The Undefended Self: Living the Pathwork

“Through the gateway of feeling your pain lies your pleasure and joy.”

Developing faith is a gradual process.

Further, we are attached to our negativity as a perverse way to punish our parents and life. We choose misery as a weapon to make others feel bad. We are angry that life requires us to grow up and take care of ourselves; and we choose instead to try to punish the parents who did not take perfect care of us long ago.

An understanding of negative intentionality—the inner choice of a part of the soul to stay negative toward life—usually comes only after much personal work. We must first develop and learn to identify with our compassionate, objective observer self (as presented in chapter 3) and then learn about our particular misconceptions about reality, our “im

This state of relaxed openness to the cosmic flow of life is rare, as our usual condition is a contracted ego state of fear and refusal to surrender our pride and self-will. So we all live in various stages of numbness, unavailable to the full pulsation of our Life Force. And yet, since human beings cannot live without pleasure, we find our pleasur

The transformation of the lower self is the heroic journey for our times. The hero’s path for our day is to go inward, not outward; to travel deep into the basements of our inner darkness, where we will meet and transform our devils and demons.

Actually, her mate was ready to love her, but she was unable to accept his love because she was focused so hard on trying to “win” it. This basic assumption that she could “succeed” to make someone love her had to be challenged so that she could finally relax and receive his genuine affection.

"The need for protective love has a certain validity for the child, but if this attitude is maintained into adulthood, it is no longer valid. Since he does not cultivate the faculty of self-responsibility and independence, his need for love and his dependency can actually make the person helpless. He uses his entire psychic strength in order t

The mask of power is an attempt to get control of life and others by always appearing completely independent, aggressive, competent, domineering. Falsely reducing life to a struggle for domination, the power mask is attempting to escape from the vulnerability experienced as a child. Security and self-esteem rest on winning in all situations and bec

In addition to hopelessness, another primary indicator of an image is a pervasive sense of shame, a feeling of not being worthy or deserving. A specific shame lives in the inner child of all of us, stemming from the time we discovered, with a great shock, that our parents and our world were not perfect. The child has a great need to believe that he