. There is no longer such a need to do or think so much to avoid what we do not want to feel. Coming out on the other side of a feeling that has been avoided for a long time imbues us with power and a much stronger sense of presence. I can only describe this strength of presence of as feeling "original", authentic and utterly at peace. It is as though you recover who you were before you repressed the feeling. You are rewarded with all the reclaimed energy of the stifled emotion. Intense emotions such as fear, anger and sadness contain large amounts of energy - and this is a good thing. You can use that once stagnant energy to create and move your life forward!

"In the less conscious person suffering is perceived as coming from the outside. This defense against suffering or more accurately against the expansion of consciousness that can embrace suffering
in a new way is a defense against the very movement of evolution."

-Richard Moss

Excerpted from the 30 Days of Inspired Creativity E-Course

Overcoming Creative Blocks

 

Blocked Creativity and Blocked Emotions

My experience of creative blocks is that usually a feeling is arising to be seen that will not allow me to move forward until I acknowledge it. I find when I am dealing with darker emotions, all of my creativity goes into this something that wants to be known.

If you are feeling blocked creatively, what stands between you and your most spontaneous and joyful creativity is your own unacknowledged emotional pain. There is no shame in this. This is our human condition. Most of us hold onto many layers of emotional pain that we can put no name to.

Many of us can recall no obvious trauma when we were children so as to pinpoint why we suffer so much. Yet we suffer as adults. We so feel often feel unnameable angst, depression, grief, fear and anger as we navigate through our daily life.

Difficult emotions arise frequently in our day to day to be accepted, loved and embraced but often we ignore the signals. Any time you catch yourself holding your breath for example, you are repressing an emotion. Every time you feel any tightness in your body, you are holding back an uncomfortable feeling.

Every time you become lost in thinking about how you need to change your life, you are likely avoiding something difficult inside. In fear and recoil we can habitually and reflexively reject our uncomfortable feelings over and over again throughout our lives.

But before we can become free, joyful and spontaneous creators in the world we have to allow our creative blocks take us where they want us to go - and that is into our own acceptance and inclusion of our darker and more repressed feelings. When we are not integrated within, the creative process faithfully brings up unknown feelings to be seen, felt and integrated.

To not run away from these unruly feelings is a courageous and creative act. To turn towards our difficult feelings with love and curiosity is to live a powerful life. To include uncomfortable emotions into our conscious awareness is to free up new energy and a creative intelligence that has been stagnant and unused since childhood.

The Inner Child is the Key to our Creative Blocks

As children we emotionally imprint upon our parents and we take on the heaviness of their emotional world. We literally absorb the emotional struggles, and the disowned and repressed feelings of our caregivers. Until we integrate all that we could not feel and accept in childhood we will walk around emotionally as children in our adult bodies, as David Hawkins writes:

"Physical appearance is a great deceiver. Most people look like adults but are not really adults at all. Emotionally, most people are children. The emotions and attitudes that prevail in kindergarten and on the playground continue on into adult life. Within most people is a child who is merely imitating being an adult. The 'inner child' is actually not inner at all, it is actually quite outer."

The simple reason why we stay at the emotional level of children is we rarely examine the childhood beliefs that we filter our perceptions of the world through. We most often stay patterned in the beliefs that we laid down as children, repeating the same kinds of feelings as we did when we were little.

Spiritual teacher Michael Brown explains this process of our inner child inside our adult body so eloquently:

"Experientially it is in the first seven years, any and all uncomfortable experience arising from our entry into the conditional world are imprinted into and affect the condition of our emotional body. Our emotional body is therefore where the record of these occurrences is kept."

Children literally soak up the emotional soup around them. I remember an instance many years ago of sitting on the sofa and noticing the synchronicity of my emotionality with my child's. My four year old daughter was in the next room, in our old claw foot tub taking a bath. The house was silent and suddenly I felt a sharp loneliness strike my heart. Just at that moment, my daughter in the next room cried out, "Mommy! My heart feels like it is falling out of my chest with loneliness!"

In my study of family system therapy I have come to understand that whatever our parents and ancestors cannot deal with emotionally falls upon the next generation's shoulders to feel, process and integrate. This is how we evolve as family groups. We are all an integral part of a larger whole of healing. We do not suffer alone. Everyone suffers in some way. We are not crazy. We are sensitive human beings. We are all part of a larger family group evolving and healing.

I have often felt the pain of my mother and father as if it were my own. We can often feel the unhealed traumas, losses and disappointments of the previous generations in our family because we are all joined. So to try to pin our uncomfortable feelings on a specific trauma from childhood, or to always look for some kind of childhood story of abuse, is often much too simplistic. As human beings we suffer on a deep level for all of those who have come before us. We suffer for all those in our family who did not know how to handle their emotional pain.

The Search for Unconditional Love

On a deep level we are angry that we were not unconditionally loved as children, and this anger can saliently block our creativity and our forward creative movement. We can feel frustrated that we regularly compromised our truth and our authenticity. We became inauthentic in childhood to belong, but now it is our task and our purpose as mature adults to find out who we really are.

We move through our creative blocks by loving ourselves unconditionally. We do this by feeling everything deeply. And in that intensely loving fire of attention to all that we have denied inside of ourselves, we come to know ourselves and our purpose profoundly. Loving all that is repressed and rejected in our unconscious mind is evocative of the mother holding her child in the collage at right with such tender awareness. With unwavering attention and determination she vows to never abandon her crying child. We need to treat ourselves in this same reverent way.

It is all to easy when we feel uncomfortable feelings to become the opposite of loving towards ourselves. Usually we put ourselves down and start mentally punishing ourselves for not feeling happy. We wonder what is wrong with us. We tell ourselves that we are no good, or substandard as a human being for feeling the way that we do. We punish our shadow parts that are simply trying to come into the light to be seen and included and learned from.

Perhaps one of the most creative things life accomplishments that we can we can focus on is to learn how to love ourselves unconditionally. To love ourselves means loving what feels hard and painful inside - unconditionally - without thinking or reacting. It does not matter what comes up - we attend to it with tender and exquisite attention. Every feeling holds messages and gifts embedded within it no matter how difficult it feels.

Becoming Strongly Present to Your Emotional Pain

Often inner pain can take over our entire life for a time. It can become so big, we can barely think, function, work, or relate to other people. We think we have to get rid of our pain. But presence to our emotional pain is nothing more than learning to become more largely loving than the pain. Becoming larger and stronger than your pain does not heal your pain - it is still there - but because it is loved and accepted with such inner strength, it integrates into your larger being. This is how we grow up. This is how we mature ourselves into contributing, creative adults.

We do this presence work by touching our inner pain with awareness - tapping it lightly at first - taking breaks when it hurts too unbearably. We then effort to sustain loving attention to our emotional pain for longer periods of time until we learn how to become consistently larger than it. As we grow psychologically stronger, the pain passes through our being at a faster rate and we are no longer mired in emotional difficulty for such long periods of time.

 The 30 Day Inner Child Challenge

Inner child drawings are a profound way to access aspects the emotionally arrested childhood and teenage parts of your psyche that you may not normally pay attention to. All of us have many inner children that became hurt and that separated away from our conscious awareness. If they remain unconscious, they can affect our emotional and physical well-being.

Doing this process 30 times or more can help you see where you are magical, peaceful, spontaneous, angry, spoiled, or are sacrificing yourself so that other people do not have to feel their own pain.

And under all of these psychical inner child structures are feelings that the inner child is trying to change, feel better about, or reconcile.

Inner child drawings are typically done with your non-dominant hand. Buy yourself a box of kid's crayons and a special sketchbook. Artist Heather Williams, author of Drawing as a Sacred Activity has an excellent exercise to help access your inner child that I will share with you. It takes 30 days of daily drawing either in the morning or the evening.

Daily Inner Child Exercise

1.Relax and breathe with your paper and crayons in front of you.

2. Close your eyes and see or feel a child near you. Notice the color or her/his hair, notice the height, posture and clothing. Open your heart and feel yourself accepting this child exactly as she/he is, even if the child is angry sad or frightened.

3. Ask the child to play a game with you. The adult in you will ask the child 3 questions. What is your name? What are you feeling right now? What can I do to help you feel really good?

4. Let the child draw a picture of for you and answer the questions using crayons and your non-dominant hand.

5. Thank the child for sharing with you.

Note: I often change this exercise as I find it a profound way to get to know renegade, shadow, inner child parts that made decisions for me a long time ago, that I might not be conscious of. Sometimes we have well-meaning but less mature parts of our minds running the show that are not making the best decisions for our current adult, mature needs. I ask my inner child parts these questions:

What is your name?

How old are you?

What is your purpose?

Keep asking for the purpose that your inner child has for you until the purpose becomes positive. For example, your inner child may say, I want you to be sick." Ask your inner child, "Why do you want me to be sick?" Every part of our inner child has a positive intention, even if it is to make you ill so that you will get the attention that you need.

Integrating Emotional Pain

Feeling what is arising inside of you, without trying to change it, is the most profoundly courageous thing you can do as human being. Feeling difficult feelings can become an art form where you exquisitely attend to your inner state with consistent and continual loving attention. As you do, your attention grows more subtle and creative, and you begin to understand that your inner pain is revealing messages to help you step forward in your life.

We grow in power and presence when we are able to feel our emotional pain without spinning off into thinking, doing, blaming and projecting our inner emotions outwards and away from inner inclusion and integration. My experience of not projecting a feeling out of my body is that it starts to seethe and boil in often an intensely uncomfortable way. We can learn how to attend to this intensity of feeling with love before we start creating the outer dramas that we normally engage in.

So many of us think that we have to get a feeling "out" of our body and so we live our lives trying to find ways to be finished with our emotional pain, to get it all out, and be done with it forever, when in truth any kind of drama to "release" feelings is often unnecessary. All your feelings need is to be accepted and integrated within the larger container of your mature, witnessing, unconditionally loving awareness.

Integration and Maturity

Growing ourselves into maturity simply means being able to be strongly present and be available to life as it is showing up right now - no matter how uncomfortable it feels. It is from this arising reality that we maturely create our lives. After you integrate a repressed or difficult feeling - after you have accepted and loved a disowned part of yourself - life feels newly whole again. When we recover our lost parts of self, we become more intelligent, more alive and more creative. We realize that the feelings we have been using all of our energy to repress and deny have gifts, strengths and new insights hidden inside of them.

When we can stay open and available to life as it is, we have more creative insight. New strengths and gifts are birthed to bring to our everyday living. The best part of loving what arises inside of you, is that you learn to love others maturely, deeply and profoundly. What you accept in yourself, you accept in other people and suddenly your life - as it is - begins to work better. From this place of self-acceptance, love and trust, a spontaneous and flowing creativity abounds that truly contributes to all of life.

Creativity and Emotional Repression

Committing to Loving Life

How committed are you to living and loving your life exactly as it is?  Most of us do not even notice how shut down and repressed we are in our emotional lives. We might not even notice how we are barely breathing, or that we are tensing and armoring our muscles in a way that can keep so much creative information out of our awareness.

Your availability, presence and full engagement with life and with those you love can be measured by how open your heart is, how much you feel love, and how grateful and at peace you feel in your life. Consider that the degree of emotional repression that you feel lowers the involvement and engagement that you are able to bring to your life.

Emotional Repression

We are meant to feel, accept and love all of our feelings unconditionally, but most of us reflexively avoid this process. It often hurts to feel, and we can spend our energy trying to control and orchestrate our life to avoid what feels difficult and unmanageable inside.

Many of us go through our days feeling a nameless anger, sadness, or anxiety and fear. Much of our emotional life is non-verbal, and if we were to be really honest with ourselves, we often cannot put a finger onto why we feel upset.

This is because as children our emotional patterning was laid down before we had words - from birth to age seven. We find the stories and words for our inner discomfort later when we develop our mental capacities from age seven onwards. Healing through imagery, visual self-expression, and being present for feelings without words is often so profoundly helpful for clearing feelings that cannot be named.

It helps to have a daily creative practice to help us move through our conditioned repression. Creative play helps to express the suppressed feelings and beliefs that we repressed into our psyche and emotional bodies in childhood and adolesence, in our attempt to navigate the adult world. Imagery, symbol, color and pattern are often richer than words and can express and acknowledge feelings in a larger, more all encompassing way. Rather than always trying to verbalize a reason as to why we feel as we do, we can employ the immediacy of present moment attention through the process of visual self-expression.

If we do not have some kind of wordless creative practice, our level of emotional repression can become our defended "comfort zone", where we make every effort to suppress any hint of discomfort from coming into our awareness. This comfort zone of our accustomed repression is the enclosed area that keeps our connection to other people out of our care and awareness. Our comfort zone protects where we hurt inside. This repression takes a considerable amount of life energy that could be freed up for creative and engaged living. Committing to an emotionally healthy life means committing to feeling uncomfortable and allowing ourselves to have compassion for our inner hurt.

Creative Commitment

Suffering with awareness, by witnessing the hurt from a larger, more loving part of ourselves is what true commitment to life is. True creativity involves engaging with your life just as it is arising right now, with unconditional love and present attention, no matter what uncomfortable feelings you feel on the inside, or what challenges are happening on the outside.

True creativity is a profound engagement with life as it is. It is a commitment to the truth that everything that happens to you, and that is arising within you is healing you, and sculpting you into who you are meant to be. Making the uncomfortable - comfortable - is the process of bringing unconscious material to light. My experience is that unconscious emotional material comes up in stages or layers to be accepted, loved, and integrated.

So for a time when a layer of my subconscious/unconscious, unintegrated psychology comes up, I will much feel worse. My heart will ache or feel bitter or sad, or intense anger will come up to be seen in the light of my awareness. I try to stay intensely present when a difficult layer of repressed material comes up.  Repressed feelings and all of the behaviors that constellate around those difficult feelings are like a blind spot where we keep life out. In my experience, after integrating a difficult feeling, a bright feeling of wholeness, vibrant energy and well-being arises. And soon after, I am able to engage with life at a deeper level.

I often track these non-verbal movements of my subconscious into my conscious awareness through spontaneous art making. Because I like to commit to deepening into creative practices, I have explored many expressive art modalites, such as collage journaling, doodling, stream of consciousness drawing, and poetry writing. I usually commit to one modality for a period of a year to see how deeply I can go into the process. I am always profoundly deepened at the end of the year and I have many journals that affirm the truth that we are designed to heal and become conscious.

At present I am drawing a mandala a day and am smilingly calling it my "Carl Jung Challenge." Psychologist Carl Jung drew mandalas everyday for a year. Recently I went to a Mari mandala workshop and the mandalas I drew pulled something deeper out of my subconscious mind. I was inspired to begin a daily practice.

Contemplating Death

Because I work with the people at the end of life, I often feel extra compelled to wake up in my own life and to do my emotional presence work. I do make it a dedicated practice to unconditionally love, or at make every effort to least accept what feels uncomfortable within me. Because I work with people who are often overtly expressive about their emotional and physical discomfort, this practice has deepened my compassion for other people who are in pain.

In my experience, when dementia sets in, and the mental capacities wane, creativity and the emotional life can awaken again. This is increased self-expression is something that few people realize about dementia. People with dementia can be astoundingly creative.

There is a window, I have seen, in the mind, as it diminshes in it's reasoning faculties where a new creative freedom can come back into play. Perhaps this diminishing of mental control is the spiritual reason, and the deeper emotional balancing behind the condition of dementia.  Because we all know when our mental capacities are in place, we can employ great intensity of will and control to deny what hurts inside.

I have seen first hand that as a human family, we are often healing and integrating our uncomfortable emotional patterning right up to the end of life. I have often sat with a person with dementia and watched them instinctively instigate their own emotional healing process through sometimes profound, and sometimes unusual forms of prayer, ritual, poetry, art, song, voice and movement patterns.

Validation Therapist Naomi Feil explains that the elderly, in the final stages of life are trying to resolve unfinished emotional issues so that they can die in peace. Unconditionally accepting the feelings that they express, as a present and loving witness, can help the elderly from descending into further withdrawal and disorientation. My experience is that dementia provides a window for the elderly to express and integrate old, repressed emotional material that they made the choice to suppress when they were more in control of their mental faculties.

The Creative Mirror of Life

The further I go into the depth of my own life, the further I deepen into my life as a creation - a creation that brings me insight into what I am thinking about. We all are given little signs and symbols within each day that can help us to unfold, heal and evolve from unconscious to conscious human beings. We can learn how to invite these daily symbols and be open to their messages. This creative syncronicity is the co-creation of our human life with the Divine.

The day I was contemplating my full engagement with my own life, I intuitively opened one of my favorite books, "The Untethered Soul" by Michael A. Singer and read this:

"It is your attempt to get special experiences from life that makes you miss the actual experience of life. Life is not something you get, it's something you experience. Life exists with or without you. It has been going on for billions of years. You simply get the honor of experiencing a tiny slice of it.

If you're busy trying to get something, you will miss the slice you are actually experiencing. Every one of life's experiences is different, and every experience is worth having. Life is not something to waste. It's truly precious. That's why death is a great teacher. It is death that makes life precious. Look how precious life becomes when you imagine you only have one week to live."

The Art and Creativity of Life

I have been contemplating the hurt areas that I still repress inside of myself. In my mandalas I have been seeing the areas where I enclose myself, and where I turn away from aspects of my life. So often as I sense into the deeper meaning of my inner life, my outer life rises up to create and communicate with me. Recently I went for a walk in a beautiful neighborhood near where I work to try to sort out my inner conflicts and I was gifted with a most amazing sighting.

I was feeling a deep contraction in my being that day. I was struggling with an overwhelming fear and doubt about some growth steps that I have been taking in my life. I was moving out of my comfort zone into a deeper relationship and engagement with my life. And I realized how easy it is to embrace life when we feel good, but when we are in a fearful contraction it feels nearly impossible to love and appreciate life as it unfolds. We can be quick to label what is wrong with our life, and what needs to change on the outside, instead of simply being present for the uneasiness on the inside.

When we open into more love and connection, usually the defense system of fear kicks in and some old hurt needs to be felt and let go of, before we can love more. As I felt my fear, I kept looking out at the beautiful neighborhood I was walking through, the heritage homes, the exquisite gardens, the birds, and the sounds of life arising.

Fear often arises whenever we cannot accept something inside of ourselves. When we are in emotional pain, our awareness often feels very close to our body. This contraction of life energy most often indicates an inner no, an inner rejection to some aspect of what we are experiencing inside. This is usually an old hurt that has not been healed. This hurt place is where we withdraw our full engagement with life. This inner rejection is an indication that something needs to be felt, accepted and integrated into our experience.

We feel contracted, dense and nearly completely self-involved when we are in emotional pain. At these moments we can choose to open up and integrate something that is denied within. It is hard to notice what is going on outside of our tight and personally embroiled awareness when we are upset. The purpose of such times is clear. Something hidden needs to grow into the light of awareness so that we can unconditionally be present for it, integrate it with love, and move forward towards a deeper engagement with life.

As I contemplated my body tightness and resistance during my lunch time walk, I felt utterly fed up and frustrated with my fear and my contraction away from life. My heart felt tight and closed. I began to contemplate, "What if this was my last day on earth? What if I missed this beauty that is so abundantly sprawling itself out in front of me."  I began to play with my awareness like an accordion, opening and closing my heart. And when I turned the corner, I saw a most profound sight.

I saw a black crow twitching, which had just been killed by a car, in the middle of the road. Above me, fifty or more crows circled and sat on wires cawing loudly, upset by the sudden turn of events. I stopped awestruck and I stood and watched the crow funeral. I was struck by how quickly my inner life decision to open to life, as if it was my last day on earth, was so instantly affirmed. I reflected on how easy it is to stay in our defended comfort zone until it is too late. Life is short. There is no better time to fully engage with life and love than right now.

I felt filled with an intensification of presence and gratitude for the creativity of life. When we integrate the inner pain that we have repressed, we build the energy and capacity to engage with people more fully. Many years ago when my daughter was two, I lost many people in my close family. With all of the death and crisis in my life, I stepped up to a creative engagment with life that I had not touched into before. I was in a visionary creative state that lasted about three months. My experience of the "crow funeral" reminded me to engage at this intense level of presence, commitment and availability more as a way of life instead of temporary state.

"You should be experiencing the life that's happening to you, not the one you wish was happening. Don't waste a moment of life trying to make other things happen; appreciate the moments you are given. Don't you understand that every minute you are closer to death? This is how to live your life. You live as though you are on the verge of death because you are."  - Michael A. Singer

 

Living Into Your Creative Vision

My Personal Creative Vision

Five years ago I wrote a twelve week e-course that detailed my personal creative journey through expressive art journaling. This course has been recently revised and republished on the Daily Om website.

Originally titled "Collage for Self Discovery" the course is now called, Empower Yourself Through Creativity and it is available here.

I deeply love this course. It is my personal story of finding my creative vision. What astounded me about revisiting this course is the realization of how a deeper truth runs under all of our lives. We just have to learn how to see it.

The authentic creative journey does not always turn out the way we think we want it to, but it always takes us where we need to go. What our personality self wants, may not always be what our creative soul needs for it's finest development and growth. My story is about allowing the Creative Muse to guide me in ways that I did not expect.

Connecting With Your Creative Vision

We all have a higher creative vision to live into. We all have inklings that pressure us from the inside, to be lived, and breathed, and created into this world. We all have an inner code that wants to unfold and create something in this world. Micheal Meade speaks of our purpose in life as being our "Opus" or our life work.

Meade writes, "If a person doesn't face their fate, they may never find their deep resources and natural gifts. If a person doesn't risk their destiny, they'll never know who they are intended to be. Fate and destiny are the two agreements the soul must make and are the core issues we struggle with throughout our lives."

Facing our fate involves understanding and growing through the limitations and challenges within the family and cultures we were raised in. Our life's creative work is part of our destiny. It is what we want to learn the most about, and is indeed who we were intended to be. Our Life Opus or Life Purpose is what we feel intensely curious about, what we most want to study in life, and what we are passionate about being good at. Our Life Purpose is what Creator wants to create though us.

Life shows us clues as to what our passions are, and although our creative visions may not always lead to fame and fortune, or may not even be the main source of income, our visions imbue us with a life force and a vitality that keeps us engaged and passionate on a daily basis. Our creative visions provide us something to live into each day, as we attend to the practical requirements of our daily life. Our creative inspirations help us to overcome our shortcomings and struggles. Our visions offer us a window into the Divine.

A Creative Vision Takes Time

Living into our Life Opus takes a great deal patience, and involves many slow, faltering steps. Our life work takes a lifetime. In living into our life work we become what we are meant to become. We create what wants to be created through us. In the process of living into our creative visions, we must chisel away all of our conditioned resistance, and human heaviness to bring our Opus forward into life to heal ourselves, and to help others. 

It is helpful to look back on your life for little clues as to what sparked your curiosity. For myself, from a young age I felt a need to understand art and creativity. My first clue came when I was 4 years old, and an artist came to rent the room in my grandmother's basement while he was in art school. He called me Shella Bella, and he drew quick, poignant sketches of my great grandfather when he came upstairs for tea.

After I met the artist in my grandmother's basement, I started to produce drawings in volumes, and I began selling my drawings for 10 cents around my neighborhood. I wanted to live into the process of creativity. I wanted to understand creativity from the inside out. You could say that wanting to learn about creativity was my Opus. I did not come here as a ready made artist. I had to grow into the idea that I was creative.

As I grew up I understood that I needed to be creative in some way, but I did not get a great deal of encouragement or attention for my early artistic efforts. I did not get accolades from most of my elementary school teachers, that spoke to my having any sort of easy talent in the arts. But I was besotted with my grade two teacher who saw that I was creative. She recognized something deeper in me, and gave me extra creative challenges in class. With her, I became a devoted student, writing and illustrating far more, extra stories than was required for the curriculum.

 

Creative Trials

I remember as a child of 8 years old struggling to draw realistically. I was not considered "talented" as an artist but I was dogged and curious. My only fumbling, grasping idea of my Inner Opus was the vague understanding that creative people understood how to draw. So I put myself on a rigorous drawing program. I remember drawing my grandmother's porcelain figurines, and struggling to get the proportions right. My paper was worn thin from erasing, but I kept at it for hours.

My realistic drawings never really flowed with expression or ease. They always looked a bit stiff and forced, but something inside of me wanted to understand creativity. And with no outside examples other than my early contact with the artist in my grandmother's basement, drawing was the only step I knew how to take.

Intuitive Drawing

It was not until I became pregnant with my daughter that I found a way of drawing that worked for me. I found a way to allow my connection to a Larger Creative Force to come through me. I finally understood that I did not like to draw realistically. I just wanted to express my truth through drawing. And so I began my intuitive way of drawing. My intuitive drawings expressed what I felt on the inside. They started out as simple doodles, and they became more sophisticated and expressive with time and practice. (See above left)

Expressive Drawing

Later on when I took over an art therapy program to facilitate art for the elderly, I learned how to draw from life in an expressive way, from an elderly client. She was a world class sculptor who was wealthy, and never had to work a day in her life. She drew like Van Gough and she imbued each of her drawings with vitality, and then when she was done, she would say, "I drew that?"  I was deeply inspired by her.

Making a Living as Art Therapist

Many women write me to ask for my opinion as to whether it is practically viable or financially secure to embark on a career in art therapy. I am not an art therapist in my formal training. I chose to become registered as a counsellor because it felt more practical to me. But I say if the urge to be an art therapist is coming from the inside of you, start moving towards it a little bit every day. I think it is possible to take care of your practical needs, and live into an art therapy practice, slowly over time.

My personal experience is that art for healing is not commonly understood, or widely embraced by our mainstream culture yet. This does not mean that we should not begin living into our creative visions. When I started teaching expressive art, I worked on a dining room table, in a group home for clients with brain injuries. It was not the fanciest digs, but I was surprisingly inspired to see how my creative ideas could connect to real life, and not just live in my head and in my journals. There is always some place in the world that needs our vision, our voice, and our contribution. As creators we awaken and enliven a weary world with color, music, connection, love, and faith in something more than just surviving, paying the bills, and marching through each day with a sense of practical duty.

In the past few years I have had the chance to meet many people who are living into their creative visions, and into their own creative aliveness and curiosity. Being creatively alive is always a good way to focus your time and efforts. Even if you are still growing into your vision, and are not yet making good full-time money doing it, you are building, connecting, living into, and embodying your vision in the world. You are in harmony with what wants to be created inside and outside of you. When I meet people living into their creativity, it fills me with inspiration to see such aliveness, such engagement in life, and such vision being implemented into the practical world. For it is the visionaries and the people willing to live into their creativity, that bring change, connection, and the Divine to the culture.

The truth is that everyone is creative in some way, and the world needs to see more people expressing themselves in health care, in government, and in private business and non-profit organizations. Creativity warms, inspires, draws forth, ignites, and unites. Working in health care, I have had care and housekeeping staff coming up to me from all walks of life to tell me they are creative, that they knit, paint, sew, weave, draw at home in their spare time. When they come to my art table, they are intrigued that there is more to life. To brings something from your rich inner world into practical life brings joy. It heartens and encourages the world. Your creativity is needed in the workaday life that most people exist in.

Small Steps

I have brought my creative visions into the world, not by grand gestures, but by taking small intuitive steps each day. Sometimes the insights that I get are just ordinary, but I do take some steps each and everyday towards my creative vision, even if it is just adding a sentence to my website, or making a small change in an article I am writing.

Sometimes I just get the direction to spend some time living into a new idea, whether it be sitting in silence, and listening for what wants to come through, or gathering materials or doing research. Often I will mentally set a creative schedule for myself, and my Muse will have a different idea. My Muse will know that I need to take a nap, meditate or walk in the woods. After I do, I feel more connected to something larger, and the creative work pours through with much more vibrancy and strength.

The Creative Soul reveals itself when it is relaxed. We have to find places in our life to let our soul relax, so that our creative ideas can imbue our daily living. Getting to know what our soul feels like when it is creatively inspired, is a feeling state we can learn to court, and invite it to become more fully embodied in our lives.

We can spend years learning about ourselves psychologically, and understanding every aspect of our ego system. But this psychological thought structure is not the whole of ourselves. Birthing something creatively through our souls is a co-creative process between the Creative Muse and our personal lives. My experience of soul creativity is sort of like a readying, or a feathering of my nest so that creative insight can come through.

Art Mother

How do you invite the Muse or the Creative Spirit into your life? How do you tend to your creativity? Do you invite your creativity to express Itself on a daily basis. What name would your give to your Larger Creative Spirit?  Recently one of the radiant, creative elders that I work with in the art studio called me his "Art Mother."

I loved the name "Art Mother" profoundly, and was grateful for his naming of my Opus in the world. It seemed especially poignant as my 17 year old daughter ventures out into the world to find out who she is. As I contemplate this change from a one-on-one mother, to the larger nurturing of an Art Mother in the world, I feel profoundly moved to the core of myself. I am reminded of how I have become the essence of my grade two teacher who saw where and how I was creative. I am touched at how she nurtured my deeper creativity, and how I now offer this same heartfelt service to others.

What part of the Larger Process of your creativity needs to be birthed and expressed in the world? What would you call your place in the Whole of Life?

I leave with you with this fantastic talk by Elizabeth Gilbert, the author of Eat, Pray, Love. She talks eloquently about the Creative Muse/Genius as being larger than what we are in our small human selves, and how if we let it come through, we, along with the world is transformed. You can watch it here.

The Golden Shadow

Your Brightest Self

Consider the great truth that God/Creator needs you to be your most vibrant, strong and creative self. Consider the truth that Creator wants to express something unique and powerful through you that will help you, and all those around you.

The question is why do so few of us live a life of creative and spiritual empowerment? Why do so few of us have an abundance of life energy that is available to contribute to life? The answer I feel is in choosing to reclaim the light that we have cut off in ourselves.

The disowned bright qualities that we admire in others are the disowned aspects of our unlimited self. Psychiatrist Carl Jung called our submerged creative potential the "Golden Shadow". Mostly when we speak of the shadow in the psyche we are speaking of the more shameful and frightening aspects of ourselves that we have disowned.

The Golden Shadow however is our submerged greatness. The Golden Shadow is the key to finding out what our unique strengths are - and our strengths wait - hidden in our deepest weaknesses. The Golden Shadow is the soul part of ourselves that is meant to offer love, healing, vibrancy and joy to the sometimes dark world we live in.

Life cycles us through difficult periods in our lives to challenge our soul qualities to emerge into this world. In the journey of our lives, especially in times of strife or trauma we are offered various crossroads or choice points. At such times we can choose the darker choices of the ego, or the more powerful and healing aspects of our Soul. It is most often at times of great difficulty that we can access the unique strengths that is our soul and our healing purpose in this world. This is why it is impossible to predict how any human being will turn out, given their life circumstances, even if they have been severely abused. Because within the greatest traumas and weaknesses are our golden strengths.

Strong Choices or Weak Choices?

In each moment we are either choosing strength or weakness. Some people in our human history have risen out of a childhood of severe pain and neglect to become the helpers and healers of life. And other people who may have experienced lesser forms of neglect go on to make choices to self-destruct through addictions and unhealthy distractions of every kind.

Usually we make a combination of weak choices in our human lives, along with more powerful choices that are guided by the more unlimited power of our souls. The gift of life however, is that we can begin in any moment to build the strength and power of our good choices.  Each strong choice to develop our spiritual, loving and creative nature builds on the next choice. And at some point the light of our Inner Spirit will become a strong and richly developed part of ourselves.

But it takes determination and honesty to be strong enough for self-examination. As you become more self-aware and engage in your own healing you will start to go through passages where you begin to remember the choice points or crossroads in your life where you chose strength or weakness. As you look back on your life you will start to see where you closed down your light in disappointment and anger at the world around you.

You will vividly see where you chose to withdraw from life and shut down your light. You will start to see where you willfully chose to have problems, illnesses, addictions and failure when instead you could have brought great light and strength to the situation at hand. You will start to see where you got scared about how much you could really give and you retreated. You will start to become clearer as to where you still choose to not do well in your life emotionally, physically, relationally or financially.

Core Soul Questions

For the past few years I have been meditating into my "Golden Shadow". Having burned through much of my "pain body" which is my darker, more subconscious aspects of self, I have come upon a deeper layer of unconsciousness. I have come upon a more golden part of myself that is longing for expression. As I start to publish my writings to a wider audience and begin moving into more success in my life, my earliest childhood somatic memories have come to the fore.

Considering moving into more largess as a writer and as a human being has brought up many of my core soul questions this past year. Our core soul questions are what we are here to learn and do again and again with more strength and more light at each crossing point. My core soul questions are: "Am I living fully in my integrity and in my honesty? Am I fully living what I teach?" Am I the same person of integrity in the "back room" - which is with my family, colleagues and friends - as I am in the "front room" - which are the public forums where I work?

I have at pivotal points in my life chosen to move into my greatness of spirit. There are areas of my life where I have chosen to live in integrity, which for me means living with a commitment to my core soul questions.  One example of this was fifteen years ago when five members of my family members died and my marriage ended within the period of a year. I chose at that time in my life to move towards my connection to Spirit and my core soul questions of honest self-expression and integrity.

I moved through the death of my loved ones with a renewed commitment to authentic self-expression and living fully. I followed my inner instincts and impulses and dreams and my life became more honest. Relationships ended and new people came into my life. I fell in love and embraced my spontaneous creativity. I started moving towards a new life from one of passivity and letting others shape my life into becoming a woman of integrity.

The Choice To Not Do Well

What I have come to understand is that on subconscious levels we choose not to do well because we want to hide from the responsibility of living with full strength into our essential life/soul questions. I can remember times and choice points where I chose not to do well in my life in my teens and twenties. And those choices in my life delayed my spiritual and emotional progress for long periods of time.

When we choose not to do well we withdraw from life and from other people out of hurt, anger and vengeance. In my 20's I chose to go down the road of my ego darkness into depression, dependence, and under functioning in my relationships. I chose not to express my honest truth and as a result did not require it from other people in my life.

The decision not to do well in our lives is made early. It is made in childhood and we may not even have specific concrete memories surrounding it. But there are always clues if you look deeply enough. This past year for example, I struggled with mysterious eye infections to such a great degree that I would wake up in the morning and my eyes would be glued shut. I considered the metaphor of my eyes being sealed shut away from the light, and seeing nothing but darkness. As I did my inner work I remembered the severe eye infections that I got as a small child at the age of about three years old and how I would awake in the morning hopeless, scared and trapped in darkness.

I remember that period at age three as a dark time, not in a memory of abuse but as a particular heavy feeling tone reflective of my own family history of mental illness and depression. Perhaps the adults in my life were going through some heavy inner pain at the time and I was picking up feelings of hopelessness. Perhaps I was absorbing my ancestral pain body. Perhaps I sensed that the people around me where not living to their highest potential and therefore I did not feel I could express the fullness of my own spirit. So often not expressing our Golden Soul qualities is a case of "No one else is doing it. Why should I?"

We do not need to access exact literal or concrete memories as we look into our Golden Shadow Selves but we need to sense into an awareness of what we were feeling at the times in our life where we chose to fracture away from Soul and Spirit. This is how our human ego and defense system is formed. The ego splits away from our soul connection to God. I for example remember changing myself at about three into a child who previously was stubborn about my truth, expressive and overt, into a child that was withdrawn, shy and barely shared anything. I remember how the honest, expressive part of myself went into my Golden Shadow.

Your Magnificent Gifts

Usually the Golden Shadow is a unique inner soul quality that is helpful to our particular life story and to the family we live in. For myself my Golden Shadow was my honesty, my self-expression and my full engagement with life. Most often our family will refuse our Golden qualities and in our need to stay connected to our family we refuse the light inside of ourselves as well. We repress the positive and healing aspects of our souls that the family ego and pain body does not want and instead move into sacrifice and diminishment.

On deeper levels we as children make early decisions to not step up in our light that does deep into our subconscious mind. As children we easily and understandably make the decision to diminish ourselves. We mistakenly believe that our greatness and our light does not matter. In our littleness we believe that will never change anything for the better and so we give up. We choose the darkness around us instead of the light within us. We see that everyone else is choosing ego and pain and so we join the club.

Reclaiming your light can bring up anxiety and a fear of not fitting into the ego club. To find your light  you will need to go back to the places in your life where you experienced trauma or felt pain and find the inner gifts that you could have brought to the situation. For example, by closing down my self-expression as a young child I likely protected the egos of the adults who cared for me by becoming passive so that they would not have to change in ways that felt uncomfortable for them.

I did not speak out to challenge the things the things that I knew in my gut were out of integrity and dishonest in other people. This quality of self-protection and the protection of others carried far into my future when I no longer needed it to survive and fit in. And it became destructive. In my twenties it led me to ignore and wash over the dishonesty in myself and in others. By not speaking out the truths that could have healed my life, I allowed myself and others to stay in their safe ego defense systems.

Psychologist Chuck Spezzano talks about the Golden Shadow so eloquently. I will paraphrase it for you here:

"If you have a problem, there is something you could give that would resolve the situation. Any time we experienced trauma, there were soul level gifts that we could have given to prevent it. The trauma was a mistaken choice that led us down the path of the ego...Most people are frightened of the gift that could have given because it was so magnificent. The gift was big enough to change a family pattern, or significantly help a family member, but it seemed too big. It was so glorious that it would have caused them to stand out too much, and they wouldn't have been able to hide. They thought people would expect them to lead or accomplish other great things."

Building the Strength of Your Light

The truth is that there is nothing we need to become one day in the future to reclaim our Golden Shadow. Our strong choices begin now. And moment to moment we can build the strength of our light. We do not have to become other than what we are at the core of ourselves, to change and beautify our corner of the world. But we do need to allow Creator to express through the uniqueness that is our soul. We do need to move through our weaknesses and refuse to indulge them. We do need to live into the specific greatness of who we really are in our daily lives - in our families, in our workplaces and in our world.

We need to allow ourselves to be the beauty of what we are in every situation we encounter even if it seems like we might upset people's egos with the truth of our light. People invested in their own darkness will either be helped by our connection to Soul and Spirit or they will choose to go away and remain in their own darkness. This is the hard part. As adults we need to risk the loss of relationship and the fear of loneliness in order to be true to ourselves.

As a child you shut your light down to fit in and be taken care of. As an adult it takes great courage to live into your light and into the truth of your own core life questions that live underneath all of your weaknesses. Bringing your Golden Shadow to light sometimes brings difficult but needed changes. But more often, living in your brightest light heals and deepens your existing relationships and it helps you to feel more connected and in love with where you already are.

Living Into the Feminine Creative Principle

While I am by nature very feminine and nurturing in my nature I was very dependent in my twenties and unempowered in my feminine aspects of self. So I set out to develop my masculine independent side in my 30s. As I exerted my truth out into the world I felt like I needed to leave my feminine nature behind.

My 40's have been about finding an empowered integration between the feminine and masculine aspects of creation within myself and I wanted to share with you what I have been discovering about the empowered feminine creative principle.

In my own life the necessary balancing of my inner masculine has been marked by outer doing, re-educating, and working full-time and in trying to move ahead in an effortful, strong, masculine principled way. Yet within my efforts I denied the needed nourishment of the feminine aspect of creation. Busyness which is an over-exaggerated masculine and is an avoidance of the deeper, more painful shadow work that we need to do from time to time.  Busyness keeps us from creative vision.

Psychologist Chuck Spezzano writes profoundly on busyness:

"Busyness attempts to protect us from the fear generated by our shadow figures, the unconscious mind, and our pain. It blocks out soul level gifts, our purpose and our destiny. In our busyness we are trying to run away from feelings of guilt, failure and worthlessness. We drive ourselves onward to prove we are useful and valuable. Yet dark feelings float to the surface in any moment of respite, so we keep pushing on. Our busyness keeps us too busy for love and bonding that would bring about the same success with much less effort. Instead of moving forward to a new stage we change by slight degrees."

What Creative Life Principle are you longing to live into in the coming year? This past year after intending with all of my heart to slow down into a deeper more feminine, receptive presence I finally did. It happened after I missed my plane to Toronto en-route to an art therapy conference. I arrived late at the conference with an eye infection in both eyes. I knew that I needed to make some changes in my scheduling when I got home to deepen my creative vision.

I stopped my monthly article writing and extraneous creative activities and went within. This past year has been marked with long solitary walks and simple, extended periods of time spent deepening into my relationships with my partner Ondrea and my daughter Hadley. It has been a profound pulling back on outward creating, while still functioning fully and staying engaged with my practical life.

I have been listening to my dreams and rounding out the neglected parts of myself and with Ondrea's therapeutic help I have been doing some very deep core inner excavating. Instead of creating new things I went back and revisited and nurtured and deepened into what I have already created. I took my journals, paintings and writings in more deeply. As I stopped creating so much and just let everything sink in, I realized that I was living into the feminine creative principle.

After years of strengthening the masculine "doing" principle inside myself, I have found the urge this past year to become, as I recently wrote in my journal "hugely receptive". I saw inner imagery of open vessels and of my arms opening up to the sky. It has felt uncomfortable for me to not do, do, do as I have been prolifically creative for the past 15 years.

I has felt strange just to sit and leave an open space in my heart to receive. And sometimes it felt strange just to receive "nothing" other than the urge to become more present and more accepting of my life as it was unfolding. Yet I have come to realize this feminine stance of creativity is profoundly creative and alive even as it seems to "do nothing". The feminine aspect of creativity waits to see and hear new information from the unseen realms. The feminine aspect of our nature nurtures what has been created and senses into what longs to be created in our tangible world.

Many women develop an over-exaggerated masculine in our culture as it is highly encouraged to strike out independently and make our mark upon the world. Yet the feminine principle is holistic and it considers the entire picture. Life unfolds all in one piece and it is a feminine trait to realize that we all evolve together. We are part of larger systems and they do not all evolve according to our personal agendas. We are a part of a family evolving, we may be part of a working group evolving and we may be part of a partnership or a marriage evolving.

Indeed we are each an individual person evolving and that has it's own timing and we cannot be rushed or pressured to change before it is time. There is a flow to life unfolding that must be accepted and surrendered too. As a human beings we are an each an unfolding creation that has a masculine and a feminine aspect. The inner feminine nurtures and loves our creations in a sustaining way so that we can build the strength of the inner masculine to take take them into the world.

Creations need to be loved and acknowledged, revisited and honored in order to continue living and this incites a revitalized energy and a passion in our inner masculine to do and bring form to new creations from a nourished and revitalized place. This inner feminine nurturing is what strengthens and inspires our inner masculine to exert the energy to bring the creation into tangible form and to make it real in our lives.

The feminine and the masculine creative principle exists in both men and women and regardless of gender we usually have a more dominant leaning and we each have an imperative to balance the two.  I recently for example met a beautiful art therapist online named Giora Carmi who lives into the intuitive flow of the feminine creative principle. I find his work deeply quiet and nurturing. In contrast my partner Ondrea in contrast serves as a catalyst as therapist which incites the masculine principle of action for practical, emotional and spiritual change in her work with people. I find her work exciting and thought provoking.

The feminine does the inner work to excavate what is holding us back from moving forward. This past year I explored many deep creative practices around descending into the basement of the psyche and helping the repressed selves that we tend to try to leave behind. One shadow practice that I highly recommend is the Buddhist practice called Feeding Your Demons by Lama Tsultrim Allione. This practice has been creative, revealing and deeply helpful for me around dialoguing with the darker, more hidden parts of myself that were causing my eye infections and other illnesses. We all have parts of our arrested childhood psyche that made very early decisions about our beliefs about life that unwittingly stop us from living into our biggest selves.

While my past year has not been a time of new creativity, it has been a time of deepening into what I have created. Buddhist teacher Thich Nhat Hahn writes, "To learn to live each moment in deep mindfulness and concentration is the practice. The conception and unfolding of a piece of art take place exactly in the moments of our daily life. The time you begin to write down the music or the poems is only the time of delivering the baby. The baby has to be already in you for you to deliver it. We must make good use of every moment of our daily life in order to allow this insight and compassion to bloom."

For the New Year of 2012 I wish you rich, mindful year of inner listening and ask you the question, "What Principle of Creativity are you are longing to live into right now?

Releasing Guilt - Part 2

Healing Guilt with Self-Love

I have had a few letters from my newsletter subscribers about how to release guilt and wanted to post up this ACIM Lesson that explains the roots of guilt in more depth. Guilt is such an interesting feeling. In my own experience I can feel myself moving into guilt when I start to judge life and other people. I can actually feel myself separating away from my core sense of well-being as I begin to judge. I can feel myself hurting myself.

Usually if I can catch myself I can sense that I have moved away from my connection to my spiritual center, from my presence to something Larger. If I do not catch myself, I move away from my presence to the God and the inherent Good of life, and I can feel myself getting frightened and defended and even more self-protective.

When I become self-protective I start to worry about only myself and I stop giving my gifts to life. I stop contributing to life and may even disrupt or disturb other people's lives with my fears and judgments. I used to let this self-protection move me into a full depression or and illness where I would withdraw from life and nurse my inner wounds for days.

Now when I catch myself heading into this downward spiral I stop as soon as I start to feel uneasy, and grouchy and disgruntled. I check to see what I am disowning in myself by seeing what I am judging others for. Perhaps it is an unaccepted quality that I fear in myself. Perhaps it is an unmet need that I am trying to get others to meet for me that stems from an old sadness or hurt. When I am judging others, I know I am projecting my own inner hurt onto the world and it is time to love myself. When I have compassion for myself and my own inner pain, I can find the strength to have compassion for myself and the world again.

I am writing a book called A Course in Miracles for Creative Women that is a simple, non-denominational, creative interpretation of A Course in Miracles. This lesson focuses on the deeper roots of guilt.

Lesson 70

"My salvation comes from me."

Creative Practice

The purpose of this lesson is to understand that nothing outside of you can save you. You create both the sickness and the remedy within yourself. When you are joined with God/Creator within you are inviting all the healing that you need. We can only feel good to the extent that we are connected to God/Creator/Higher Mind. The closer we are to God the better we feel. The further we move into separation away from seeing the Goodness/the God-ness of the world the worse we feel. And it is entirely our choice.

2 times, for 10-15 minutes repeat, "My salvation comes from me," and add a statement to the effect of, "It cannot come from anywhere else."

Close your eyes and think about all the external situations, circumstances, people and self-concepts you have sought to try to make yourself feel better. Think of all the life situations that you thought would "save you". Say, "My salvation cannot come from any of these things (and really sense into the truth that if you had them without a deep connection to your spirit, anything would feel empty). My salvation comes from me and only from me." Your salvation comes from the depth of your connection to God/Creator. The ego mind assumes, "If all of my problems on the outside were changed, I would be ok." However the level of presence to your deeper connection to your Higher Creative Mind is the only thing that can bring you happiness.

Then enter again into meditation, trying once more to travel through the clouds to the light within you. Using the same technique as you did yesterday today, rather than the clouds being your grievances, the clouds are now all of the external things from which you have tried to find salvation - all the outer things you thought would save you from your inner pain.

Frequently remind yourself throughout the day, "My salvation comes from me. Nothing outside of me can hold me back. Within me is the world's salvation and my own." Only your thoughts separate you from joining with God/Creator. You can choose to make room in your mind for this connection.

Spiritual Idea

We are all tempted to lay blame for our problems outside of ourselves. It is part of the human journey to project and blame our our own unprocessed psychological material onto the world.  After the guilt of creating this kind of havoc in the world we might begin to realize that we have the power to feel good in any situation if we choose to take every upset back into ourselves and look at our own inner pain. We stay away from God through the projection of our unfelt feelings and unexamined thoughts onto life and others and then we feel guilty for those thoughts. The Course says, "All guilt is solely an invention of your mind".

It seems devastating and overwhelming at first to take responsibility for all of our problems but if we lay blame outside of ourselves we leave ourselves powerless and victimized. It is very deep work to look inside of our minds and to see our part in everything that happens to us.

If you think of your guilty thoughts as clues to what you are unwilling to feel and own inside of yourself you will start to clear the guilt. Often it feels too painful and we do not think we have the strength to look within so we project it outwards. This makes us feel really guilty and tortured because we have continued to deny our own pain and have continued to avoid ourselves. Letting go of guilt involves asking the higher part of your mind to have compassion for your pain and to gather the strength to feel and process it.

We are free when we know we are solely responsible for our inner well-being and we have to do the inner work of meeting all the parts of ourselves that are in denial of our inner pain. Every time we felt pain in our lives we disassociated from our spiritual selves, we stopped believing in a Spiritual Source. The level of our inner pain is in equal measure to our distance from God and our spiritual, emotional and physical wellness.

Yet nothing outside of ourselves will ever rescue us. We heal the pain to move back towards our Source of Life. When we move into spiritual maturity all that we hoped would saves us begins to fall away. If we are not connected to our deeper Source, no amount of money or good circumstances can make us happy. No one will further our connection to Creator unless we first desire it and say yes to it. We each have tremendous power to move our life towards a deeper connection with God/Creator.

The good news is we are meant to be happy. We become sick with our own unprocessed psychological material and when we do not do our own inner work we contribute to a sick world as well. We can choose to do our inner work and enjoy a life of well-being.

Releasing Guilt

What Do You Need To Learn?

We are in part responsible for everything that happens to us. To heal guilt we need to take total responsibility for out part in things and learn from our mistakes. Consider the truth that we all have many submerged subconscious and unconscious parts of our minds that want things to happen as they do, even if they are negative.

Psychologist Chuck Spezzano teaches that guilt is simply blocked wisdom. It is a way of removing ourself from the lesson to be learned. He says that guilt is "almost wisdom" as it is a way of punishing ourselves for not making a simple correction. In fact our guilt in any area shows us a lesson that we still need to learn.

We never need to be tortured with guilt. We can be responsible for our actions, but not guilty. Once we learn the lesson we are free from guilt. We are innocent again because we know we will not make that mistake again.

Our Unloving Thoughts Torture Us With Guilt

I am writing a book called A Course in Miracles for Creative Women that is a simple, non-denominational, creative interpretation of A Course in Miracles. This lesson focuses on the roots of guilt.

Lesson 39

"My holiness is my salvation."

Creative Practice

You could say that this lesson means in a nutshell, "My wholeness, my oneness with all of life releases me from guilt." When we are focused on our oneness with other people, we are looking for connections, sameness, and we are seeking to meet and join with others. When we look at others through our judgemental ego mind we are separating away from other people and we are judging them. The purpose of this lesson is to get you in touch with your holiness/your divinity, which is your salvation or your release from the hell of ego guilt.

Meditation: 4 times (more are encouraged), for 5 full minutes repeat the idea,  "My holiness is my salvation (from guilt)."  

Close your eyes and slowly search your mind for unloving thoughts.

With each say, "My unloving thoughts about.....are keeping me in hell. My holiness is my salvation." Our unloving thoughts keep us in hell as they produce guilt and guilt feels like hell.

Spiritual Idea

The Course teaches that guilt is at the root of all our problems, and yet at the beginning of our inner journey we don't even suspect guilt as the cause of our pain. We may not understand that unloving thoughts torture us internally with guilt. I sense on an unconscious level we understand the oneness of humanity and can feel how on a deep level we are poisoning and hinder other people with our unloving thoughts. We blame our problems on many things but rarely on our disowned connection to people and our own internal guilt for judging them and condemning them.

The Course teaches that guilt is insane and there is no reason for it. It serves no useful function. If we understood the extent that we manufacture our own guilt through our unloving thoughts and actions we would have no need for the Course.

Unloving thoughts are guilty thoughts. Holiness is wholeness - which is a loving connection to others. Holiness is lovingness. When we realize that our unloving thoughts keep us in our own personal hell, as well as have a very real affect on the well-being of others, we will more easily be able to transform them. We automatically become fearful and guilty when we indulge in our unloving thoughts."

Unloving Thoughts 

One thing I have learned in my own life is that if I think better of people it helps them. If I focus on what is wonderful about them, it always grows and through this practice I have come to enjoy people immensely. Most people I meet have something truly admirable about them. Everyone has a unique gift, a purpose, a strength of character that is waiting to recognized and celebrated. I find if I have an intention to find what is uniquely good about another, they will reveal it quickly to me. I find that it is easy to see the world as a dark and difficult place and indeed I could easily focus on what is wrong with someone's character, but it is much more joyful to focus on the gift, or the good quality that shines  in another.

Living On Purpose

Fear of Our Purpose

We all have a creative vision and a purpose for our life lurking around in the background of our consciousness. Our purpose is a higher quality of being or a heightened attitude or value that we want to live into. It some kind of feeling state that we want to become in our life. If you were to look at all of your dreams and desires, they would have a higher quality of feeling state behind them that you are not fully living into just yet. What feeling state is the most important to you?

The importance of finding the feeling state behind your purpose is so you can begin living into your vision everyday. Creativity, for example is a quality that I feel called to live into and so it becomes a way for me to develop my character and give to the world. Through my creativity I have to learn how to see more deeply into life, to be present, to listen within, to be more spontaneous and patient and trusting and so on. Knowing these feeling qualities that contribute to my purpose helps me start to live into my creative vision.

Perhaps you sense your vision or purpose is coming up and repress it right back down again. Perhaps you think your purpose is too big or too ridiculous to follow through on. Perhaps you tell yourself that you do not have the talents or capacities to live into your purpose. Or maybe you have forgotten your purpose nearly entirely.

We really do have places to fill in life that are uniquely ours to occupy. This may not always involve being famous or even making much money doing it. But our life purpose always involves giving to life and bonding and connecting with other people in some kind and helpful way. You could call your life purpose your unique way of loving life and other people. Ask yourself this question, "How do I uniquely give to life?"

Progressing as a Whole

Having worked in a hospital setting facilitating art for the elderly and interacting with over 700 people including patients and staff, I see that we all have a part to play in the organization of whatever human system that we live and work in. And no one is inessential. Some of the best people I have met are not necessarily the people who are at the top of the organization or who are making the most money. The people who are most on purpose are the one's who are giving to the reality of their day in an authentic, intelligent and mature way that considers the whole of the situation.

African Elder Malidoma Some puts it this way:

"Every person is sent to this outpost called earth to work on a project that is intended to keep the cosmic order healthy. Any person that fails to do what he or she must do energetically stains the cosmic order."

When We Don't Live Into Our Purpose We Become Depressed

Failing to keep the cosmic order healthy in our corner of the world in my sense of it, as a therapist, is the number one cause of depression and anxiety. We are all wired to give to life. What I have found is that we as humans tend to beat ourselves up for not living into some grand looking, far reaching, meaningful purpose that gets us noticed and approved of by others. And so we miss the small essential progressions that must be made in our character and in our practical life so that we can move forward in a daily, incremental way towards a unique way of contribution.

Life essentially requires that we round ourselves out as a whole piece. We are always being called by life situations to grow and to round out our character. We also must progress as a whole regarding other people. This means if we are not moving forward towards our purpose we need to ask, "Who do I most need to give to in my life situation right now? or "What is life waiting for me to give right now so that I can move forward in my growth?" We have to be alert to how we need to change to give meaningfully to the reality of our life as it is right now. This is how we find our place in the fabric of life. This is how we evolve our life, our purpose and the world. We sense into what is required of us in the present moment cosmic order by one small, kind act at a time.

This is how we evolve as families, as work groups, and as larger and evolving systems. Perhaps the biggest mistake people make is thinking that they can progress as an individual entity and that they are not part of a larger network of connection that needs to progress along with the whole.

Living Into Purpose in Increments

I think when we are creative people we often see things years and years in advance and it can take a long time to live into a big vision. Life a human being is often slow moving and we most often progress by increments. For myself, having long been a prolific creator, I have had to often take side steps in other directions to get my family life, my emotional life and my practical life in order before I can take the next step in my creative life.

I have had to take the time to appreciate and celebrate my life the way it is, even though as a visionary thinker, I can see the potentials I have not yet lived into. If you were to look at your life 20 years ago you may see many things that you only dreamed of are now a given, practical reality for you now, so have patience with yourself. Just because your visions are not here now does not mean you cannot live into them everyday and make your life full of meaning.

Lousia May Alcott the writer of Little Women and a "transcendentalist" (early new age spiritualist) - in the earlier part of the century wrote:

" Far away there in the sunshine are my highest aspirations. I may not reach them, but I can look up and see their beauty, believe in them, and try to follow where they lead. "

I used to feel discouraged by this quote when I was younger because I expected the life I wanted to manifest instantly. And yet I was also encouraged because I sensed that I needed to have the time to evolve slowly and to make the needed changes in my character and in my family and in my working world, to be able to live the vision and purpose that I have for my life. Living into what is meaningful for us what being "on purpose" means. 

Living into what is meaningful for you could be as simple as making an attitude change even though at the moment you are not seeing your purpose "on the outside" just yet. If your attitude is one of impatience or frustration that you are not living the life you want, perhaps you could see how it would be to live into appreciation for what is right in front of you. What attitude would you change so that you can begin living into your purpose? A good question to ask yourself is to ask is "Who would I have to be to live my vision in the world?" Then start to build your character into that. Change is possible.

Change Is Only Found in Taking Action

Aster Barnwell, writer and spiritual teacher describes how creating deep changes in our being begins by taking action. Action is absolutely necessary for change and it does not have to be grand and sweeping action. It can be a small daily practice of living into who we want to become. As Aster puts it, we start to live into the higher aspects of our nature because they recalibrate our being - we begin to sculpt a "new me".

"Our hormonal and nerve impulses will change to correspond to the new person we are becoming. Once we have achieved this degree of change we are able to do "good deeds" without any expectation of reward. Good deeds are now a natural and spontaneous expression of our beings as a result of our consciousness becoming established at a higher level. We can start by making small changes in our life by focusing on little things."

Understanding Anger

A Psychological Model of Anger

There comes a time in all of our lives when we need to psychologically explore and learn how to express and understand our anger. Our anger has several facets. It can be a protection against our hurt and vulnerable parts, and it can also be a projection onto another of what we do not like about ourselves. Anger can also be a suppression of our essential passion, purpose, and initiatory strength in the world.

It is necessary to build a strong separate/ego self to survive in the practical world. Our psyches are made up of different parts, sometimes called subpersonalities. Each part has it's own perspective, feelings, memories, goals and motivations. Let's explore two of the parts that we all have inside, the inner child and the protector/guard in relationship to anger.

You can also read a good article on anger here for therapists by Jay Earley PhD. I have simplified his understanding here and added my own understandings.

Anger to Protect Against Inner Pain

The inner protector/inner guard's job is to handle the world and protect against the pain of your disowned and suppressed pain from childhood. Your inner guard protects against pain in a variety of ways - closing down feelings, anger, caretaking, pleasing others, avoiding situations that might evoke a trigger of pain, judgment of self and others (projection), and a variety of defense mechanisms.

The inner guard uses anger to defend against and avoid the pain of exiled feelings. The key to working with your protector/guard is to build a relationship with it from the aware, witnessing part of your mind, which you can call your Self or your Higher Mind. The Self/Higher Mind can ask the Protector/Guard what pain it is protecting.

Your higher mind can ask the guard to talk about the childhood incident or family situation where it shut down from the pain and took on the burden of pain and negative beliefs. The Self witnesses the story and the release of feelings around the story. Or it can simply be conscious and feel the pain until it is gone. Stored childhood pain is often the root of depression. Once the original pain is finally released the protector can let go of its anger.

Appreciating your anger as mechanism to protect you from hurt and pain builds an inner compassion. In some cases releasing or unburdening the anger in an expressive way in therapy, in art-making, or with a trusted other can help dissipate the charge that is covering up the inner pain and make room to feel the inner hurt that the anger is masking.

Suppressed and Disowned Anger

Often however, even our anger gets suppressed by another protector/guard, especially if anger was not allowed in our families when we were growing up. Often we have type of guard that manages our expression of anger and suppresses it. So now we have 3 layers - a managing guard, an angry guard and an exiled child part of our mind that is holding onto our suppressed pain. If a managing part of ourselves habitually suppresses our anger it is helpful to find a conscious and healthy outlet.

Years ago for example when I was going through my divorce found that going for long runs helped me work through my anger on a physical and emotional level. Often in therapy anger can be exerted in a controlled way to help a release, such as punching or yelling into a pillow. We can express anger without danger and often when we do, the original pain that the anger was protecting, will also release, often with tears and a sense of relief.

When to Express Anger and When to Witness It:

Sometimes anger needs to be witnessed and in some cases discharged.

1. Witnessing Anger - Your protector/guard serves a defensive purpose and needs to be listened to and understood. Encouraging the protector/guard to express anger will simply encourage its defense system. Your protector/guard needs to learn how to express anger constructively and learn to delve into the roots of the hurt, heartbreak and pain that the anger is protecting. Feeling and releasing the original pain disassembles the guard’s defenses, as there becomes less of a need for protective anger.

2. Expressing Anger - Exiled anger, such as anger originating in harmful childhood situations, may need to be witnessed by the Higher Mind and a trained therapist or trusted other, and spoken by the child self that originally shut down it's anger. When intense anger has been suppressed for a lifetime, often it is helpful to free up and give permission for the expression of anger in a safe therapeutic environment while your Higher Mind witnesses the process. This reduces the intense charge of your anger and allows the therapeutic work to continue with more ease. Disowned anger needs to be reclaimed and expressed outwardly as a way of accessing inner strength, passion for life and healthy and necessary assertiveness to get through the vissitudes of life in a healthy way.

A Spiritual Model of Anger

I have been writing a book called A Course in Miracles for Creative Women and these particular lessons explore the spiritual roots of anger. On a deep and spiritual level anger is a form of projection and through deep inner accountability we can often heal our anger at its root. When we are angry we are burying the things we do not like about ourselves and then project them out onto the world around us.

Psychologist Chuck Session writes it this way:

"What we see in another is what we have projected, what we think we are. The negative things we see in people are what we actually believe about you. We know this because when we can forgive those things within you, they no longer seem to bother us. What we see in another is what we think about you. If we do not change our judgment on another person, we will be stuck with what we see in them."

When you are feeling angry these two lessons may help deepen your understanding of anger.

Lesson 21

"I am determined to see things differently."

Creative Practice

5 times, for 1 full minute each - repeat the idea, "I am determined to see things differently." Then close your eyes and search your mind deeply for any situation at any time that arouses anger in you, no matter how mild.

Hold each person or situation in you mind and say, "I am determined to see - specify person or situation - differently." Be very specific, even to the point of naming specific attributes in specific people that anger you.

The degree that we feel anger does not matter. Whether it is mild irritation or intense anger that you feel - nothing is too small to include in this practice. This exercise is meant to get underneath the small irritations and see the truth that there is no small anger. Anger is anger.

The Course says,  "You will become increasingly aware that a slight twinge of annoyance is nothing but a veil drawn over intense fury."

Spiritual Idea

All forms of anger arise from the same source within the psyche. Allen Watson points out about how some schools of psychology maintain that everyone carries around a deeply suppressed, primal anger. Underneath our subconscious lies an intense and violent fury. The Course metaphysically views anger as a deep, primal self-hatred that is buried and denied. The self-protective ego that was born in fear and separation cannot love itself and this makes it endlessly angry. Only when we turn to the Source of our own unique souls can we find the love that is ours.

The displacement of anger onto others is called projection. We are enraged at ourselves for separating from the Divine Source and we feel a submerged, salient anger at ourselves that we in our ego selves want to project outwardly. We are endlessly trying to prove that the anger we feel is caused by something outside of ourselves but it is really the roots of own disconnection from Creator and our own creative souls that fills us with unjustified fury.

Lesson 33

"There is another way of looking at the world."

Creative Practice

2 times, morning and evening, for 5 full minutes go back and forth from glancing around your outer world to closing your eyes and observing your inner world. While doing so repeat the idea unhurriedly” There is another way of looking at the world." Regard both inner and outer worlds with equal casualness, and detachment.

The instant any situation disturbs you apply the idea specifically, saying, "There is another way of looking at this." Do so immediately, rather than waiting until you have tried to fix things on the outside. If your feelings do not clear up right away, don't give up. Spend a minute or more repeating the sentence over and over, closing your eyes and concentrating on the words you are saying.

Spiritual Idea

We can consider with this lesson that do not need to view life through our defense system. Indeed when we do, we actually create the very thing we are trying to avoid. People feel our defenses and ultimately we unconsciously put out the vibe, "stay away from my sore spots - and so we continually feel separate. When we look at life "my way" we miss the Larger Picture and actually miss the creativity of seeing life in a myriad of different ways. If we took the time to look at a life event from the point of view from each person involved we would begin to experience life as more multidimensional.

If we saw the world from a friendly perspective and understood that everyone flourishes with love and kind attention and we could extend that love, we can shift how we see the world - and indeed affect the outcome of any situation. Our attitudes and perspectives make a very really contribution to outcomes in our daily life. We can assert that love is here and it is up to us to extend it. And it is this way of looking at the world that creates a New World.

Forgiveness

Forgiveness requires that we delve deeply into our own minds instead of trying to change somebody else's mind. I have been reflecting a great deal on forgiveness this past while because as I have healed and integrated many apects of my psyche I find forgiveness has become much easier and more natural. Whereas in the past I have struggled a great deal to forgive those who I believed had "wronged me".

Consider the following quote by psychologist Chuck Spezzano:

"Everyone we have grievances with, reflects self-concepts within ourselves that we are attacking. They are parts of our own mind - what we think of ourselves in a subconscious or even unconscious part of our mind."

If we were to look into the deepest recesses of our mind we would find where we are actually doing what we are blaming the other person for. This is how the psyche projects and creates havoc in our outer world. We project onto others what we feel guily for in the deepest, most hidden parts of our own mind.

Finding and reconciling with the hidden parts of our psyche is the work of psychological and spiritual growth. There is a level of consciousness that we can reach that is problem free. I often have moments in my day, usually when I am walking in the woods where I suddenly say to myself in a burst of clarity, "I have no problems!" This is not to say that I don't have issues that need to be dealt with but I no longer treasure and create my problems so that I can preoocupy myself away from what I need to offer to life. Consider that we create problems so we can withdraw and so we do not have to make the effort to give the strength of our gifts to life.

When we don't forgive the people that we have grievances with we get to use another person's behavior to distance and separate and not make an effort to give to the situation. We get to remain a victim. As psychologist Chuck Spezzano describes it - being a victim and not forgiving allows us to do what we want to do, or not do something we do not want to do, instead of offering the strength of our gifts that are needed in each situation.

For the past year I have been writing an ambitious and devoted non-denominational tome called A Course in Miracles for Creative Women which is a simple version of the daily lessons for the creative mind.

The following is my simple and creative interpretation of one of the ACIM lessons for creative women.

Lesson 62

"Forgiveness is my function as the light of the world."

Creative Practice

Meditation: as frequently as possible (suggestion: every hour on the hour),

for 1-2 minutes tell yourself (with eyes closed if the situation permits): "Forgiveness is my function as the light of the world. I would fulfill my function that I may be happy."

If your mind wanders, repeat the idea and add: "I would remember this because I want to be happy."

We practice these higher ideas so we can have a happier day. And this is not a selfish practice. When we forgive we bring peace and happiness to everyone around us.

 

Spiritual Idea

If you were the light of the world, what would you do? You would forgive everyone in your life. Forgiveness simply means not judging people for their "small" behaviors - their fearful, survival, selfish acts and instead sensing into what is great about them.

 

We forgive others so that we can remember the truth of ourselves. When we remember the truth about ourselves, we remember the truth about everyone. If we see something that we cannot forgive in another we are really seeing what we cannot accept and love within ourselves.

 

From our egos we do not know how to forgive. Forgiveness is antithetical to maintaining a separate self. Forgiveness is spiritual process that simply says, "I love you and I see what is beautiful about you. Whether you change or not is up to you."

 

Forgiveness is releasing all judgment. When we forgive, we call upon on our own inner greatness. When we see, focus on and judge weakness in other people, we automatically make our own weakness larger and more acute in our own life.

 

Forgiveness is really a refined sense of acceptance. As the light of the world - as the embodiment of our own personal greatness - we are not here to teach, fix or even help. We are here to see the particular goodness of each individual and celebrate that and invite it to become stronger through our love of it. The Course says so aptly, "Forgiveness is the demonstration that you are the light of the world. Through your forgiveness does the truth about yourself return to your memory." In forgiving others, you find your own greatness.