فصل 6

CHAPTER 6

“I AM THAT”

Once we have unconcealed all of our disowned aspects we are ready to move into the second stage of the process, which is to own all of these traits. By own, I mean acknowledge that a quality belongs to you. Now we can begin to take responsibility for all of who we are, the parts we like and the parts we dislike. At this point, you don’t have to like all of your aspects; you just have to be willing to acknowledge them to yourself and others. There are three helpful questions you can ask yourself. Have I ever demonstrated that behavior in the past? Am I demonstrating that behavior now? Under different circumstances am I capable of demonstrating that behavior? Once you answer yes to any of these questions, you have started the process of owning a trait.

Some traits are easier to acknowledge than others. Aspects of ourselves that we’ve tried hardest to deny or have projected on someone else are the hardest to own. They take more time. But it’s just as important to be ruthless with yourself as it is to be gentle. Be willing to find out that you “are” what you least want to be. Be determined to look with new eyes past the defense mechanisms which only want to say, “I am not that.” Look through eyes that say, “I am that. Where am I that?” Resist the temptation to judge yourself. Don’t jump to conclusions and decide you’re an awful person if you find out that you’re selfish or jealous. We all possess these qualities as well as their polar opposites. They are a part of our humanity. All of our emotions and impulses—the ones we call positive and the ones we call negative—are there to guide us and teach us. You may be skeptical, but give yourself the opportunity to get to know all these aspects and find their gifts. I promise that you will find gold at the end of this process.

“Owning” is an essential step in the process of healing and of creating a life you love. We can’t embrace that which we don’t own. If you want to manifest your full potential you have to reclaim the parts of yourself that you’ve denied, hidden, or given away to others. When I was in the beginning stages of my own healing process I could never find the right man. No one I wanted seemed to want me. I went through men like most people go through magazines. I was attracted to men who weren’t right for me because I didn’t know who I was, and because I was cut off from so many beautiful aspects of myself. The one man whom I really loved actually told me that he couldn’t stay with me because he knew one day I would realize who I was and leave him. My friends could see that the men I picked were wrong for me. But I still believed I was a small two-bedroom house that needed work. So everything and everyone around me kept mirroring back to me my own lack of self-love. Once I owned more aspects of myself—my fear, my covertness, and my grandiosity—I no longer had to attract partners who were fearful, covert, and grandiose. It became easier for me to attract men who could mirror back the positive aspects of myself, men who were kind, giving, and who loved and accepted me as I am.

If there is an aspect of ourselves that we don’t accept, we’ll continually attract people in our lives who act out that aspect. The universe will keep trying to show us who we really are and to help make us whole again. Most of us have buried these disowned aspects so deep we can’t see where we could possibly be a particular kind of person that we look at with distaste. However, if a particular type of person keeps showing up in your life, it’s for a reason. For years every time my friend Joanna went on a date she would tell me, “He’s not for me, he’s a geek.” The first six or seven times it happened, I didn’t say a word. But after a while, it became too obvious. I finally suggested to Joanna that she was the geek. I told her that if she owned the geek in herself, she wouldn’t find herself dating geeks anymore. She thought I was crazy. I pointed out that I never went out with geeks. How was it possible that all the men she met had this quality which she disliked so much?

So the geek stories went on for months. It became almost comical, because the dynamic was so clear to me and so hidden from Joanna. Then very late one night I got a call from Joanna who had finally had it, after a date with yet another geek. She was really in pain, and asked me to explain to her how she was a geek. I gently suggested that sometimes, when she wore those little pink socks with her white leather sneakers, people might consider her geeky She half laughed and made me promise that if she owned the geek in herself she would no longer have to date them. She agreed to make a list of all the times in her life she had been a geek. The next day Joanna called me with a long list of geeky things she’d said and done. Because she didn’t want to be a geek, Joanna had constructed a “cool” facade. She had been living that way for more than twenty years, but when she looked closely she was able to see that geekiness did rear its ugly head once in a while.

By discovering those geeky moments in her life, and being able to laugh about them with me, Joanna could see that being a bit of a geek wasn’t so bad. And since she owned her geekiness two years ago, I can honestly tell you she hasn’t been out with a single geek. When she looked to see what her geekiness had given her, Joanna saw that out of her desire not to be a geek she had manufactured a public persona who was cool, chic, and elegant. It was Joanna’s geekiness, and her response to it, that had enabled Joanna to create a beautiful style all her own.

There are lots of ways to tackle owning your traits. Start by concentrating on qualities that offend you. Take out your list of words that describe the people you dislike or hate, and examine each trait. No matter how resistant you are, you must own each of these traits in order for the process to work. Find a place in your life where you’ve displayed this trait or where someone else might have perceived you as embodying this trait. Try on each trait like you would a jacket, see how it feels, and figure out what you have to do to make it fit. Imagine how you would react if you were called that word by someone you love. You have to examine what judgments you make about each trait itself, and what judgments you make about people who possess each trait. Look at how many people you’ve dismissed for having this aspect. Don’t try to compare yourself favorably to these people or to differentiate your behavior from theirs. Don’t let your ego try to justify your own behavior. Remember, the world sees a geek as a geek.

A man who attended one of my courses loved the concept of being all things—of having the world within him. Bill was in his late fifties and really only had problems with one person in his life, his twenty-two-year-old son. When I asked what it was that upset him most about his son, Bill said his son was a liar whose constant lying to him was, in his estimation, the worst thing anyone could do. “I’ve never told a lie my entire life,” Bill said. “Ask anyone who knows me.” He was so charged up that his face was bright red. For a good fifteen minutes I was unable to help him acknowledge that he’d ever lied in the past, or was capable of lying in the future. Everyone in the course was growing impatient with Bill. The rest of us were able to recall at least a hundred times that we had lied as children, teenagers, or adults, not to mention how often we’d lied to ourselves. But Bill was still not budging. Then I asked Bill if he’d ever cheated a little on his tax returns. A huge smile crossed his face, and with his finger pointing directly at me, he said, “That’s a different kind of lying.” Everyone in the class looked at him with disbelief.

I’m sorry to say that Bill is one of the few people who took my course but never worked his way through it. James Baldwin, a Jungian analyst, said, “One can only face in others what one can face in oneself.” Bill had made his son so wrong for lying and was so self-righteous in his opinion of liars that he was unwilling to discover this aspect in himself. He had too much invested in being right. If Bill had been able to own the aspect of himself that was a liar he would have been able to unplug himself from his son. It takes compassion to own a part of yourself that you’ve previously disowned, ignored, hated, denied, or judged in others. It takes compassion to accept being human and having every aspect of humanity within you, good and bad. Ultimately, when you open your heart to yourself, you will find you have compassion for everything and everybody.

Last year, a man named Hank came to one of my courses. His big issue was with his girlfriend, who was always late. He shared lots of incidents with the group that had upset him. I suggested that the reason Hank was so upset was that his girlfriend was mirroring an aspect of himself. He told us there was absolutely no way this was possible, though it was quite obvious to everyone in the class that Hank couldn’t live with this aspect of his girlfriend. His face was full of disgust when he related how she had stood him up earlier that day, so his feelings were close to the surface. It was the beginning of the seminar, and I didn’t want to rush Hank, so I simply told him, “What you can’t be with won’t let you be.” Hank could see he was having trouble accepting his girlfriend’s lateness and that he was emotionally plugged in. But when I asked him if he was the kind of person who was ever late Hank’s answer was, “absolutely not.” We moved on, going through various exercises, but twenty-four hours later I could see that Hank was still struggling. As the group came back from the second night’s dinner break we noticed that one chair was empty. I had asked everyone to come back from breaks promptly so we wouldn’t waste any valuable time. We were trying to figure out who was missing when someone said, “It’s Hank.” We waited a few minutes but Hank was nowhere in sight so we decided to get started. Just then a woman in the front row looked at me and said, “I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but Hank has been late coming back from every break. I, for one, am sick of waiting for him.” Suddenly we all realized that Hank was doing to us what his girlfriend did to him. He was making us wait.

When Hank arrived ten minutes later I stopped what we were doing to see if Hank was ready to have a breakthrough. I asked him if he realized he’d been late coming back from every break. He looked at me and said, “I’m only a few minutes late. What’s the problem?” Everyone in the room gasped in disbelief. I replied, “Hank, you are the only person in the room who has been consistently late from five breaks. Some people feel offended that we have to waste time and energy checking to see who’s late and then waiting a few minutes to see if you’re coming back before we can get started. Can you see any correlation between what you’re doing to us and what your girlfriend does to you?” Hank refused to see that his being a few minutes late, meaning anywhere from three to fifteen minutes, was a problem. He told us his girlfriend was often two hours late, or even an entire day late. “That,” he said, “is late. That is a problem.” Hank had rationalized a fundamental difference between being five minutes late and being several hours late. For him they were two distinct issues. I asked for a show of hands to see how many people agreed. No one raised a hand. Then I asked how many people felt Hank was being rude by not coming back on time. Everyone raised his or her hand. It was clear to everyone in the room except Hank that he was doing to us what his girlfriend did to him. Late is late, a geek is a geek. It’s the ego that makes the distinction to protect itself. Someone stood up and told Hank that they did everything in their power to be on time and they expected other people to do the same. I added that if someone in my life is constantly late and doesn’t try to break themselves of the habit I stop making plans with them. I also told Hank that when someone is consistently late I feel like the underlying message they are giving me is my time is not valuable, or that their time is more important than mine. Hank looked upset and perplexed. I asked him to go home that night and think about what we were saying.

The next morning Hank came in on time. He said that he’d stayed up half the night making a list of all the times he’d been late in the past year. He realized that he was almost always late, but he had believed that as long as he was not more than a half hour behind schedule he was doing great. That day, in front of all of us, Hank owned that he was late and that being late was rude. He was still angry at his girlfriend but he could see that in his own way he was doing to us what was being done to him. Hank had buried this aspect of himself so deeply that it was completely hidden from his awareness. Rudeness did not fit into his ego ideal. But as soon as he owned his lateness and rudeness, Hank’s face relaxed. He had a natural internal surrender. He could now be with more aspects of himself. And when he spoke about his girlfriend’s behavior, it was no longer with total frustration. Hank could see the benefits of taking back his projections from her and owning his own traits. He was becoming free to choose whether he wanted to be in a relationship with a woman who was constantly late.

Hank believed he was a caring and responsible person, but he had needed to attract a particular kind of woman to show him the hidden aspects of himself. People mirror back what is within us because subconsciously we are calling it forth from them. That’s why certain kinds of people and situations keep showing up in our lives over and over again. The miracle occurs when you truly own and embrace an aspect of yourself. At that point, the person who is serving as your mirror will either stop acting out the behavior, or you will become able to choose not to have this person in your life. When you unplug, you no longer need another person to mirror your shadow back to you. Because you’ll be more whole yourself, you’ll naturally gravitate to those who reflect your wholeness. If our soul’s purpose is to become complete, we’ll continually call forth what we need to see to be whole. As we own more of ourselves, healthier people will show up in our lives.

Take your time in considering what you don’t want to own. When resistance to owning something shows up, don’t skip over it. Search around until you can see where the resistance comes from. Notice what judgments you make. Write down the times when you’ve displayed this trait. If you have trouble, enlist a friend to help you. Remember that if you zero in on an unlikable aspect of someone else, it’s because you have this same aspect. In my seminars when someone gets stuck on a particular trait and can’t seem to own it, I have them own being a “resistant ass.” This usually makes people laugh. And when they can be with the resistant ass in themselves, they usually can move quickly through the word that gives them resistance.

The hardest words to own are always related to incidents where we feel someone has wronged us. Our egos resist owning characteristics that would make us give up blaming someone else for the condition of our life. Most of us have spent a long time building cases against the people who have harmed us. Oprah Winfrey once said in a commencement speech, “Turn your wounds into wisdom.” Instead of holding onto resentments, learn from them. Look to see how you’ve benefited from your wounds. Where have they led you? Who is in your life now that might not have been if you hadn’t had a particular bad experience? And how does holding onto your wounds keep you from fulfilling your dreams? When you use your wounds to grow and learn, you don’t have to continue to be the victim. Look at the person who has harmed you; examine what aspects of this person plug you in. And when you can find those things within yourself, you will no longer be attached to or affected by the other person.

There is a Zen story about two monks journeying home who come to the banks of a fast flowing river. When they reach the riverside they see a young woman unable to cross. One of the monks picks her up in his arms, carries her through the current, and sets her safely on the other side. Then the two monks continue on their travels. Finally the monk who crossed the river alone can restrain himself no longer and he begins to rebuke his brother, “You know it is against our rules to touch a woman. You have broken our holy vows.” The other monk answers, “Brother, I left that young woman on the banks of the river. Are you still carrying her?” When you hold on to old wounds you continue down the road carrying that burden. Recently I worked with a beautiful young woman named Morgan, who had stomach cancer. When she came to see me she had little desire to live and was resigned that her cancer would take her life. Morgan was filled with anger. She hated her mother for the continual cycle of emotional and physical abuse that characterized their relationship. Even though she was in her early thirties and had tried many self-improvement seminars, Morgan had been unable to release the hostility and distaste she had for her mother. So Morgan and I decided that even though she was quite weak, she would give my seminar a try and work on releasing her toxic emotions.

At a certain point in my seminars I ask everyone to write down the five words that are hardest for them to own. We then do a mirroring exercise with partners until each person no longer has any emotional charge on any of their five qualities. For example, if one of my charged words was “incompetent,” I would say, “I am incompetent,” and my partner, looking me in the eyes, would say, “You are incompetent.” Then I would repeat, “I am incompetent,” and she would repeat, “You are incompetent.” This continues until it no longer matters to me if I am incompetent or if you call me incompetent. Just saying the word out loud, over and over, breaks down our resistance to being called that word and to having that quality.

Before we start, I usually walk around the room and check people’s lists because they often leave off words that are obvious to everyone else, but hidden from themselves. When I arrived at Morgan’s seat she was busy owning her words, but I noticed that one word Morgan always used when she spoke about her mother was nowhere on her list. Knowing this was an important thing for her to own, I told Morgan’s partner to work on the word “insane”.

Morgan looked at me with disgust. She said, “I’m not insane, and you know it.” Once again I said if we are everything then how could she not be insane. I told her she could call me insane and I wouldn’t mind a bit. Morgan’s partner didn’t care if we called her insane either. Morgan squirmed, then cried, then told us she felt she might vomit. She couldn’t say she was insane. The word could not come out of her mouth. Morgan’s partner and I both looked at her and shouted, “Insane! Say it! Own it, Morgan! Insane!” I asked, “Tell me Morgan, when in your life have you been insane?” Morgan recounted a few incidents that clearly could have been considered insane, but the word still stopped her. All I wanted to hear her say was, “I’m insane.” I knew if she could repeat this word long enough, it would lose all its energy and the grip it had on her life. What we fear, appears. And for Morgan insanity came in the form of her disease. She had no freedom. But now she was on the brink of owning her greatest fear and nightmare. Morgan went home that night able to say, “I’m insane,” but still she did not completely feel it. Later though, after a warm bath and a few hours of saying the word over and over to herself, she got it. A few months later she wrote me a letter: I had to break any fear and everything that I went through as a child that I associated with insanity to own insane. I had to embrace it and let it go. Once I owned it I dropped to my knees and started praying. Dear God, please remove the scales from my eyes, let me see only the beauty in my mother. For the next 45 minutes I prayed with the most authentic fervor to remove the judgment I had against my mother and myself, to accept that she had done the best she could. I prayed that I could forgive myself for the unconscious blaming, for being hurtful toward myself, for not loving myself and for becoming ill. I was bathed by an exquisite peace. Prior to the work the mere thought of my mother would make me cringe and tense up, now I felt only peace. The exercise had opened the gate, I had walked through it. The cancer stopped spreading and began to slowly recede.

Morgan is now cancer-free. Tests show no signs of the disease. When she stopped hating aspects of herself, she was able to forgive herself and her mother. Today she tells me that owning the word insane was the hardest part of the process. Her eyes were sealed shut when it came to seeing her mother within herself. But once she realized she was dying of resentment, she allowed herself to embrace the totality of her being. Owning your shadow restores your body’s natural tendency toward wholeness. When you are whole you are healed.

Transformation itself only takes seconds. It is a shift in perception, a change in the lenses we look through. If we see the world as if we’re a hammer then everything looks like a nail. If we shift from being a hammer to a bolt, then everything looks like a nut. Our perceptions are always colored by how we see ourselves, and the decisions we make about what is good and bad, right and wrong, what we like and what we don’t like. If you shift lenses from “I’m in the world” to “I am the world,” you will understand that it’s not only okay to be everything, but it’s essential.

I know this is a difficult concept for most people to accept. We’re taught never to say negative things about ourselves. If I wake up feeling worthless, I’m supposed to pretend that I don’t feel that way. I’m supposed to say to myself that I’m worthy and hope I will come to feel worthy later in the day. I have to go to work pretending I feel worthy because feeling worthless is not okay. I have to hide behind my mask of worthiness all day, hoping no one will see through it. But, inside, I’ll feel a quiet despair knowing I’m not being myself, all because I’m unable to embrace being worthless. We resist this aspect of ourselves and pass judgments on the kind of person that is worthless. We are told affirmations will make us okay. But as I tell people in my lectures if we put ice cream on top of poop after a few spoonfuls we will taste the poop again. When we integrate negative traits into our selves, we no longer need affirmations because we’ll know that we’re both worthless and worthy, ugly and beautiful, lazy and conscientious. When we believe we can only be one or the other, we continue our internal struggle to only be the right things. When we believe that we are only weak, nasty, and selfish—traits that we believe our friends and families don’t possess—we feel shame. But when you own all of the traits in the universe, you’ll understand that every aspect within you has something to teach you. These teachers will give you access to all the wisdom in the world.

Sometimes, in order to own a trait, you’ve got to release some stored-up anger—at yourself, or at others. People often ask me if it’s okay to be angry at themselves. My answer is that it’s okay to feel whatever you are feeling. Allow yourself to feel and express everything that is within you. You need to get all this negative emotion out before you’ll be able to truly love yourself, to feel compassion for yourself and others. You deserve to express your emotions in a healthy way. The only time it’s not okay to express your emotions is when you’re hurting another person.

Screaming is a good way to let out pent-up emotions. Often our voices have been literally suppressed and we’re unable to use our entire vocal range. When you allow yourself to scream completely, with every ounce of your being, you can really clear out repressed energies. If you don’t want to disturb anyone, scream into a pillow. If you have never really screamed, or if you grew up in a home where there was a lot of screaming, you may have decided screaming was wrong. Now we’re back to “what you can’t be with won’t let you be.” So scream. It’s important to have access to your entire range of emotions.

One of my seminars included a beautiful woman in her late sixties who hadn’t ever raised her voice in her entire life. Janet had never screamed, never uttered a curse. Her father had drilled into her the idea that nice people didn’t do such things and if she was to be respected and loved by him she would have to obey his rules. For sixty years Janet had done exactly what she had been told. And now she was having recurring polyps in her throat. When she finally found me she was ready to release all the emotion that was stuffed inside her and disobey her father. She had come to believe that the cause of her health issues was suppressed emotion. Still, she could hardly raise her voice.

For five days we yelled, screamed, and cursed. Then the moment came when we said the F word. What a release! Janet’s whole body shook. The entire next day she walked around with a huge grin on her face. It had taken every ounce of courage she had to do this work even though her father was long dead. Six months later Janet was feeling great and her throat was completely clear. She was expressing herself joyfully and felt she had finally made peace with herself and her father. As long as we are not hurting others we should joyfully express our rage. When you come face to face with an aspect of yourself that you hate, express it. Express it with the intention of releasing all your judgments, your shame, your pain, and your resistance to taking back this disowned aspect of yourself.

My favorite way to release anger is batting. I take a plastic bat and a couple of pillows. Then I kneel down in front of my stack of pillows, raise the bat over my head, and hit those pillows as hard as I can. I imagine that my stack is whatever trait I’ve resisted owning and whack away. After I release all that emotion, it becomes much easier to go to the mirror and own a trait.

If we embrace it internally we no longer have to create it externally. One of my close friends, Jennifer, was convinced she was being stalked. Jennifer would see this same woman at all the public events she attended. She was sure the woman was following her. “She’s evil!” Jennifer would tell me. Of course, being the good friend I am, I told Jennifer, “You are evil.” She’d get furious with me and hang up the phone screaming, “I’m not evil!” For nearly a year, this woman kept showing up everywhere Jennifer went and always ruined Jennifer’s night. Toward the end of that year, Jennifer flew to Hawaii for a conference. She’d been looking forward to the meeting for months. Sure enough, the woman showed up at the first lecture. Jennifer was horrified. She called me from Hawaii, “What do I have to do to get rid of this woman?” I told her this woman must be mirroring a disowned aspect of herself. It was obvious Jennifer needed to own whatever it was because she was so plugged into this woman. I asked her, “What judgments do you have about being evil?” Jennifer told me of course it was awful to be evil, and evil people did bad things. We tried to think of times in her life she’d been evil, and she came up with a few incidents when she’d done mean things to her little sister that could be considered evil. She had felt deeply shameful of those moments and had decided to be a good person. In her mind good people were not evil. I explained that we couldn’t know good without knowing evil, just as we couldn’t know love without knowing hate. If we can own the evil or the hate in ourselves, we wouldn’t need to project it onto other people.

I told Jennifer to try standing in front of the bathroom mirror and saying to herself, “I am evil,” until she no longer cared about denying this aspect of herself. After an hour in front of the mirror, Jennifer was so angry she sat down and wrote a letter to the woman she believed was stalking her. Jennifer allowed herself to call this woman all the nasty names she could think of, to express all her rage. She was radically honest, and as a result she felt lighter and better. Jennifer had needed to give voice to her pain and anger. After writing the letter she tore it to shreds, went back to the mirror, and owned her evil. Once she could face this aspect of herself, she could also face this other woman. She unplugged. When Jennifer saw the woman the next day, she said hello and walked away without being affected at all. She never saw the woman again. This is freedom.

The pain of our perceived flaws compels us to cover them up. When we deny certain aspects of ourselves, we overcompensate by becoming their opposite. Then we create entire personas to prove to ourselves and others that we are not that. Recently, while visiting a close friend I started talking to her father about my work. Norman is a perfect example of this phenomenon. Intrigued, he had asked me to show him what I did. So I asked him to tell me two words he wouldn’t want said about him in the newspaper. He replied that he would not want to be called dull or stupid. I laughed out loud. “Exactly,” I said. “No one who knows you today would ever say you were dull or stupid.” Because he’d always put his family first, Norman had never taken the time to finish his education. But after the death of his wife of more than thirty years, Norman had gone back to school to get a master’s degree. He had enrolled in a program at a university near his home and had ridden his bike to school daily. He graduated with honors and is now working toward his Ph.D. When he is not in school, Norman is traveling all over the country, going to conferences and lecturing on physical health and the aging process. He recently went to a Buddhist retreat for a month to get in touch with his spirituality. Would anyone meeting Norman consider him dull or stupid? Everyone I know would call him courageous, interesting, and bright. But Norman’s decision not to be dull and stupid actually runs his life, and results in his always competing with himself, to prove that he’s not dull or stupid. No matter how hard he works he always has to do more to make sure he’s never exposed, and show the world that he’s smart and interesting.

It was fairly easy for Norman to recognize how his life is run by the words dull and stupid. He always feels that whatever he achieves is not enough. The irony, of course, is that “dull” and “stupid” have given him his enormous drive and determination. They force him to seek out interesting people and places. If he didn’t have this terrible aversion to these two words, we don’t know if Norman would have had the drive to do everything he’s accomplished in the past four years. Norman perceived the gifts of these two aspects and understood that he is everything. How can we know smart unless we know stupid? How can we know interesting without knowing dull?

When you are internally driven by not wanting to be something, you often become the opposite. This robs you of your right to choose what you really want to do with your life. Norman has no freedom just to take time off and vacation with friends. He won’t read a novel or spend an evening playing bridge for fear that he might turn into an old man who is dull and stupid. He cannot look to see if these opportunities are best for his health or for his soul. When you don’t own an aspect of yourself it runs your life.

If we look closely, all of us can see where we’re dull and stupid. If we’re honest, and aren’t displaying these aspects right now, then we have to identify a time when we’ve been dull or stupid in the past. Our opinions of ourselves are the most important opinions. If we feel good about our own lives we seldom care what others say. In Norman’s case he has spent the last three years buried in books, working feverishly to be in the top of his class. Some people would say he’s dull because all he does is study. Others might say he is stupid to be wasting his time going to school. Until Norman can love the part of him that is dull and stupid and integrate these aspects into his psyche, he will be driven to prove to the world that he is smart and interesting. We exhaust our internal resources when we try not to be something.

We are here to learn from all these parts of ourselves and make peace with them. To be truly authentic persons, we have to allow the aspects of ourselves that we love and accept to coexist with all the aspects of ourselves that we judge and make wrong. When we can lovingly hold all of these traits together in one hand, without judgment, they will naturally integrate into our system. Then we can take off our masks and trust that the universe created each of us with a divine design. Then we can stand tall, embracing the world within.

EXERCISES

In order to be completely free, we need to be able to own and embrace all the qualities that upset us in other people.

1. Refer to your list of words from Exercise I in Chapter 4. Sit or stand in front of a mirror and say each word over and over again, “I am [that trait].” Say it until the energy around the word disappears. It works. I have never had people fail this exercise if they are committed to owning a trait. If you get stuck and feel anger or rage at someone who has displayed this trait, or if you feel pissed off that you have this trait, take time out from the mirror and sit down and write a hate letter to this trait. Expressing anger in this way is healthy. These letters are for your eyes only. You are not going to mail them or read them to anyone. You are going to write them as a way to release your built-up emotions. If you don’t know what to say, start with, “I am angry at you for …” and then write as fast as you possibly can without thinking. Write anything that comes to your mind. Don’t worry about grammar or about making sense. Just focus on releasing old emotions and toxicity.

This exercise is a way of discharging toxic emotions stored in our bodies. If feelings arise during the process, stay with them. You may find it especially difficult to say those words that you have judged harshly. Even if you’re crying, stay with the process. At some point you will notice the charge you have on the word releases spontaneously.

1. Using the same list of words, see if you can identify times in your life when you have demonstrated these traits. If you cannot think of any time you have exhibited this trait, then ask yourself in what circumstances might it be conceivable for you to demonstrate this trait? Would anyone else say I’ve demonstrated this trait? Write down your responses next to each word.