فصل 7

CHAPTER 7

EMBRACING YOUR DARK SIDE

Most of us long to experience peace of mind. This is a lifelong pursuit, a task that calls for nothing less than embracing the totality of our being. Discovering the gifts of even our most hated qualities is a creative process that needs only a deep desire to listen and learn, a willingness to release dysfunctional judgments and beliefs, and a readiness to feel better. Your true self makes no judgments. Only our fear-driven egos use judgments to protect us—protection that ironically prevents us from self-realization. We must be prepared to love all that we have feared. “My grievances hide the light of the world,” says A Course in Miracles.

To get past your ego and its defenses you need to get quiet, be brave, and listen to your inner voices. Behind our social masks lurk thousands of faces. Each face has a personality of its own. Each personality has its own unique characteristics. By having internal dialogues with these sub-personalities you will turn your egotistical prejudices and judgments into priceless treasures. When you embrace the messages of each aspect of your shadow, you begin to take back the power you’ve given to others and form a bond of trust with your authentic self. The voices of your unembraced qualities, when allowed into your consciousness, will bring you back into balance and harmony with your natural rhythms. They will restore your ability to resolve your own issues and illuminate the purpose of your life. These messages will lead you to discover authentic love and compassion.

Until I started communicating with my sub-personalities I had to rely on others to help me find out what was wrong with me. I went from one therapist to another. I tried local psychics, fortune tellers, and astrologists to get the answers I needed. If I felt there was something wrong with me, if I was feeling angry or sad or even overly happy, I would have to make a call or pay someone to tell me what was going on. What a way to live. If they told me something that I wanted to hear, I would think they were brilliant. But if they told me something I didn’t want to hear, I would go to another person, and another, till I got the answer I was seeking.

I knew there had to be a different way to live. Why would God make us so we can’t understand ourselves? Why would God make us so we’d have to pay someone else to tell us about ourselves? Now I realize that we’re brilliantly designed to heal ourselves and return to wholeness. But sometimes we can use a little help. Talking to our sub-personalities is an excellent exercise to advance the process.

Examining our sub-personalities can be a tool to help us reclaim the lost parts of ourselves. First we must identify these parts and then name them, then we’ll be able to disengage from them. Actually naming them creates distance. Roberto Assagioli, founder of psychosynthesis, says that “we are dominated by everything from which our self becomes identified. We can dominate and control everything from which we disidentify ourselves.” If I take one of my traits which I don’t like, for example whiney, and then name it Whiney Wanda, it suddenly seems less threatening to me. In a funny way, as soon as I name these aspects of myself, I feel fondness for them. I can then stand back and look at them in an objective way This process starts to loosen the grip these behaviors have on your life.

My first experience with sub-personalities was in a transpersonal psychology class at JFK University in Orinda, California. Every week, we would learn and actually experience a different model of emotional healing. The week on psychosynthesis altered my life. I established a dialogue with different aspects of myself which we called sub-personalities and began to find out who they were and what they needed to be whole. The goal was to find their gifts, of course. And in finding each gift, I found acceptance of a disowned part of myself.

Our teacher, Susanne, started with a visualization that took us on an imaginary bus ride. She asked us to see a bus full of people. In my imaginary bus I saw many different kinds of people. Some of them were old, some of them young. They were dressed in everything from miniskirts to bell-bottoms. I saw fat girls, skinny girls, girls with black hair, red hair, big chests and flat chests. I saw every size and shape I could imagine. There were short people, tall people, circus people, people of every color and nationality. There were hookers and saints. It was a big bus, crowded with people, many of whom I didn’t want to know. My first thought was, “Oh no, you have to do better than this.” Susanne informed us that we’d have to get to know all the people on our bus, the ones we liked as well as the ones we didn’t.

Each of these passengers represented an aspect of myself who brought a special gift. They were all there, each offering something unique, if only I would meet them and listen to their wisdom. We were told to let ourselves get off the bus with one of our sub-personalities. And Big Bertha Big Mouth was right there reaching out to take my hand. She was the first sub-personality who wanted to have a conversation with me. When I saw her face I thought, “There is no way I am going for a walk with this woman. I’ll find another sub-personality to walk with.” Bertha stood about five feet tall, weighed two hundred pounds. She was in her sixties, and was my worst nightmare in terms of appearance. She had thinning gray hair, which was poorly cut and sticking up in front of her face. She reeked of hair spray and cigarettes. She was wearing a beige muumuu with large, orange polka dots. Wrapped around her shoulders was a beige polyester sweater held together by an old, rusty pin. Her legs were fat and her stockings were torn. On her feet were badly worn plastic shoes.

My eyes darted around, looking for someone to save me from Big Bertha. No one came forward. Bertha looked annoyed, and finally just grabbed my hand and dragged me off the bus. We sat down on a nearby bench and Bertha started to talk. She told me she was one of my sub-personalities and I would have to learn to live with her. She said she was not going away and if I would only open my closed mind, I would see that she had a lot to offer. Then Suzanne guided me to ask Big Bertha what she had to teach me. Big Bertha told me I shouldn’t judge people by their looks. She said she could see right through my phony spiritual persona. I wanted to argue, but before I began I realized that I had so much prejudice against Big Bertha when I saw her that I didn’t even want to talk to her in the privacy of my own mind.

Big Bertha went on to tell me that I’d never get any further in my spiritual development if I didn’t deal with this issue. She reminded me that I’d always judged people whom I considered fat and that the only people in my life were those whose external appearances I felt comfortable with. Deep inside I knew Bertha was right. I pretended to be spiritually evolved and not swayed by external things like appearances, but I was lying to myself. I had thought I had ended this behavior years earlier since I had done some work on this issue. But here was Big Bertha, telling me to wake up; there was a lot more work to do. Susanne told us to ask our sub-personalities what their gifts were. Big Bertha said her gift was wholeness. If I really believed I was part of this holographic universe, I would have to accept her whether I liked it or not. She said I would have to look in the eyes of everyone I met with love and compassion to see myself fully. And she told me that meeting her would be one of the most important encounters of my life. She was right.

Big Bertha Big Mouth was a creation of my psyche, based on an aspect of myself I couldn’t accept. Through this guided visualization she was able to express herself and teach me a great lesson. It took me months to fully integrate my experience. Everything about her was so real, so pure, so natural. How could this person be part of my subconscious? Where did she come from, how could she be so wise? I kept asking myself these questions. I wanted more of Bertha even though I had been so resistant to accepting her.

Slowly, I gathered the courage to get to the back of my bus and meet some more people. I led myself through the visualization and asked which sub-personality wanted to come out to meet me. In my first encounter alone with this wild group, Angry Alice came out to greet me. She was small and frail with bright red hair that stuck straight up in the air, bushy and teased. Her first words were, “Even though I’m small I’m tough, so don’t even think about messing with me.” Alice said she was tired of my trying to get rid of her. She told me she was probably the best friend I’d ever have. My anger was there to guide me, and warn me, and when I was in danger Alice screamed in my face. Since I’d always ignored her clues, she had to act out and scream at everyone around me to get my attention. She told me her gift was my strong intuition that would always lead me to healthy relationships. She said the reason I rarely experienced healthy relationships was because I was too busy talking instead of listening to my inner voices.

It was hard to embrace Angry Alice since I’d always believed that I expressed my anger in inappropriate ways. I had been trying for years to get rid of my anger. But Alice didn’t need to disappear; she needed acceptance and love. She wanted me to listen to my heart instead of my head. When I started thinking of Alice as my ally she started to calm down. Healthy sensible expressions of anger took the place of my uncontrollable outbursts.

Next I met Gorging Greta, who liked to eat whole chocolate cakes, and Trashy Trixie, who liked to wear really short skirts and had a foul mouth. Gorging Greta waddled over to tell me she was a close friend of Big Bertha Big Mouth. Her gift was compassion and inner relatedness to all other human beings. She also told me to slow down, and pay attention to myself. Greta said that I’m completely unconscious of how fast I’m running around. I’m a doing machine. And she’s the one who freaks out, gorging herself on food in order to feel grounded. Trashy Trixie, on the other hand, came with the gift of grace. She wanted me to treat myself like royalty and behave in a dignified manner. When I didn’t she exploded, and had to act out by showing off and being the center of attention. As I explored the positive side of all these negative traits and began to embrace them, they stopped running my life. They were my psyche’s great teachers. As soon as I responded to their requests to love them or just to slow down, they became an integrated part of my consciousness and enriched my sense of self-love and wholeness. When I embraced these qualities, it was no longer necessary to eat a whole pint of ice cream or wear skirts that were too short. As soon as I accepted my new friends, they stopped showing up in my life.

I learned this technique when I was living in San Francisco with a man named Rich. We found it was an amusing way to talk about each other’s shadows. On a long drive we made a list of each other’s sub-personalities that seemed to show up frequently in our relationship. It looked like this:

DEBBIE

Resistant Rita

Angry Alice

Dominating Dixie

Processing Percilla

Princess Paulina

Yolanda the Yogi

Controlling Carrie

Lovergirl Laurie

Righteous Renee

RICH

Dominating Dick

Know-it-all Nick

My-way Marvin

Jimmy the Jock

Loverboy Benny

Competent Ken

Tommy the Teacher

We had a lot of laughs putting together our lists. But we had found a serious way to talk about the parts of each other that seemed to give us the hardest time without creating any upsets in our relationship. When issues came up, I was able to stop pointing my finger at Rich. Instead of saying, “You’re trying to dominate me and I don’t like it,” I was able to say, “It feels like Dominating Dick is out today. Could you talk to him for me?” This automatically drained the tension between us because it never seemed like a personal attack. If I started to process what Rich was saying to me, which I often did, he could just tell Processing Percilla he wasn’t in the mood to be processed. I never took this personally, though taking things personally had always been one of my biggest issues in relationships.

Sub-personalities reveal behaviors which we find unacceptable within ourselves. We’ve shut them out because we couldn’t or wouldn’t accept them. Because I had closed off certain parts of myself, I was out of touch with the totality of my being. When I looked inside, I discovered these traits were screaming for my attention. And they guided me toward the next step in the transformation of my life. I have come to believe we have as many sub-personalities as we have traits. I have uncovered at least a hundred of my own, and whenever I look I can always find a new face, a new voice, and a new message. Even the darkest sub-personalities come bearing gifts. We just have to be willing to spend some time with each of them in order to hear their voice of wisdom.

You must be willing to spend time exploring your own inner world. In Neale Donald Walsch’s Conversations with God, God reminds us, “If you do not go within, you go without.” If you take this message seriously, it can change your life. When you go within and form a relationship with your entire being you begin to recognize your ability to steer your life in the direction you choose. There is no greater gift you can give yourself. Then when you say, “I want more money, more love, more creativity, more friends, or a healthier body,” you will have the faith you need to manifest it.

Trust is always a major issue when you begin a dialogue with your internal voices. The most common question seems to be, “How will I really know if I’m hearing my inner truth?” After a few visits with your sub-personalities it becomes easy to distinguish whether you are talking to a sub-personality or listening to negative chatter. Your negative internal voice will seldom have a positive message or a gift for you. There are many ways to help yourself get to an authentic place within. Meditating can be an ideal way to quiet the mind and its negative inner chatter. If you don’t have a regular meditation technique, it may help to buy a meditation tape to give you some direction. Having someone guide you through a series of breathing and body relaxation techniques will help you get out of your head. Another quick and easy thing to try is dance. Put on some beautiful, light music and just let yourself go for a half hour or so. Then sit down, close your eyes, and start to follow your breath. Once you are in a truly quiet place, you’ll begin to distinguish your head from your heart. It takes some practice, but once you make this distinction it makes the process of finding and exploring your sub-personalities much easier. Your head can be heartless. Your heart, though it will be straight and tough at times, will always be full of compassion.

It’s important to receive your sub-personalities with welcoming arms. Easy to say, but not always easy to do. This is one time when expecting the worst may work in your favor. Then what you get will probably be much better than you thought. People are often shocked by the cast of characters they call up, but that’s usually because they were expecting a busload of angels. Sub-personalities might be headless or appear as animals, monsters, or aliens. Whatever you experience in your psyche during a visualization is the right image for you. It’s important not to judge whom you meet or what you experience.

It’s also common to see people you know—ex—lovers, old bosses, family members. Usually someone you didn’t get along with. When these familiar faces show up in your subconscious, resist the urge to blink them away. Stay with them and find out what they’re trying to teach you. You may be able to forget about them for now, but if you don’t deal with their issues you’ll end up meeting them again and again in life. This isn’t a card game where you can throw back the sub-personalities you don’t want for new ones. In fact, the personalities you least want to see will have the greatest lessons for you.

Recently I worked with a woman who seemed to have it all. Not many women have achieved the level of success, fame, and fortune that Shelly has. She climbed the ladder of success in the entertainment industry and worked very hard to get to the top. She got mostly positive press, but was very sensitive to criticism. After years of going at a pace too fast for most people, Shelly took a few months off to work on herself. She had realized she often acted aggressive but hated this part of herself. When she said, “I am aggressive,” her face tightened up and tears came to her eyes. She couldn’t live with this aspect of herself. We sat facing each other for a while and I just had her say over and over, “I am aggressive, I am aggressive.” Shelly was still feeling uncomfortable with this aspect of herself, so I had her close her eyes and took her on a bus ride. We called up a sub-personality which she named Aggressive Allie. Allie had big teased red hair and was in her mid fifties. She was dressed in a navy business suit and had a powerful presence. At first Shelly didn’t like her. But we asked Aggressive Allie what her gift was to Shelly. Allie said protection. Allie told Shelly that she had protected her while she built her career. Allie said she had made sure no one got in Shelly’s way and that no one hurt her or stopped her from attaining her dreams. Then we asked Aggressive Allie what she needed to be whole. Allie wanted love and acceptance. She was tired of being this big, awful, mean woman whom Shelly beat up on. Allie was the person who had made all Shelly’s fame and recognition possible. Now she wanted some credit. In her opinion she wasn’t asking for a lot from Shelly, only love and appreciation for the part she played in Shelly’s life.

Shelly lay on my couch with a huge grin on her face. She was ecstatic. She had fallen in love with Aggressive Alice. She embraced a part of herself that she’d been trying to bury for years. This quality had caused her shame and self-loathing. The paradox was that by not embracing her aggressiveness, Shelly had been robbed of enjoying the gifts of all her success. Shelly was now free to enjoy the fruits of her labor. This is often how it works. You have a quality which has a gift for you. You call on the gift to help get something you want in life. Then because this aspect of yourself is not fully integrated into your psyche and because you’ve made some negative judgment about it, it takes on a life of its own, acting out in inappropriate ways. Until we embrace the qualities from which we’ve disassociated ourselves, they will continue to act up until their needs are met. Remember, what you resist persists. When Shelly had accepted Aggressive Allie, her anguish about being aggressive vanished. Now she’s free to use this aspect of herself only when and if it’s appropriate.

Another useful way to embrace your traits is inviting other people into your consciousness to get their perspective on disowned aspects. Visualize someone you admire and respect, perhaps someone who is holy or spiritual. Now concentrate on one of the words that you still find hard to embrace. Ask the person you’ve chosen how they would interpret this aspect of yourself. Make sure you pick someone who is wise and compassionate. Or try it with someone important from your past, preferably a parent or family member. Here’s an example from my own life: My word is “sloppy.” Since I don’t approve of this part of myself I try to hide it from the world. I orchestrate my life so that I have a nanny who takes care of my son and cleans my house. She keeps everything clean and in perfect order. Even though I’m not the one who keeps my surroundings impeccable, this is the way I like my home to look. No one ever calls me sloppy because my home is always neat and clean. But if someone said Debbie Ford is a slob it would affect me. So I close my eyes, take some slow, deep breaths, and think about the word sloppy. It makes me feel a little sick and tight. Underneath that is the feeling of fear. I trace the feeling into my past and remember my mother yelling at me for being sloppy. I was afraid I wouldn’t be loved if I was a sloppy person. With my eyes closed I picture Mother Teresa in my heart and I ask her how I could reinterpret the word so I am no longer hateful of sloppy. I say to her that I want to put love on this word and then I allow myself to hear her voice. She replies by telling me my sloppiness is play. It’s the way I express the child in me. Throwing clothes on the floor is fun for me and I can stop making it wrong. She tells me the gift of sloppiness is order. Because I grew up always being reminded what a slob I was I now have a unique ability to organize everything and have it look perfect. Now I have one new powerful interpretation.

Then I close my eyes again and I ask Martin Luther King, Jr., to give me a new interpretation for my sloppiness. I picture him in my heart and he says that because I have so much passion for life I have an urgency to go on to the next thing. This shows up as my sloppiness. I’m too excited to tend to the little things, like putting things back where they belong. He says my passion and enthusiasm are the gifts of my sloppiness. By taking responsibility for my sloppiness and hiring someone to take care of those things that I don’t like to do, I can take care of more important business. Interpretation Two.

Now I’m starting to love my sloppiness. Feeling brave, I visualize my mother who always criticized my sloppiness. I ask her for a new powerful interpretation. She says, “The reason I always criticized you for being sloppy was because I was jealous that I never had the internal freedom to just throw a piece of clothing on the floor and leave it there.” She said she was always rigid with herself, even as a child, and couldn’t stand anything out of place. My sloppiness was a reminder of her rigidity. That’s why it upset her so much. She went on to tell me my sloppiness gave me the gift of self-expression. When I was young I loved to paint. I just dove in and tried different colors and strokes, sometimes I used my hands. I was never afraid to try something for fear of making a mess. My sloppiness gave me freedom. Interpretation Three.

I could go on, but in fewer than ten minutes I had a new respect for my sloppiness. Now it feels like a loving, positive characteristic that has given me many gifts. I can really see that I was just having fun and expressing myself. Now when I close my eyes and think about the word sloppy I feel open and receptive. Love heals, and it’s sometimes just a matter of inventing a new interpretation of a feeling or an experience.

As you go about embracing your disowned traits, it can be useful to retrace the steps that led you to believe that a certain quality was bad in the first place. Going back to the time when a characteristic began to have power over you enables you to expose the origin of your ego-driven judgment. My friend Peter was having trouble embracing his weakness. So I asked him to close his eyes and find an image from his past that exemplified his weakness. His first memory was of high school, when he chose a different sport every season because he felt inadequate and uncompetitive. He recalled feeling weak among his classmates at an all-boys’ private school. I asked Peter to go deeper and find an even earlier incident. Then Peter remembered a time when he was eight years old. He was visiting the site where his family was building their new home. The stairs leading to the second level had no backs, so you could see through them to the floor below. Peter remembered his mother and sister leading him up to see his new room. But when Peter was ready to leave, his mom and sister had already gone back down the stairs. He was afraid to climb down alone for fear he might slip through the holes in the steps. Seeing his mother and sister on the first floor, he called to them but they refused to help. His mother told him he’d have to do it alone, or they’d leave him behind. Paralyzed by fear, Peter stayed put. His mother and sister left and didn’t return for half an hour. At that point he internalized the lesson, “If I’m weak, women will leave me.” Since then, Peter couldn’t be weak because he believed it would cause women who love him to leave.

Most of us are driven by the eight-year-old within us. That child who didn’t get his needs met is begging for acceptance. So it’s useful to delve into your memory as far back as possible. From that place that you can more easily find compassion for an aspect of yourself. Peter was a tough guy for years, and his relationships with women never lasted more than six months. He always left them. By retracing his disowned weakness, Peter was able to find the origin of its power. By facing this early incident he was able to own his weakness. To help him embrace this aspect, I asked Peter to choose two people he admired who had an abundance of compassion and humanity. He chose the Buddha and the Dalai Lama. Bringing the Buddha forth in his mind, Peter asked what the gift of his weakness was. The Buddha responded by saying it gave Peter a deep compassion for other people’s weaknesses. From the Dalai Lama, Peter learned that his weakness was the source of his dynamic personality and his ability to make other people comfortable in social situations. Feeling weak provided him with a strong desire to develop a loving and engaging external persona.

Then I asked Peter to think of one of his parents. With his eyes closed, he brought his father into his consciousness. His father told him that by always having to overcome his weakness Peter learned to be resilient and bounce back from all kinds of situations. Because Peter couldn’t accept his weakness he had always taken the hard road to prove how strong he was. He needed to show the world his strength by creating a life full of mishaps, wrong turns, and missed opportunities. Peter’s father predicted that if he started to learn these lessons and embraced his weakness, he would start manifesting the easy road.

Recently, I learned that Peter is writing music, a passion of his which he never thought would be a viable career path. Instead of starting a new job and a new relationship every six months, Peter is channeling his energy into writing songs and producing a demo tape of his work. He is learning to create a world without suffering. A world where it’s safe to express his emotions and his creativity.

If we don’t shift our perceptions of our true selves, we’ll be stuck repeating our past behaviors. Your sub-personalities can tell you what work is left unfinished, what you have to do to resolve reoccurring patterns. They will tell you what you need to do to learn a specific lesson. If you’re willing to listen you will find your sub-personalities are funny, resourceful, honest, and forgiving—the wisest people in the universe when it comes to yourself. This is because they’re giving you answers that come from within you.

You can access anybody you know by going within. All you have to do is get quiet and call forth that person in your subconscious. And when you visualize a particular person and start a dialogue with him you can ask anything you want. You can ask what he thinks about a particular issue and what advice there is for you. Everyone’s voice can be found inside of you—the answers you need from all the people can come from within. All your unresolved relationships and all your lovers, family members and friends, and heroes and gurus. All the people you have shut out or have shut you out. Each one of these people can speak to you and speak through you.

A couple of years ago, I was having a difficult time trying to decide what I wanted to do with my life. During this period I closed my eyes and asked myself, “Whom should I go to for some advice ?” There was a man I’d gotten to know years earlier whom I respected tremendously. My friend Steve’s face appeared to me. For days I went back and forth in my mind trying to decide if I should bother him. It seemed somewhat inappropriate to call him about my career decisions and boyfriend problems. We weren’t really friends anymore. One day during my meditation I attempted to visualize Steve and ask him what he thought I should do. I’d never tried this before, but I knew I had nothing to lose. The most astonishing thing happened: Steve started talking to me. He told me he was glad I’d come to him for help, and he answered all of my questions, clearly and concisely. When I finished it felt like I’d just spent an hour with the real Steve, receiving his wisdom and feeling his love. It was an amazing, eye-opening experience—simple, direct, and to the point. I didn’t even have to leave my house or spend money on a phone call! For months I called on the Steve within me to guide me on my path. I’d found a friend and confidant within myself.

My girlfriend Sirah used a similar technique with me after my father passed away I went to see her in the middle of my grieving, when I was feeling particularly sad that my father would never get to know my son, Beau. Sirah had me close my eyes and visualize my father playing with my son. It was as though my father was standing right in front of me telling Beau he’d always be there to protect him. My father told Beau how much he himself loved music and hoped Beau would also find joy and beauty in music and play one of the instruments he had left behind. This was a moving and extremely valuable experience. It changed the way I felt about the loss of my father. When I left the session with Sirah I was sure my father would always be there to guide and comfort me and that I could bring him close to Beau by sharing his love of music with Beau. The feeling of loss shifted from a hopeless, sinking feeling of despair to one of optimism.

Your sub-personalities are there waiting for you—go in and reclaim them. They want nothing more than attention and acceptance. They are the voices of your future, not your past. They will always be there to guide you, embrace you, and comfort you, whether they come in the form of someone you know or in the form of some shadowy figure. If you befriend yourself, you’ll break the continuing cycle of loss of self or loss of others. What you’ll find out is that we never lose anyone: our relationships simply change form. Someone might not be there physically, but will always be there, within us. By reclaiming everything you hate about yourself, you open up a world within where you have access to the entire universe.

We each have the capacity to give ourselves everything we need to be happy and whole. When we reconnect with our whole selves, it’s virtually impossible to feel lonely, isolated, or left out. We need to find the universe within us, and learn how to love, honor, and respect that universe. Then we can accept the magnitude of ourselves. When we discover the magic of the world within, we stand in awe of ourselves. With that awe comes peace, satisfaction, and gratitude for our humanity.

Every single sub-personality has a gift for you. Every aspect of you, whether you like it or not, can benefit your life. To think there is only darkness is to deceive yourself. There is light in every part of us and every part of the universe. To not find our gifts is to reject the extraordinary design of life. Our souls long to learn these valuable lessons. We need to stop judging our souls’ journey and trust in the design of our humanity and eternal goodness. There is an ancient saying, “All things must grow, or they die.” Our highest purpose is to learn and grow from our experiences and then move on. Once we receive the benefit of our traits we are free to choose the experiences we desire.

EXERCISE

Do this exercise when you are very relaxed, after a walk or a bath. You are going to meet your inner voices so you want to have your mind as quiet as possible. Early in the morning or before you go to bed is also a good time. Put on some soft music and light an aromatherapy candle to help you create a relaxed mood. Close your eyes and start following your breath. Take long, slow, deep breaths, retaining the breath for five or more seconds, and then slowly exhale. Do this four or five times until your mind is quiet.

Now imagine stepping onto a large, yellow bus. Take a seat in the middle of the bus. You’re feeling excited about taking a long-awaited trip. Imagine riding down the street on a clear, beautiful day. You’re sitting there minding your own business when someone taps you on your shoulder. You look up and this person says, “Hello, I’m one of your sub-personalities and all the other people on this bus are also your sub-personalities. Why don’t you get up now and walk around and see who’s on your bus.” You get up from your seat and you walk through the entire bus looking at all the different people in their seats …

You see before you every kind of person—tall people, short people, teenagers, and old people. There might be circus people, animals, and homeless people. With you on the bus are people of every race, color, and creed. Some of them are waving to get your attention, others may be hiding quietly in the corner. Continue to walk through the aisles, slowly visualizing all the characters on the bus. Now the bus driver directs you to allow one of your sub-personalities to take you for a walk off the bus in a nearby park. Take your time and allow one of your sub-personalities to come and take your hand, and escort you off the bus into the park.

Sit down next to this person and ask his or her name. Ask that person to tell you what trait he or she represents along with a name. For example, if you meet someone angry you could name this person Angry Alfred or Angry Ann. If you don’t hear a name you give that person one. Take all the time you need. Notice how this person is dressed and looks. What does this person smell like? Notice his or her mood and body language. Take another deep breath and ask, “What is your gift to me?” After you have received the gift, ask, “What do you need to be whole?” Or “What do you need to integrate into my psyche?” After you have heard every answer ask this person, “Is there anything else you need to say to me?” When you are finished make sure you acknowledge and walk this person back to the bus. When you are ready open your eyes and write down the messages you received from your sub-personality. Then take out your journal and write for at least ten minutes about your experience.

Don’t worry if you did not get all the answers you needed from your sub-personality It takes time and practice to hear all of their messages. Make a date with yourself to do it again. This is an exercise that requires you to surrender to yourself, so make sure you have created a safe environment for the process.