By Phoenesse
The podcast currently has 21 episodes available.
Let’s go deeply inside the phrase ‘let go and let God,’ a much-loved phrase in which there’s more than meets the eye…“Letting go” means to let go of the limited ego, with its narrow understanding, its preconceived ideas and its demanding self-will. It means letting go of our suspicions and misconceptions, our fears and lack of trust…It means letting go of the tightly held attitude that says, in so many words, “Life must go exactly according to my plan”…The ultimate aim of “letting God” is to activate God from our heart center, from the innermost place of our being where God speaks to us if we’re willing to listen…
So there can’t be any hard knots of energy prohibiting the divine flow, such as our self-will creates through its distrusting, insisting, anxious forcing current. These qualities belie an imbalance of trust. What’s being trusted is the little, limited ego, while the greater divine self—the Higher Self—is being denied and pushed away…We’d rather trust our own false gods—namely, our ego—than trust the process of letting go…
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Read Pearls, Chapter 17: Discovering the Key to Letting Go & Letting God
Read Original Pathwork® Lecture: #213 The Spiritual and Practical Meaning of "Let Go, Let God"
When it comes to mastering leadership, we have many conflicting attitudes. First of all, we envy leadership when we encounter it in others…We reactivate our dormant reactions towards anyone in authority, dragging obsolete problems out of hiding. We make an enemy of anyone who is a leader in the truest sense of the word…In our envy of the leaders, we want to become the leader. But this undeveloped, childish part overshadows the parts that are more developed. And it doesn’t want to accept any of the responsibilities that go along with being a leader…
We have another common conflict with leadership: we want a leader who will benefit us personally…This greater leader—really more like a biased personal god—is supposed to alter the laws of life for us, as if by magic…
As long as we refuse to fulfill the natural requirements for leadership ourselves—in whatever way we are called to do so—we have no right to resent or envy leadership in others. Yet we do. The word that describes this phenomenon is “transference”—we react to this super-power the way we react to our parents…The equation is simple. If we don’t assume leadership over our own life, we will need to find a leader who will run our life for us. For no one can live without leadership; we become a boat without a rudder…
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Read Pearls, Chapter 16: Mastering the Art of Stepping into Leadership
Read Original Pathwork® Lecture: #237 Leadership – The Art of Transcending Frustration
In whatever form it shows up, crisis is always attempting to break down old structures that are based on negativity and wrong thinking. It shakes loose ingrained habits and breaks up frozen energy patterns so new growth can happen. Indeed, the tearing down process is painful, but without it, transformation is unthinkable. This is the spiritual meaning of crisis.
Change is an inevitable fact of life; where there’s life, there’s never-ending change. Full stop. But when we live in fear and negativity, we resist change…So then crisis comes along as a means for breaking up stagnant negativity—so we can let go of it. But the more painful the experience is, the more our ego—that will-directed part of our consciousness—attempts to block the change…In the areas then where we don’t resist change, our lives will be relatively crisis-free. Wherever we resist change, crisis is sure to follow…
Just as a thunderstorm serves to clear the air when certain conditions in the atmosphere collide, crises are natural, balance-restoring events. But it is possible to grow without creating “dark nights” for ourselves. The price we need pay for this is self-honesty…
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Read Pearls, Chapter 15: What’s the Real Spiritual Meaning of Crisis?
Read Original Pathwork® Lecture: #183 The Spiritual Meaning of Crisis
To start, we need to understand the three fundamental layers of the personality. We must involve each in the process of meditation for it to be truly effective. The three levels are: 1) the ego, with our ability to think and take action. 2) The destructive inner child, with its hidden ignorance and omnipotence, and immature demands and destructiveness. 3) The Higher Self, with its superior wisdom, courage and love. This allows for a more balanced and complete outlook on situations…
What we want to do during the process of meditation, in order to be most effective, is leverage the ego. It activates both the immature destructive aspects and the superior Higher Self…It’s actually a sign of great progress when we can allow the belligerent little monster inside us to surface in our inner awareness. Being able to acknowledge this destructive part of ourselves in all its egotistical and irrational glory indicates a measure of self-acceptance and growth…
Many people meditate but they neglect this two-sidedness and therefore miss out on the opportunity for transformation and integration. Their Higher Self may be activated but the unfree, closed off areas remain neglected. The work of opening and healing, unfortunately, doesn’t happen by itself…
Our goal is not to slay the destructive aspects of ourselves. No, these parts need instruction so they can be freed and allowed to grow up; then salvation can become a real thing. As we do this, our ego will, sure enough, move steadily closer to becoming unified with the greater Higher Self.
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Read Pearls, Chapter 14: Meditating to Connect Three Voices: The Ego, the Lower Self & the Higher Self
Read Original Pathwork® Lecture: #182 The Process of Meditation (Meditation for Three Voices: Ego, Lower Self, Higher Self)
For people walking a path of self-discovery—whether through therapy, spiritual counseling or the like—the work tends to concentrate on waking up our own inner being, bringing all our inner obstacles into our awareness so we can transform them. This is important and necessary work. We need to get to know our Lower Self and how it operates if we want make another choice. For we are basically a big electromagnetic field that always follows the like-attracts-like rule. Bottom line: we need some information about the three basic principles of evil so we have a more complete and clear view of our lives and what we’re up against…
They all contribute to the aim of the dark forces, which is to alienate us and all of creation from God…We’ve come a long way. People are opening up to accepting God as a creative principle, even though we may hesitate to accept that principles of evil also exist. We drag our feet more still though in accepting that all principles manifest on Earth as entities. We fear being called childish or primitive by those who are too smart to believe in such things…
Knowledge that we are surrounded and influenced by angels does not need to lead us to worshipping angels and overlooking Christ, who was God’s human manifestation and who is the ultimate source of all the help we need. We also don’t need to skip over making a connection with Jesus Christ, as that is what opens a direct line of communication between us and God. Being aware of the presence of spiritual guides and angels also shouldn’t cause us to fear the devils, or dark angels, we attract from time to time…
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Pearls, Chapter 13: Uncloaking the Three Faces of Evil: Separation, Materialism and Confusion
Read Original Pathwork® Lecture: #248 Three Principles of the Forces of Evil – Personification of Evil
There is a subject of great dispute: positive thinking. As many believe, it is indeed essential for anyone who wants to mature spiritually. Unfortunately, it is often wrongly understood and therefore applied in the wrong way. For there is a wrong way to think positively.
One of the fundamental building blocks of any spiritual path is developing clean and sound thoughts…Unclean thoughts then build disharmonious creations that lead, eventually, to impacting our destiny…
It’s always so tempting for us to push uncomfortable thoughts out of our awareness. But we don’t realize that those thoughts then have the power to do infinitely more harm than any conscious thought ever could—even our worst ones…When a thought is conscious, we can deal with it. When it smolders in our unconscious, it’s like a time bomb that builds highly destructive forms around itself…
As a result, diligent students of positive thinking do the one thing that is the very worst for them. They push all negative thoughts out of their mind and into their unconscious, completely disregarding the discrepancy between what they actually think or feel and what they want to think or feel. All in an intention to not harbor negative thoughts…Positive thinking tries to convince us it's out-of-sight, out-of-mind. Well-meant as this may be, it’s a lie. And this is the real tragedy of the wrong kind of positive thinking...
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Read Pearls, Chapter 12: The Right and Wrong Way to Think Positively
Read Original Pathwork® Lecture: #13 Positive Thinking: the Right and the Wrong Kind
Orderliness is directly connected with divine harmony. And, like so many things, there is both an inner version and an outer version; there’s also a divine version, order, and a corresponding distortion, disorder.
In the grand scheme of things, inner order is what we experience when we are fully conscious. When there is no more unconscious material left in our soul…Any lack of awareness is an indication of disorder somewhere in our soul. When we’re not aware, we’re not in truth; things slip away into our unconscious and we become confused…
The disorderly mind will become frantic trying to impose a false order. Yet this only heightens our level of discomfort and disorderliness. It’s like shoving garbage under our furniture so no one will see it. But the whole place reeks of the hidden waste…
Our resistance can be surprisingly strong. When we kick over to compulsive orderliness, we create as much trouble and hardship as if we were surrounding ourselves in filth…The first step in becoming aware of this connection between orderliness and our inner landscape is to tune into how much we are disturbed by disorder; feel the tension and anxiety it creates…
Interestingly, the part of us that resists is well aware that freeing ourselves of the burden of disorder will make our inner work much easier. And that’s exactly what the resistance wants to avoid. Think about it. The disorganized person can’t concentrate; same for the compulsively orderly one…
So someone who has their act pulled together is going to be an orderly person in their outer habits. They will be clean, not just in their body, but in their handling of daily life…Making messes then comes from our unconscious negative intention—our will to stay stuck. This may be a whole new vantage point from which to view disorder.
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Read Pearls, Chapter 11: Bringing Ourselves to Order, Inside and Out
Read Original Pathwork® Lecture: #205 Order as a Universal Principle
We face our first conflict with authority at a very young age. Parents, siblings, relatives and later teachers all represent authority whose job is seemingly to say No…So there’s a barrier between the child and the adult in charge…On one hand, the child wants the parent’s love, and on the other, the child rebels against being restricted…Authority, then, is the hostile force of an enemy locking us behind prison bars and causing frustration…
The child then develops an impatient longing to grow up and become an adult so these restricting walls will go away. But then the child actually does grow up and the face merely changes. Now, instead of parents and teachers, it takes the form of society, the government, police officers, bosses and other people in positions of power we must now depend upon. Same conflict, different day…
We can build common ground with others by seeing how their reaction lives in us. But not setting ourselves up as the judge. This balance is tricky to attain; we can only find it through solving our own inner struggle against authority…
Common criminals must be prevented from continuing their law-breaking ways, and this must be done by imperfect law-enforcing establishments…We can all contribute to building a world in which vicious circles get broken before they result in wrongdoing; the cornerstone for this work is to examine our own reactions to authority. For left unchecked, they can set an avalanche rolling.
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Read Pearls, Chapter 10: Two Rebellious Reactions to Authority
Read Original Pathwork® Lecture: #46 Authority
Whether we realize it or not, we associate a joyful life with a life of perfection. We can’t enjoy life if we’re not perfect—or so we think. Nor can we enjoy our neighbors or our lovers or our situation in life. So let’s pause right here because this is one of humanity’s biggest bonehead beliefs. Essentially, we demand perfection, and that’s just not what’s happening…
It’s time to connect the dots between how our need for perfection alienates us from our true selves. Thi in turn hoses up our chances for a joyful life. No one’s shooting unrealistically for 100% joy here, but it could be possible to have a lot more joy than we do now…Only by accepting that we are imperfect beings can we grow out of our imperfections and enjoy the experience of being who we really are, right now…
People, we don’t have to be problem-free. In truth, we cannot be. We don’t have to be perfect to live fully, have more awareness and enjoy more fulfilling experiences. Accepting our imperfections, in fact, makes us less imperfect and flexible enough to change…The trouble, as is often the case, is our dualistic either/or attitude. Either we strive for immediate perfection—ignoring what’s still not perfect—or we give up…
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Read Pearls, Chapter 9: Why Flubbing on Perfection is the Way to Find Joy
Read Original Pathwork® Lecture: #97 Perfectionism Obstructs Happiness – Manipulation of Emotions
In the beginning was the word. Words, in fact, are the blueprint necessary for building any structure…Nothing in creation can exist unless a word has been spoken, known, held, believed in and committed to…
Holy Scripture starts by postulating that in the beginning was—or actually is—the word. The word is eternal; it will always be. It is from God’s spoken word that all creation came into being, including our personalities…So what do we do with this truth? Well, for one thing, we can become aware that every situation we experience in life is the product of words we ourselves have spoken…
Our goal: establish a one-pointed word…They are no less powerful when they are not articulated well. Vague and hazy words need to be crystallized and brought out from behind the smoke screen…The silent word is not necessarily less powerful than one that is uttered. In fact, words that wash across our vocal chords may well have much less energy than the ones held inside that are rooted in strong beliefs…
We can tune into the underground noise and observe and identify our words. Then we will gain a much better understanding of how we create our lives…Holding onto a nihilistic belief about a terrible world may seem preferable to seeing our own painful belief that we’re not worthy of the joy of life. But folks, if we believe this, we’re not in truth…
Until we unwind all this for ourselves, we may be convinced that the positive words spoken on the surface are all that count. We might then use the fact of our opposite experiences as proof that life is unfair and untrustworthy. That our own inner processes have no bearing on what goes on. People, we then think, are victims of life…Once we go a little further in our work though, we will uncover our unfortunate self-hate and our lack of faith in our own Higher Self. Knowing this information will help in our search for the imposters. Those are the parts of ourselves who still speak on our behalf but don’t represent our best interest.
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Read Pearls, Chapter 8: Articulating the Power of the Word
Read Original Pathwork® Lecture: #233 The Power of the Word
The podcast currently has 21 episodes available.