Someone just asked me about the difference between New Age teachings like the Secret, and the kind of work that I do. I think the way that Byron Katie says it here, is pretty clear.

The Secret: “You can have whatever you want.”
The Work: “You can want whatever you have.”

The Secret: “My will be done. I know what’s best for me.”
The Work: “Thy will be done (=Thy will is done). What’s best for me is what actually happens.” (In A Thousand Names for Joy, Katie says, “God’s will and your will are the same, whether you notice it or not.")

The Secret: “You can control your thoughts.”
The Work: “You are not the thinker. It’s not possible to suppress your stressful thoughts. But when you question them, they let go of you.”

The Secret: “You can manifest your positive thoughts as reality.”
The Work: “Reality already is the best thing that could be manifested. When you realize this, you’re home free.”

The Willful and The Intuitive Self

I’m sharing this coaching session because I feel that the kind of conflict my client was struggling with permeates our collective consciousness in North America, and perhaps in many other places as well. Our incapacity to slow down, to listen, and to rest is part of the insanity that rules our world right now.

This is a dialogue that evolved in a session with a client of mine, a dialogue between two voices, or two very different aspects of her being. We all have these different voices--it doesn’t mean that we have multiple personality disorder. Our personality has always been like this: a field of consciousness in which many different voices live and interact. Think of Walt Whitman: “ I contradict myself, I contain multitudes.”

To open to healing, wholeness and full integration involves a process in which we learn to listen to each voice with kindness and respect, understanding that no matter how destructive the voice appears to be, it has, at the core, a positive intention. In some therapeutic models, all these voices that seem to hold us back or cause us pain are part of a whole system called ‘The Protector.’ The Protector, and all the voices that come from it, is trying to take care of us, in the only way it knows how. We cannot grow, evolve and awaken until we forgive these voices for the suffering they have caused us, and until we forgive ourselves for listening to them!

My client was experiencing an ongoing battle between two very different voices. She calls one of these voices her gentle intuitive self, the one “that wants to be nurtured, to go through life with ease.” She calls the other voice her willful self, the one who pushes her into action and achievment. The willful self is not gentle, and it experiences her intuitive self as weak.

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I’m posting a copy of an email I’ve just sent to a coaching client, about opening to the power and basic sanity of the feminine voice:

Here’s what came to me, and it was in response to what you said about feeling that you are not being as loving in this situation as you would like to be. And also what you said about feeling that what is evolving for you in this relationship is a mirror for something more universal, something that is happening for many women.

I feel that there is a desparate need for the voice of women, the heart of women, to emerge and be heard in the world right now. And it is a voice that has been deeply supressed for thousands of years on our planet. I know many men who are also feeling this way, and looking for ways to support the women they know in acknowledging and following a radically different kind of intelligence. Stephen Lewis, the envoy at the U.N. who has been dealing with the Aids crisis in Africa, is one of these men. He speaks with great passion about how differently things would have gone in Africa, if the women there had been in charge.

I experience a strong and beautiful feminine energy in your presence. And I think what is awakening in you right now is the awareness that this feminine way of being is not loving in the way we have been taught. Compassion can be soft and sweet, but it can also be fierce and wild. We need both sides, one without the other is only half. It seems to me that it is the fierce compassion that is emerging in you right now, and I know from my own experience, how difficult it can be to open to that. Fierce compassion says “No” when it needs to say ‘No,’ it draws very strong boundaries, and it even destroys, instead of nurturing, when that is what is being called for.

I guess what i want to say is, “You don’t have to be loving. You just have to be fully and freely yourself--that is where the healing is, that is where the awakening is, beyond all of our ideas about love, into a radical experience of integrity and deep honesty about what is actually working for us..”