Pathwork: Is it better to feel difficult feelings or to try not to dwell on them?

By Mary Anne Bourque, Pathwork Helper

You can also read this article in the November 2019 issue of Tone Magazine.

Have you wondered if there could be something more to life than what you are now living?  Maybe you are at a point where you feel there must be more than the rushing and daily routine. All the outer demands and expectations of family, work, and friends can leave you overwhelmed and feeling you have no time for you; no time to hear yourself.  At the end of the day you are left feeling bad about yourself. What would you like to change?  Often we look outside ourselves to answer this question – the job, the partner, the parents.  This is an invitation to check in with yourself.

As you listen into the voices inside, a key place to listen is under the ones that want to blame others for what is not going well. You will hear a voice of judgment towards yourself and at its side, fear that you are not good enough, not lovable enough. These are the very places we want to run away from.  We do so, by trying harder to be good enough in all the ways we fear we aren’t.  This is the very place where we are asked to soften into self-acceptance.

At the next Pathwork Open Lecture on November 13/19, we will explore the conundrum that Pathwork Lecture 190 points out:  “the acceptance of your hate will make you more loving, the acceptance of your weakness will make you stronger, the acceptance of your pain will allow you to be more blissful”.  Such a paradox.

In the lecture we are also encouraged to befriend this judgment and fear, with a desire to understand its purpose. “The capacity to own up to being fallible, human, vulnerable, irrational, wrong, needy, defenseless, weak, and unhappy must, by necessity, increase your capacity to be strong, truly right and not self-righteous, truly independent and fulfilled. The admission of heretofore apparently inadmissible feelings is the bridge to inner unity and fulfilling self-expression of life “.

In our evening together we will examine these concepts more closely along with a new understanding of our laziness or procrastination. “There is an intimate connection between the problem of laziness and feelings that have not been experienced.”  We all have an amazing life force energy that is covered by stagnant feelings, the feelings we have suppressed. The Pathwork lectures describe tools that guide us to clearly see and help us express our blocked feelings.  The real gift is that these blocked feelings also release a life force energy; energy that will be our source of living fully.