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.
We had a dialogue in which my client stepped back and allowed both voices to be heard and honoured. She came to see that her willful self was very young, about two years old, and very frightened of not being in control. It really believed that my client could not survive a single day without it being in charge. Slowly, as the willful self was fully acknowledged, it began to open, soften, and listen to what was true: my client desparately needs rest and gentleness right now, not more pushing and striving. The more acknowledgement this willful self received, the more it was not blamed or judged for the suffering it had caused, the more it was willing to step back and allow the gentle intuitive self to make choices and decisions about how to live each day.
At the end of the dialogue, the willful self agreed to allow my client to rest and heal for the next few months. It was still frightened about losing control, but it relaxed quite a bit when my client agreed to take a few minutes every day and check in with it, see how it was doing, and listen to whatever it wanted to say.
To my client’s surprise, the dialogue finished with a request from the willful self: it asked my client to write down every day what time she goes to bed, and send it to me, her coach. For the willful self, this was clearly a request for a firm commitment from my client in the direction of real rest, and a whole new way of caring for herself. So the voice that was fighting with her need for rest and ease at the beginning, ended up supporting this need quite strongly in the end.
