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The Hungry Soul: Food for Thought

In November of 1989 as my partner and I were glancing through the latest edition of the Omega Institute catalogue we spotted a workshop in Key Largo, Florida that combined swimming with dolphins and Breathwork. We had heard about swimming with dolphins and were intrigued by the idea, but knew nothing about Breathwork. We eagerly sent in our deposits and embarked upon a journey that one takes unwittingly, or what Joseph Campbell might have described as the journey of the "reluctant hero." For if either of us had been fully aware of where our paths would take us from that point we might have turned the page and picked a course on the Zen of basket weaving instead.

In a motel room packed with 20 or so eager and anxious workshop participants I met Kim. Kim eventually became my teacher and helper. For five days we swam with dolphins and breathed our brains out. And Kim introduced us to the Pathwork.

And what does the Pathwork have to do with breathing and swimming with dolphins? They are all doorways inside, to the divine spark in each of us. They are processes that melt away our masks and help us touch the deepest longing of all created beings, to know our God-selves and join with the divine in all creation.

For me swimming with dolphins and the breath experience were the threshold over which the mythological hero must cross in order to access the deepest regions of the psyche. The terrain is often rocky, full of steep ledges, vacuous canyons and treacherous white water. So the hero needs a map and a guide to help navigate the terrain. The Pathwork process is the map and the Pathwork helper is the guide.

What is the Pathwork? It is a way of life, a spiritual path of transformation focusing on self- knowledge, self-acceptance and self-responsibility, based upon 258 Guide lectures channeled by Eva Pierrakos from 1957 until her death in 1979. Many spiritual paths focus primarily on the essential goodness of human beings. The Pathwork also guides us toward uncovering and transforming our negative aspects, what Carl Jung might have called the "Shadow Self." The Guide (as the spirit entity Eva channeled came to be known) called this aspect of consciousness the lower self.

It is this lower self, with its defenses and misconceptions and negative intentions, that the Pathwork process teaches us how to bring into our conscious awareness, to be healed in this moment, through self-acceptance, prayer and the willingness to use our wills in right alignment with universal law. In this way we can change negative intentionality into positive intentionality. In a sense, our job is to access our longing and our willingness to receive God into our awareness, then God does the transforming.

This Pathwork process with, the assistance of my able and compassionate helpers, has enabled me to literally embody a new life in this lifetime. Not a life that is totally free from suffering or unhappiness, but a life in which my fear of pain, rejection, judgement and feelings of helplessness no longer dominate and control my life.

These fears, once drowned in a pool of booze and drugs, kept me in a dark, dank dungeon of my own creation, in a constant state of guarded isolation. Today I am exploring relationship. Relationship with myself, my creative process, my partner, my friends, my family, God and all aspects of divinity that are reflected back to me in my everyday life, including a new relationship to my own fear. This is what we all seek, whether or not we are consciously aware of it.

The Pathwork process is not an easy map to read. It requires rigorous self-honesty and a willingness to reveal the self on all levels, including what we believe are the most unlovable aspects of our psyches. The lectures teach us that our life force, our feelings and therefore our ability to access our divine core are hidden beneath layers of misconceptions and wrong conclusions about ourselves and the nature of reality. Two common misconceptions are that it is weak to need and accept help and that we don't deserve love. It is not merely that we believe such untruths, but we are convinced that desperately holding onto these beliefs is a matter of life or death.

The Pathwork process gives us the tools we need to allow consciousness to expand to incorporate a truthful perception of reality which tells us that existence is both life and death. Ultimately, only when we accept our moment-to-moment experience in duality we can transcend it and open to a unified experience of life.

An example from my own process. In a recent Pathwork weekend workshop I became aware of my desperate fear of receiving help or nurturance. Somewhere in my soul's journey (both in this lifetime and previous lives) I had experienced the terror of being violated while in the vulnerable state of receiving. As an infant would recoil from rough handling during caretaking when s/he is helpless to control what kind of attention is given, so I became aware of the ways that I recoil from and fearfully defend against accepting any sort of help. Even something as simple as the bagger at the supermarket offering to take my groceries out to my car. My wrong conclusion was that all help is violating and either I refuse help and avoid that pain and live or I receive help, I am violated and I die.

You can see the "Catch-22" of this intra-psychic dilemma. In the workshop, with the guidance of my current Pathwork helper, Judith, I was able to experiment with receiving help, truly opening myself to that vulnerable state, and lo and behold, not only was I not violated but I was held and supported in loving awareness by the group energy as I dissolved this misconception. I allowed fear to vibrate in my body and opened my heart to receive. I did not die. I was not violated. And even if I had been violated I would have experienced a deep wounding but I would not have died, disappeared into oblivion, ceased to exist as my fear would have me believe. In this undefended state of awareness and oneness I received the love, nurturance and help that I have always longed for.

It is this kind of misconception that the Pathwork process dissolves, thus freeing us to love and receive love, to emerge from isolation and the illusion of separateness into relationship with all that is, and to touch the divine spark that dwells within each of us.

"Deep within you is an essence of life, a nucleus of consciousness and energy that you may call God, you may call the cosmic self, you may call your spirit, you may call the transpersonal, unified all-consciousness -- whatever name you give it is immaterial. The aim is that you know that this is who you are; that you lose the illusion of being this isolated dot in the universe. And in order to attain this experience of your reality, it is necessary to eliminate those areas of your present manifest consciousness that created the illusion in the first place -- the misconceptions and negative intentionality and denial of truth. Whether the truth is in concept or the truth is in feeling makes no difference. This is, perhaps very briefly put, the aim of the path."

Thus, the Pathwork is a path of truth-seeking that teaches us how to die. . . to die into our feared experiences and feelings so that we may truly live.

This article originally appeared in The ODYSSEY, May, 1996 and is reprinted here with the permission of the author, copyright, 1996, all rights reserved.

Patricia Burke, author of Breathe Deeply! Healing Stories For The Soul, is the Co-Founder of the Beyond Mind Healing Center and a member of the New York Region Pathwork. For more information about the Guide Lectures or Pathwork events in Maine email her at bmhc@ime.net. You can also order Pathwork related books through the BMHC Bookstore by clicking on the category: Pathwork.


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