One with oneself, one with the world

I never wanted to repeat the algorithms of my parents. When I felt into their patterns and programmes, I felt narrowness, rigidity and mendacity. But above all, there was no real joy in life. Beneath the façade of the conformist personality I sensed something else, what in many spiritual traditions is called the authentic self. It urged to be discovered, born and nurtured. The numerous encounters with spiritual teachers, as well as the confrontation with my own patterns and my failures, later turned out to be important prerequisites for the successful search. Mao Tse Tung is credited with the sentence: “Defeat is the mother of success”. It is failure that enables us to wake up from the cultural trance, but only if we do not stop at self-pity or lamentation, but set out to go deeper. For me, going deeper meant on the one hand facing my own pain and on the other hand going in search of the authentic self. Healing takes place through immersion in the darkness. Not only did all the healers and shamans of this world know this, but it is also one of the fundamental principles of psychotherapy. Only when we release the frozen shadow beings of the past can the life energy flow again. Otherwise, we mercilessly repeat the algorithms of our ancestors. Many prefer permanent busyness to escape the demons of one’s past, but a packed agenda is not a fulfilled life.As the light dims towards the end of the year, many fall into a panic-like busyness. Everything still needs to be completed, especially before Christmas, and squeezed into the short, dark days. The hectic pace serves above all to resist with all one’s might the rhythms of nature, which in winter strive ever deeper inwards, into the roots. Now is the time to dive into the core of one’s being, to explore silence and doing nothing. There, inner restlessness lurks above all, but also healing and unity with oneself. Our split-off, unheard aspects of the soul now want to surface. They want to be seen and integrated. The secret of healing (heil = whole = one) is to see any form of self-condemnation (primal dividing = splitting) for what lurks in the depths of our being as soul aspects that want to be embraced. What our parents have never been able to give us, namely unconditional self-love, we can only give ourselves. “The deeper meaning of healing and meditation is to connect with all aspects of the soul”, the great Swiss psychologist C.G. Jung once said. Above all, this means seeing the unredeemed aspects of the soul with deep acceptance and love for what they originally are: childlike processing strategies for lack of love, rigid punishments or lack of appreciation. The majority of the activities that people develop in our society today do not stem from the creative creative joy of the authentic self, but bear the signature of repression. That is why it creates the same suffering over and over again. When we come to rest and dare to look into the flow of our soul, when we have authentic conversations again and meet ourselves in our nakedness and vulnerability, healing happens. By diving in and sharing our true, inner state, we escape the patterns of past generation and become one. One with ourselves and one with the world.