Frozen Life Center Becomes Alive

By The Pathwork Guide

Greetings all my friends, those whom I know well and those who are new here. Blessings for everyone. May the strength of love and truth, as it is coming forth here, help you wherever you are within yourself, within your own path. And if you have not yet made a deliberate decision to develop and to find your true self, to find your life center, so that your life can be what it is potentially meant to be, these words may help you toward such a vital inner decision.

This lecture is directly related to where most of my friends are on this path. I might start off by saying that the progress so many of you have made is a tremendously joyful reality. For the first time you gain a personal experience of this path being a reality that leads truly to bliss. For the first time you experience that the key to every conceivable possibility of happiness lies within you, that you harbor the richest treasure: life in its essence. Quite a few of you have come to the point where you have made the remarkable discovery that what you know in theory is now an experienced reality. You have experienced your own inner life center -- the goal of all pathwork. You have thus seen what a world of difference it is to hear about, to read about, or to intellectually know about something, and to actually emotionally experience it. After much effort and searching, a number of you have arrived at this point.

Often man sets out with the wrong expectations. He believes that when he comes in touch with his spiritual self he will suddenly be transformed into a different kind of human being. In fact, all his fruitless and painful striving goes into this wrong direction. Such striving makes the path so much longer and unnecessarily painful. The words have been said, but people seem unable to hear and understand them: you must accept yourself and experience yourself as you are now, even if it means to go through pain, fear, and anger. This experience cannot be avoided. Only by learning to do this can you come to your life center. By this very act of self-acceptance, the unwelcome emotions and attitudes begin to gradually dissolve. All strife ends when you discover self-acceptance.

By the unpronounced but nevertheless distinct expectation that you must first be different, so that you can avoid going through the unwelcome feelings, you put obstacles in the way. Those of you who have made the wonderful experience of your life center know that it is precisely by accepting the negative emotions that you dissolve them. Right when you experience the negative feelings, you simultaneously begin to feel a new aliveness which you have never tasted before. This is truly a wonderful, encouraging, and strengthening experience after which you can never be the same again.

But why is it that you cannot feel this life center in yourself? Why do you have to grope so ardently in order to experience something so deep within you? Why is it concealed from you for so long? Why can you find it only indirectly? The fact is that what at one time was a shock, you have proceeded to anaesthetize, to numb. The greatest distress a human being can experience is not hurt, as you now know, it is unfeelingness, inner deadness. At one time, this deadness was meant to be a protection. Protection against fear and discomfort, which the individual was not able to cope with. At such a time, when one is very young, this may, indeed, be a temporary solution. For an immature mind, with its limitations, is surely not equipped to meet and handle certain emotional experiences and comprehend them in a realistic way. Therefore a temporary anesthesia is needed for the child to survive. But if it continues, it is indeed a most harmful process.

When something alive is deadened, made immune to respond, all experience stops. This deadness is what creates the hopelessness all human beings suffer from, to some degree. This may be quite conscious, or it may be concealed from awareness. It is without a doubt the greatest cross to bear.

As I said, numbness dulls pain and fear. But in doing so it dulls life itself. It makes immobile what is supposed to move. The phenomenon of dying on the physical, material world that you are living in is an expression of many inner attitudes. In the course of these lectures I have discussed a number of them. One of the most important ones is the desire not to move. This can be verified by many people. It expresses itself in your awareness as laziness, as inertia, as apathy, as even being consciously aware of not wanting to do things, not wanting to move your body, mind, and feelings. You do not want to venture forth into life, into experience. This attitude creates deadness in you, and, therefore, it ultimately creates the phenomenon of physical dying. Since the will and one's attitude are always the cause of all outer happenings, it is the same way with the universal earth phenomenon of physical dying. It is a direct result of wanting to be unfeeling, hence dead, hence non-moving.

When the life center is deadened, the desire to move dies as well. Therefore you can see for yourself that as people grow older, the desire to move diminishes. This is usually explained away by saying: "Well, this is a natural phenomenon of aging." This is, once again, reversing cause and effect. Aging itself is a process of dying and is a manifestation and an effect, rather than a cause. Dying is a result of somewhere and somehow not quite wanting to live, of rejecting aspects of living, such as feeling, breathing, and moving. If and when an entity reaches in his evolution the point of totally embracing and accepting life with all its aspects, dying will no longer be. Anyone who suffers from the fear of death should try to understand these words on a deep level of personal experience. He should discover that part in himself where he desires not to be alive, not to move, not to feel. When he thus connects with his own rejection of life, he will no longer feel helpless in the fear of death. Something will change about it.

You can also observe that those human beings who stay young long do not lose the desire to move. It is wrong to state that they do not lose the desire to move because they stay young for a long time. It is correct to state that they remain young because they continue to want to move. He who does not want to move must understand the cause of it, which I discuss here.

The fear of moving can be ascertained relatively easily once you question yourself in this respect. Once you cease to explain things away and you confront yourself with simple questions and answers in this respect, you will be easily aware of your fear of moving. You may first feel it as a simple desire to be deadly immobile, which is really no pleasure at all. Pleasure is to be alive and moving. When you discover your fear of moving, your distaste of doing so, your reluctance, or your resistance -- physically as well as mentally and emotionally -- you have discovered the cause of living in a sphere of consciousness where death is inevitable. You hasten death to the degree you refute movement on all levels of your being. Movement is refuted because movement awakens the deadness. When the life center is feared because pain and fear cannot be dealt with, numbness is supposed to be the solution. Movement removes the numbness; therefore movement is rejected, in the ignorance that non-movement is the beginning of the dying process.

Those of you who have come in contact lately -- many of you for the first time -- with a heretofore deadened life center, know what a tremendous experience this is. Yes, you first experience pain. But as you learn to accept this pain -- or whatever other emotion may come up at first -- you also discover the enormous difference between pain and pain, between fear and fear, between anger and anger. It is the difference between an accepted emotion and a rejected one. When you accept pain, it is not half as painful, or as anguishing. It never produces anxiety, tension, hopelessness, bitterness, torment. It never puts you into a trap from which there is no way out. It never closes life. Even while you experience the pain, there is life in you, bubbling, wonderful life, pulsating life, and the joy is right "behind" the pain, in the outlook of limitless possibilities. Accepted pain is not really frightening, confusing, or conflicting. It is much rather enlivening. As you dare to accept this feeling, whatever it may be, and go deeper, it transforms itself. While the pain is still there, you, at the same time, feel yourself immensely alive, beautifully alive. Little by little the pain makes room entirely for pleasure. Safety, hope, new experience -- they are all available, all imminent, but only through what already exists in you.

Thus your striving away from the unwelcome feelings must lead into more strife. You go the wrong way. If you expect the path to eliminate those unwelcome feelings before you have experienced, understood, and felt them, you must be in a bottleneck. The path is specifically geared to teach you how to accept the unwelcome feelings, not how to get out of them before you have even been in them. Here is the great misunderstanding, which is difficult to avoid, no matter how many times you hear these words. Light, bliss, vital inner movement can only come when your goal is to be in those feelings you have always wished to avoid. Your own treasure of creative life, of warm, eternal, moving life is revealed to you only if you follow this direction, never otherwise.

Once you have transcended the numbness and have revived the frozen life center, it will never be quite so difficult to accomplish this again. But the one time experience will not remain. The conditioned reflexes are too deeply ingrained. The old fear will come back, perhaps not consciously at all, for consciously you may be full of good will and joy to remain in this wonderful state. Once you have tasted it, you will surely find it folly not to remain in this state of being. But something else in you is just bound by habit patterns and does not know yet how else to react. Therefore something shrinks back again from living, especially when you feel the threat of new painful experience and disappointment. The shrinking back from the life process numbs you again. So you must start all over again. But, as I said, the more often the opening up to life is experienced, the easier it is to attain, and the more strength the ego has to do its part, to commit itself in full consciousness to life in all its aspects.

When you see those automatic reflexes, you also have to accept the fact that they are processes that you cannot control by direct will. They work indirectly -- the closing as well as the opening. You open up not because you now decide this and an immediate result is visible. It suddenly seems to happen to you when you least expect it. It is nevertheless an indirect result of your searching, your groping, your efforts, your will, your commitment to the process of self-realization, your honesty of seeing and facing the truth, your good will to change and give up dishonest patterns. All this brings a result, but this result seems to have nothing to do with these efforts and attitudes. The beautiful experience seems to be gratuitous. It seems the same with the opposite process of closing up. You may be open, pulsating, alive, and full of joy about this new condition. Suddenly, without understanding why, you find yourself back in the old state of numbness. Here, too, the indirect processes are at work. Some fear, some defense, some inner shrinking has taken place that you are not consciously connected with. Your work requires to connect with these unconscious processes. That will happen, little by little, when you learn to interpret and heed the indirect signs and manifestations: your own outer symbols. Do not allow yourself to be discouraged and feel lost because you do not yet comprehend the connection, you do not yet see the cause and effect of why you open up suddenly and close again just as suddenly. This is in itself a concentrated aspect of self-awareness that also develops gradually.

Roughly speaking, the predominant emotions an individual shrinks away from and numbs himself against are pain and fear -- with all their subdivisions -- as well as the anger and rage that develop as a consequence. The non-acceptance of these feelings, of this particular life experience, creates the following process: you divide yourself. Any rejection of what one feels and experiences creates self-division and inner fighting against the self. One side is dead, the other is alive. The life process wants more life, with all the good it contains. For life is truth and love, experience and pleasure, movement and unfoldment, new adventure and new horizons of being. It means increasing one's inherent potentials as a co-creator in the universe. It means finding the indwelling creative powers. All this, and more, is the life process that wants to perpetuate itself. It requires, and is a result of, a full acceptance of whatever is.

You who have recently awakened this life center have truly experienced that pain and pain differs. The pain that is rejected is bitter and disquieting and hopeless. The pain that is accepted has quite a different feeling about it. It is very near an opening, pleasurable experience. The accepted negativity of like makes the negativity eventually superfluous. The rejected negative experience binds you to it for as long as you keep on fighting it.

Let us take the simple experience of fear. If you shrink from fear and fight it and deaden yourself in order not to experience it, you become enslaved to fear. On the conscious level this will manifest in any number of projected fears, which in reality have nothing to do with what you really fear. When I speak of not rejecting the negative feelings, I do not mean that you are expected to welcome pain. What I mean is that only by not shrinking from it but by opening up to whatever comes your way does negative experience cease to be. For you attract it, you hold on to it, you are enslaved to it, by being in a state of battle. By fighting against anything in life, you must also be in a state of fighting against something in yourself.

All this must not be confused with unhealthy passivity. There is, of course, a healthy way of fighting for something. This is entirely different from fighting against something. The former occurs out of strength and the positive consciousness of reaching for good experience. The latter occurs out of fear and weakness, and cringes away from experience. By fighting against the undesirable experience, you deaden something. What you deaden is an integral part of life -- something that feels. If you deaden something that feels -- even if it be negative now -- you eliminate the possibility of feeling something positive to the degree you deaden any areas of yourself. Therefore, the side that is dead misses out, frustrates itself, and the life side must fight against this frustration. Any kind of numbing process, any attempt to deny a genuine inner experience, inevitably produces inner fight and self-division.

He who fears hurt, pain, disappointment, frustration -- whatever it may be -- fears experience per se. If he fears experience, he must guard himself against experience in one way or another. On the conscious level he may not be aware of this. In fact, he may believe that he is all open and ready for the good experience, if not for the painful one. But if the painful experience is feared, one is cautious, unspontaneous, defensive, and thus walled off from any kind of experience. The effect will be that the warm feelings that bring love, companionship, and intimacy cannot be fully felt. They are, at best, dulled, and often merely abstractions of the mind. Nothing renders the individual so insecure and inadequate. Nothing is so disquieting and hopeless. If you wonder about your capacity to experience deep, warm feelings of love, find how you defend yourself against any negative feeling and experience. There you will have the key.

So it becomes obvious that fear of emotional experience breeds frustration, discontent, and emptiness which, in turn, breed battling against that which is the product of one's own inner processes. By instituting death processes and shrinking from whatever experience there is, you divide yourself. That, as you know, is the most painful of all experience: your fight within yourself, your self-division. Any outer strife in your earth sphere is nothing but a symbolic representation, an outpicturing, of the self-division going on in all human beings in varying degrees. The self-division is not only the real cause of outer strife, warfare, injustice, conflict, and all the malconditions you can possibly think of, it is also the most painful experience within the human individual. Man finds himself in a constant state of inner tension, where he pulls simultaneously into two opposite directions: into life and into a rejection of and defense against life. The inevitable frustration that results from this divided self, divided motivation, divided directions, is fought against even more. Here you have a good illustration of the process: by fighting such a frustration in a blind and destructive way, the cause cannot be eliminated. It is understandable on the surface to say, "Why should I accept such a frustrating life?" But only by accepting the frustration can it be understood and its cause eliminated. Only by going through the experience of frustration can the other emotions that cause it surface: the fear of disappointment and pain, which numbs the feelings, which creates frustration.

Your numbing process, your shrinking from the feelings and experiences within yourself, does not only enslave you to the very negative experience you deny, it also creates a self-division of painful inner warfare with yourself. Again I want to emphasize for the benefit of the new friends here: when I speak of accepting negative emotions, it must not be confused with masochistic, self-denying, morbid attitudes toward negative experience. It is not required from you to welcome it. This applies to a much more subtle level of your feelings. Those of my friends who have already experienced an unnumbing process of their life center know perfectly well what I am talking about. You do not have to morbidly dwell on a negative emotion, but you do not have to shrink in fear from it either. You should say, "Yes, here it is. I let it be. I do not fight against it in some inner movement of rejecting it. I want to truly dissolve it by letting it be. I see what happens and let it dissolve itself." This has nothing to do with morbid wallowing.

When you come to the traumatic experience that has created the numbing in this lifetime -- which always happens in early childhood -- it is often not possible to reconstruct it directly, for mental memory does not suffice, even if it exists. It is possible and necessary, though, to reconstruct the emotional experience by comprehending certain problematic reactions now. This will then be recognized as a repetition of early experience, once you do not avoid being in this problematic emotion right now. Sooner or later on the path you must discover that your problematic reactions now reveal the original trauma. You are then bound to discover where, how, and why precisely you numb yourself against pain of some sort: this feared pain amounts to a sort of shock reaction. I do not mean a one-time experience that created a one-time shock. A child can be in a protracted shock, in a protracted painful situation or subtle climate, in an environment that he responds to by a more or less intense shrinking and numbing defense. This is a shock reaction. When this is recreated in your present day reactions, you will see in yourself, with your new awareness, what the soul movements do. You will gradually learn to institute new, different reactions and soul movements. Instead of shrinking from the feared pain, and thereby creating all these harmful, life-defeating attitudes I mentioned, you have to learn to cope in a new way with such experiences. You have to reconcile yourself to finding an entirely new approach to these experiences that have, at one time, made you shrink away from them and anaesthetize pain and fear.

If you imagine a human being going through life physically half anaesthetized, you can easily imagine what such a life would be. It would be a very dull, incomplete life, with very limited experiences, and a very low degree of awareness. This is literally what human beings constantly do when it comes to their spiritual and emotional life. This inner anesthesia eventually also affects the capacity to feel in the body, so that it affects all levels of being when the process continues for any length of time. For it progresses in a self-propelling way. The anesthesia has to melt. It must be undone. As it first thaws out, you are bound to experience pain -- the pain you had once frozen. The pain cannot heal unless you are courageous enough to feel it without exaggerating its intensity -- which is a "pain killer" in itself. If the pain is accepted in its real nature -- without denying or aggrandizing it -- it will soon genuinely diminish and completely disappear. This is altogether different from repression. The latter binds vital life energy. The former frees it for joyful, pleasurable experience, for strength and delight. Observe it, rather than control it. Let it be. The more you inwardly tense up against it, the more unbearable the pain will become. The more you relax toward it, the less severe it will be. By fearing the pain, you shrink from it and you reject it. You then fear the fear and numb your fear, as well as the fear of it. Thus you alienate yourself further and further from where you are alive. By doing what I suggest here, you are using indeed a new way, a new approach, to deal with what was once afflicted. This way of dealing with it is not illusory wishful thinking. It is the most real attitude a human being can adopt. Your split soul will mend, it will unite.

Again, I must say that this process cannot be adopted in one sweep, therefore the deadening process cannot be stopped in one sweep either. It happens gradually; little by little the death process will be eliminated. Eventually you will come out of this cycle where you have to constantly fear death because you court it; and fear pain because you do not encounter it in a meaningful, effective way which would eliminate it in a realistic, healthy, proportionate, relaxed manner.

Those of my friends who find themselves in this stage on the path where they have, perhaps for the first time, felt the life of their inner center and perhaps also felt again how it closed up, have to proceed now with renewed vigor in the same direction. Only, this time prepare yourself -- first in your mind and, little by little, in the deeper realms of your emotional being -- to meet the pain in a new attitude: to feel into yourself and observe your shrinking. As you observe your automatic shrinking and tensing and tightening up -- as you observe this -- the shrinking will lessen. The cramp, the frozenness will diminish. Your very awareness of what you do inwardly will diminish the intensity and the compulsive drive to perpetuate it. Life can only bring you what you have perpetuated. When you no longer reject pain, fear, negativity, when you deal with them in a relaxed, real, and unifying manner, you will truly have outgrown the pain, the fear, the negativity. All of you who are at this point on the path, who have experienced the enlivening beauty of being real, even as you are in pain, will make it a deeper and eventually joyful experience -- by no longer rejecting it.

Now, are there any questions -- first in regard to this topic, my friends?

QUESTION: The conflicts you speak of... doesn't all movement come from conflict?

ANSWER: No, movement does not come from conflict. On the contrary, movement is life. Wherever there is life, there is movement. If there is no movement, there is no life. When conflict increases and increases, eventually movement first diminishes and then stops. The totally integrated and self-realized entity -- which is, of course, beyond this dualistic earth sphere -- is in perpetual, joyful movement. The dualism -- that is, conflict -- is the very result of denial of movement. The dualism here is not only life versus death, but it is movement versus non-movement. Although death is accepted by the healthy personality as one of the phenomena of this state of consciousness -- and thereby its fear is eventually eliminated -- the time comes in the evolution of a being when the dying process no longer exists; where there is only life, forever more unfolding movement.

QUESTION: Is not the difference of the sexes a conflict that brings life?

ANSWER: It is a conflict for those people who are in conflict. But for those who are beyond conflict, the two sexes do not create more conflict. Conflict can never create life, though life may exist in spite of conflict.

ANSWER: About the point where anaesthetizing began... I feel somehow... well, it seems that in the cycle of life abandonment plays a big role. You are abandoned by your parents. Then, in your turn, you abandon life when you die. I am very involved with this abandonment.

ANSWER: Wherever the inner shock reaction, the frozen life center is, that is what must be experienced. With you, the emphasis is on abandonment. With each human being another particular, specific point exists which is the trauma. The shock reaction in the soul may in one case exist in regard to the feeling of not being loved; in another, in the fear of being left alone -- as with you; in still another, that the personal value of the individuality is negated. There are many other variations of basically the same, or similar, experiences. Each must find his own emphasis: what is triggered off most strongly in the soul. In the last analysis it is always the fear of pain, and the pain of not being loved and protected, of not being warmed and accepted. This is, roughly, the basis. Yet each individual has different conditions and therefore the personal, specific way varies. In your case, abandonment is the key, as it were. Therefore, what you will have to learn is this: In order to transcend the fear of being abandoned, no longer shrink from the feeling of "I am being abandoned. Here is the experience." The words are, of course, too limited to adequately describe the inner attitude necessary in order to change the dynamics of soul movements. If you try to listen with your inner antenna, you will know what I mean. You have been threatened by abandonment every day since your childhood. Until recently you have denied and ignored this fear. Now you begin to be conscious of it. Go through it. When you see this phantom of abandonment, you must observe your inner reactions to it. No mental process, no mental conceptualizing can help you to transcend this fear. Rather, you have to first see what "it does in you," which is a more correct way of stating the process than "what you do." It is nothing you do volitionally, in a direct way. Something does it in you when abandonment threatens you, and it cramps up in you. As you observe this, you already have gained a different, healing perspective in your self-observation. You then can see yourself cramping up, numbing yourself, denying the experience of abandonment. As you see yourself do this, you know that in this denial and fighting you increase the fear. You make the experience inevitable. You constantly live in the shadow of it, because of your inner way of handling it. Now you may be able to experiment with this new way and say, "All right, I shall try. I would like to react differently, instead of tensing up against it and freezing myself, I shall endure what I feel. I will stop fighting with emotions which are vital life energy and which can be used in a more constructive way." As you do this, you will first truly experience the pain of abandonment, even if its being repeated is only a threat. As you experience it in this way, it is already less painful. As you do this, some new strength begins to gather in you. You will suddenly see new ways, different ways of avoiding abandonment. A new initiative will reveal itself to you quite naturally. A new and productive way of fighting for love and closeness will come to you. This is not cramping and shrinking, but it is a relaxed activity that leads to fulfillment. The old way is freezing the life energies in order not to feel, which also results in creating weak, passive dependency and not finding the resources of meaningful action. The defensive attitude cripples vitality and joy and exudes negating attitudes that are bound to bring the very thing one fears most: in your case, abandonment.

My friends, in order to make the deadness alive, you must first feel the deadness in you. You have means at your disposal to bring it to life again. For there is a live part in you in which you can will, act, overcome. There is still something that enables you to come here, to listen, and work on the path. You can decide whether or not you want to be fully alive and feeling, and thereby come to experience the best that life is, the best that you are. Be life, be God, for that is who you truly are.

The Guide
by Eva Pierrakos
November 8, 1968

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