Pathwork, One Means, Not an End
I have too often treated Pathwork as an end rather than a means. Something to be learned, taught, and shared rather than something to be practiced, along with other means, in order to grow and mature personally and spiritually.
And practicing Pathwork, I notice, leads me to seeing and trusting inner truth, feeling and trusting love, and deeper experiences of life in its infinite palette of feelings. In short coming fully into my selfhood in the context of God’s Cosmos. Yes, Pathwork provides me with perspectives and concepts such as Higher Self, Lower Self, Mask Self, Idealized Self Image, Negative Intentionality, Images, and the like, but these are merely symbols on a map that help me experience the terrains and vistas of my life journey. My job is not to study and memorize the map but rather to live the journey. In the end I can throw the map away, like taking training wheels off my bike, and live fully and freely into life.
This is important for me to keep in mind so that I do not get too hooked on studying Pathwork perspectives, as helpful as I find them. Rather I need to practice my daily review, practice confronting aspects of myself that block my experiencing life as it is, do processing work of areas of life where I am stuck, do body work, have helper sessions, practice daily meditation, prayer and all the other practices suggested in the Pathwork lectures and elsewhere.
As I let go of the Pathwork map and consider trusting my inner truth, refining my own opinions, I feel my fear arise. In some ways I have become attached to outer authority, usually not individuals, but certainly the bible for many decades of my life and more recently Pathwork Lectures. I have come to not trust my inner wisdom, my Divine Essence buried below my more troublesome aspects. But the Pathwork lectures, and so many other spiritual teachings, state over and over again that my need is to let go of the Pathwork teachings per se, the Pathwork map, and find and come to trust my own deep internal compass and map, my Divine Center. In those moments when I do find my core, and then surrender to God within, I notice that I experience great freedom and spontaneity. It’s as if I move from “paint-by-numbers” to being a master painter painting broad strokes across the canvas of my life.
I can feel the thrill and freedom of my life journey in this statement, and yet I still face my fears, fears that come up when I forget that my humanness means I shall have many falls and bruises along the way, physically, intellectually and psychologically, and that in experiencing these falls, as painful as they can be, I learn and grow. I pray for the courage not to let those necessarily painful learning experiences block or dampen my intentions to live life fully. And freely. In Truth and Love.