ABSTRACT: While primal therapy has brought a much needed
emphasis on feelings, one must not make the mistake of neglecting the other
aspects of personality, especially intellect and spirit or higher self.
The author relates her intense and difficult path in primal therapy and
its benefits to her but does not insist that Primal is the sole way to
grow. Experience means being in present time, and we experience
the tragedy of losing that realness of experience because of the traumas
and conditionings of our early lives. Yet crises and emergencies
bring us back into that present time, which otherwise we are afraid to
confront. The experience of present time is religious experience.
Present time also relates to the experiences of serendipity and
spontaneity, which can occur when we are able to let go of the expectations
arising out of our past experiences. Three guidelines for becoming
present are to rely on inner guidance, trust our deepest wisdom, and surrender
to our impulses and deeds. Also, vulnerability and innocence, in
the proper context, serve one the best. Most importantly, one must
wake up and become all of one’s Self. Unfortunately, people are “normalized”
into controlling themselves, until at a certain point in their lives crises
occur that cause them to have to reevaluate their life direction.
The author describes four parts to our personalities, P1
through P4, once again emphasizing—amidst these propensities, which
are not all helpful—that one must be wise, must heal oneself, must use
all of one’s mind, and must seek to awaken one’s soul purpose in being
here.
Four universal human resources one needs to access in order to
act creatively in this world are one’s power, one’s love, one’s wisdom,
and one’s vision. These are the ways of the Warrior, the Healer,
the Teacher, and the Visionary, respectively. Each of them has a
shadow side, which must be acknowledged and dealt with as well. Finally,
whereas the Creative Intelligence, or God, cannot be proven, it can be
experienced. And if we continue clearing away the barriers to living
in the present, if we continue healing ourselves, trusting ourselves, listening
to our inner voice, trusting spontaneously, and looking for and expecting
good, the totally new being, the Somebody who has been foretold to be coming
at the end of this millennium, heralding a new era of consciousness, a
shift in consciousness, will be ourselves.2
We Are More Than Feelings
I believe our feelings are incredibly important. I think the gift
that Arthur Janov and all the people who are working with primal therapy
have given us is that they have started focusing on feelings, for a change.
But it is time to emphasize as well that we are much bigger than just our
feelings.
To begin with, in our society feelings are suspect, really downplayed.
Oh, we can act them out and kill each other; we can sexually act them out;
and we can act them out with addictions. But to really take responsibility
and connect with one’s feelings is not OK in this society.
We are taught very early to hide our feelings. So I believe the great
gift of Primal is to put the spotlight on feelings.
On the other hand, the danger of this can be that we put the spotlight
on feelings to the exclusion of the other aspects of us. One of the
things I’m discovering is that we are much, much bigger than we ever thought.
I feel like we are a “quadrinity”: I have feelings, but I’m not just
my feelings. I have them, I experience them.
I also have a body, and I use that too. And it’s fun:
It touches, it tastes, it sees, and all the rest . . . but I’m somehow
more than just my body, too.
I also have an intellect. And it’s a wonderful, absolutely
fabulous tool. I myself am not anti-intellectual, although that tendency
has existed in the Primal movement and to some extent still does.
I just think the reason the intellect has gotten such a bad rap is that
we, and our intellects, have been so badly “programmed.” Like they
say in the computer world: “garbage in, garbage out”! Thus we keep
getting the same old printouts. So I have an intellect, but who is
it that has this intellect, and who has these feelings that I call mine?
Here we get to the fourth aspect, which is kind of an integrative
aspect of ourselves. For me this is the essence of who I am.
I have used the word spirit or soul for this part because
soul
in Greek means psyche. To me it is a container for me to use
my feelings and to use my body and to enjoy my feelings in the body and
all the rest of it. But there's a “me” in here who’s doing the feeling
and there's a “me” in here who was there when I was born, and this same
“me” is probably going to be there when I’m dying . . . I hope.
So what I wish to address here is kind of inclusive, getting us to
be thinking in a bigger way, not isolated. I think that what happened
to us when we were kids is that we were driven into ourselves. There
was so much Pain3 that we
were split into a small corner of ourselves, which was based on, “How am
I going to survive? How am I going to get through this?” And
we’ve been doing that ever since. Therefore the beauty of primal
therapy and the beauty of feelings is that it gets us back in touch with
what we hid, with what we lost . . . all of our feelings, in fact.
The Beginning of My Journey
I got into Primal in the late Sixties. Someone handed me the book,
The
Primal Scream by Arthur Janov, and said, “Read this, Barbara.”
At the time, I was doing some things that were on the edges of what was
going on in my “new-age”-type community: We were thinking globally
and helping others to; we’d been to Esalen; we did “encounter” groups in
the Fifties.
At the same time, all that time, I was raising kids, going to PTA,
doing my Red Cross Service, and all that Palo Alto housewives do.
Then I came to this book, The Primal Scream, and started reading
it. And I found myself—page after page after page—I found me
in that book. My husband read it too, and we got on the phone and
called Art Janov. We could do that in those days; we just looked
him up in the phone book and said, “Hi!” Because of the inspiration
from that book, we both went back to graduate school and we started primal
therapy as soon as possible.
We didn’t go to L.A., where Janov was, however. By the time
we got around to going into therapy, a primal center had opened in Marin
County. Of course it was much easier for us to go to Marin county—which
was only one hour away—instead of flying back and forth to Los Angeles.
That was the beginning of primal therapy for me.
Nonetheless, it was really a catastrophic change for me to go from
having this perfect persona that did all these nice things that well-brought-up
ladies are supposed to do, to lying down and screaming on a mat.
I had had no previous formal therapy. I was a novice. I’d had
one psychology class at Stanford, and I’d just hated it. I’d thought
the last thing I ever wanted to do was to get into psychology. I
considered the people I knew in the field of psychology to be real kooks.
I hated the whole subject because it treated me as if I were one-dimensional,
as if I were a machine. The attitude was they could just “reprogram”
me and fix it up, and I just hated that. For in doing so, I thought
they left out the essence of me, the spirit of me.
Despite all this, years later there I was going to graduate school
to be a psychologist because of primal therapy. Afterwards I practiced
as a therapist at the Marin Center for Intensive Therapy until they opened
an office in Palo Alto. In the meantime my whole life fell apart.
There was a divorce. I felt as if the whole rug were being
pulled out from under me. I felt like I was in fragments, holding
on to a comet for dear life, not knowing where the heck I was going, just
trying to hold on. I’d work in the daytime and feed my kids—although
my oldest boy was in college by then—and I would primal all night long
. . . and just scream.
And through all this I started having some unusual experiences, out-of-body
experiences. One day when I was driving up the freeway I felt I was
really crazy, and I said to myself, “This is what psychosis feels like,
Barbara.” I couldn’t continue driving. I finally pulled over
in San Mateo and went to a friend’s house and sat with her for a little
while. She sent me to somebody who did some healing work just to
get me to the point where I could contain myself. The journey I am
still on began when I read The Primal Scream, which led me into
what the mystics call “the dark night of the soul,” and to finding myself.
More Than One Way
I want to make clear at the beginning of this that anything I say is
nothing more than my own experience. There are many paths to the
mountaintop. I think we are all on our path, and we are led by whatever
that spirit is within us to find our own unique way. I don’t think
there’s only one way: There’s your way and my way; and we are all
going home, to love, because that’s what we started as. It’s a big
circle . . . and where we are going is to being in love with life, being
in love with ourselves, and therefore being in harmony with the Universe.
Whatever we do with our lives, is our choice. With consciousness,
we choose love.
Children are in love with their mothers; mother-child bonding is
an experience of being in love. It’s what the pop songs sing about:
“Can’t live a day without you,” “It’s your face.” Those are infant
songs. For infants do fall in love with their parents, with their
mothers—if the mother’s heart is open to it. When the mother’s heart
is open to love, she mirrors and reinforces the love in the baby, beginning
en
utero. Yet if that love is not mirrored back to us as infants,
something catastrophic happens: We split off. What we split
off from is the real self. It is such a tragedy. We begin as
that loving essence with the heart open; then we learn to shut our hearts
down, we learn to develop a false persona, we learn to try to behave, we
try to fit somebody’s projections. And if that doesn’t work we go
into rebellion, off and running down a track that’s not home but some place
that spells survival.
We spend our lives in search of that lost home, that real me and
you. And people, deep inside, know this! Yet they die without
ever going back to or knowing what “home” is. Despite this, in each
of us I believe there is still that radiant child, that heart of love,
our original capacity. I think that all therapy is simply clearing
away the barriers for us to be able to experience our original essence.
When we experience that, we begin to see it in other people. Even
when these other people are caught up in their Pain or they’re so mad they’re
tearing down a wall, we see that sense of Self in them because we know
that from our own experience.
Experience, Present Time, and God
I put a lot of emphasis on the word experience, because experience
means to me being in present time. It is body, mind, and heart.
You’re not figuring it out, you’re not controlling it, you’re not analyzing
it. In a sense, in a primal, you are in the experience.
And what’s happened to us because we’ve had bad experiences (in our early
life) is we never want to go there, into the real and present experience,
ever again. We were in our experiences during early traumas.
Thereafter we attempt to control our worlds and avoid being in present
time in the misbelief that we will forever keep that old Pain at bay.
We don’t want to move into our experiences because that’s where
the Pain came. Yet when there’s a crisis—say an automobile accident,
or a tree falls down—we find we are all galvanized in present time.
Traumas and crises bring us into present time. We both yearn for
and yet are fearful of being in present time. This tendency helps
explain a number of behaviors and patterns in people.
Let me give an example. Once I was flying back to Denver from
the East Coast, and I sat next to a man who had cowboy boots on, a cowboy
belt, and so on. I started talking to him. He was going to
Colorado, and somehow or other I found out he was a rancher. He said
to me, “When they take away the only thing you love I guess ranching is
OK to do.”
And I said to him “What was the only thing you loved.”
He replied, “I was a jet pilot. I was a jet pilot in Korea,
and I was a jet pilot in Vietnam.”
He spent the rest of the trip talking to me. And it was incredibly
interesting. People are just fascinating to me. I think we,
that is, people, are “the jewels.” I think we are, people are, really
fabulous. We can make a difference here. I really believe that.
So I sat there for the rest of the time on that trip talking to this
man. He talked to me about what it was like to be a jet pilot.
He also told me that he was going home because his eighty-nine-year-old
father was blind and he was bringing him back to live on his ranch.
Then he talked about the chickens. He said there was one little
chicken and all the other chickens were picking on him. So he made
a special place for this chicken. He talked to me also about the
Mourning Doves and how much he loved them. Here was this jet pilot;
yet here was this loving child in him—his caring and love for the animals,
his caring for his elderly, blind father.
So then I started wondering what it was about being a jet pilot that
had so captured him. He said to me: “When you’re in that jet, flying
so fast, you have to be awake. You have to be in present time.
My job was to find downed pilots.” He said, “When you’re doing that,
you don’t care about anything about that person except to save him.
You don’t care what color he is; you don’t care what religion he is; you
don’t care anything about it, except to help.”
I was thinking about this, and I even said to him, “You know that’s
a very spiritual thing.”
And he said, “Nope. I don’t have anything to do with spiritual
things. I was raised a Catholic. No way, shape, or form.
Those ladies in black crying and mourning all the time, I don’t want anything
to do with it.”
And I said, “OK.”
Then he said, “You know why I know that?”
I said, “Why?”
He said: “I was shot down in Vietnam. Drowning. I went
down once, I went down twice. But I didn’t see Jesus, or Mary, or
God . . . nothing at all. I saw the faces of my four children.
And I felt this tremendous sense of love. Then a hand reached down,
grabbed me by my flight jacket, and pulled me up.”
Now, whatever it is that man was talking about is what I’m talking
about . . . the experience of love. And maybe that’s about as close
to God as we can get. It is the feeling that what matters to you
matters to me, your well-being matters to me. I’m connected to you;
I’m not separate from you. We’re in this together. And
we do it without the martyr position of, “Oh my God, I don’t have to matter
to you”—this crazy position that we learned as kids to take care of everybody
else’s feelings and not our own. No, I’m in this, too. We’re
all in this together. It isn’t about sacrificing the Self.
It is about finding the Self.
I think that what Primal does for us in the long run is to help us
to realize that we are all the walking wounded and that everybody is wounded
and that we’re all in this together.
I suppose it is possible there are some people in this society who
aren’t wounded. I read an article in the newspaper about a young
kid in the hills of Mendocino who’d been home-schooled. His parents
were hippies and didn’t want him to go to the public school. When
this boy took the SAT, he scored so high that he got scholarships from
every major university in the United States.
Then the psychologists at the university began to study him because
he was such an unusual, rare, natural kind of person; and they couldn’t
figure that out. He was not so damaged, whereas in our society most
of us are damaged. As soon as we’re out of the womb, we’re separated
from our mother, so we are damaged right away. Every single one of
us is walking with a crutch of some sort. One of the things in therapy
I believe is that you shouldn’t take a person’s crutch away; I don’t think
it’s fair to pull people’s crutches away, unless you are willing to walk
beside them as they learn to walk without crutches.
Serendipity, Spontaneity, Living in the Moment
Spontaneity—“the state of acting in accordance or as a result
of a natural feeling.” And the second thing, serendipity—“the
aptitude for making fortunate discoveries,” like synchronistically, or
like a miracle. From the most ordinary: “We’re late. Wow, we
found a parking place! We’re just gonna make it!” to the most miraculous.
When I say I believe in miracles, people say Barbara is off on one
of her tangents. But the ranch at which I work is a miracle.
When I had the idea to found the ranch, I had no resources except my house
in Palo Alto. I also had nobody to do it with. I just had a
vision and a reason. When I was going through my personal dark night
of the soul in the Seventies, I needed a safe place. I needed a sanctuary;
I needed a place where someone was going to trust my process . . . not
stop me, not drug me, not judge me; but protect me.
Even at that time—and I’d already done a lot of primal work by then—I
felt that there was some good that would be gained from going through the
experience. Why, after all, all of a sudden was my life in total
chaos? Why? Yet I used to say to myself, “You know somehow
I’ll get through this” . . . even though I felt like killing myself.
A funny thing happened. One day I was doing a ropes course
in the mountains. Suddenly I found myself off the side of the mountain,
hanging by a rope, and I thought, “Oh my God, how am I going to find the
next thing to hold on to?” And I laughed at myself because apparently
I really didn’t want to die! I could have fallen, but there was something
in me that said, “No, hang on there for a while.”
So in looking at spontaneity and serendipity the first
thing that came to me was, learn to live in the moment. The second
thing was, rely on inner guidance. Third thing was, trust our deepest
wisdom, surrender to our impulses.
For learning to live in the moment means surrender; it means letting
go, which means confronting your ego, which means confronting the fact
that you don’t know much, which means confronting a lot of your old tried
and true admonitions about how you’re going to live—survival messages deeply
ingrained, based on fear not love.
Actually what happens is we decide that what is safe is fear and
what is dangerous is love; that our fears, our defenses will keep us safe.
So we live behind barricades, and we don’t trust anybody. Anyone
who’s living in a castle with the turrets up, the moat in place, the gates
barred is not in a very good place for a relationship . . . unless you
get someone else who’s also in their turret and all you do is send messages
across to each other or capture someone.
So why don’t we live in the moment? Occasionally we live in
the moment, but it is rare. We live in the past, and we project the
past into the present. Every time we meet somebody we say something
like, “Oh my God that’s a man wearing a blue shirt, he looks like my uncle
who molested me.” So we don’t see the man at all. We do this
all the time. We project massively. And that is not living
in present time. That is living in the past.
What primal therapy is about for me is to go back there to look at
the wounds, to feel the feelings, and to “witness.” It’s something
about, if we had had our Pain witnessed and not judged, we may have not
repressed it. Our reality was not validated. R. D. Laing said,
“If our experience is destroyed, our behavior will be destructive.”
So of course we don’t trust our experience. Of course we can’t live
in the moment. We can’t live in the moment if we’re always deep,
deep inside, hiding behind our defenses and masks. Some of us are
like: You can’t find me. I’m so deep in the woods back there that
you can’t touch me, can’t reach me. The false self that we develop
has to control. I mean you’ve got to. You can’t be natural.
You can’t be in the moment if you’re always constantly trying to be something
that somebody else wants you to be or you think they want you to be.
We learn to live an inauthentic life, and we will defend whatever it is
we believe will keep us safe.
Relying on Inner Guidance: The Voice of Fear and
The Voice of Love
Serendipity and spontaneity mean simply letting go of expectations,
letting go of what we’ve learned to expect. Just like the man in
the blue shirt: a man treated me a certain way at one time, and then I
expect that from men in general. So how can we be spontaneous with
this person in the present without letting go of those old beliefs we have
which form the foundation of prejudice and projection.
Incidentally, living in the moment is like that jet pilot I told
you about when he was drowning: He was absolutely present, in the
moment. And it is a very high state of being to be living in the
moment, to drop the past, to heal it, to transform it. It is a high
state of being, and in order to do it, the next thing is to rely on
inner guidance.
People come to me and they say, for example, “Chief Sunbear is my
guide.” I say, “Fine.” For it may be a projection of his or
her higher self, the innate self. The higher self can be projected
on all kinds of things: It can be a religious figure; it can be Sunbear;
it can be a golden eagle. Regardless, this kind of projecting can
serve as a way for a person to begin to trust the “within,” to begin to
listen to it.
Before Primal, or a lot of therapy, most of what we learn to rely
on as inner guidance is that voice of fear, the defensive voice from the
past. We learned to trust it because it’s “what got us through the
night”; as I was saying to somebody, bless it, it got you through your
childhood. It served your survival. So that voice of defense
is to be acknowledged. It’s the best you could do at one time, as
a child. Children are creative, they’re psychic . . . in devising
the best possible way of surviving in a situation. That choice can
be honored.
But now, is there another way, another voice you can listen to?
Is there a voice of feeling, within, a voice of truth, within?
Can you learn to take that little moment of choosing and make another choice
instead of going down that same old path of fear and defense? What
I’m saying is that we’ve been listening to the voice of fear most of our
lives, yet I think our innate voice—our original voice before the fear
and defense started—is the voice of love, the voice of feeling. And
that voice of love and feeling is not stupid, like cynics would have one
believe. No, in fact it is very smart, very wise indeed.
Before therapy, most of us are in a battle between our intellect
and our hearts; and the battleground is the body. I used to think
when I was going through my worst days that there was this big war going
on in my body between this voice that was saying, “Stop this. Get
to work! This is crazy,” and this voice that was saying to me, “Die.
This is too much for you, you cannot handle this. It’s going to kill
you anyway so go ahead and die.” But there was a little voice that
was saying, “Barbara, there is a purpose in this; there’s a reason for
this. Go with it, trust your process.” And my body continued
to be a battleground. At one point I developed a fever of 104 degrees,
and all my skin peeled off. The doctors couldn’t figure out what
was wrong with me. What I know now is that I was going through a
rebirth experience. I was awakening to another way of being in the
world. For many of us our body somaticizes our feelings in such ways.
To rely on inner guidance we have to begin to ask, “Is this the only
choice in this situation? Is there another way of looking at this?
Which voice am I listening to? Is it the voice of fear or is it the
voice of love?” I’m simplifying this, because I think in essence
those are the two choices. There may be many names on the side of
fear and many forms on the side of love, but essentially the choice boils
down to the voice of fear or the voice of love.
When I was going through this battle I used to say, “I don’t know
what voice I’m listening to.” And then I learned to notice what the
fruits of the voices were. What was going to be the product if I
listened to this voice? What was going to happen if I listened to
the voice of fear? Was there a possibility I could learn to trust
the other voice? And you can learn to do that. So in order
to have inner guidance you first have to get straight about what you’ve
been listening to most of your life. And most of us have been listening
to the voice of fear, this critical parent voice. Knowing this, we
can begin to change it.
Trust Your Deepest Wisdom
The next thing is, trust your deepest wisdom. Wisdom is
the marriage of the head and the heart. But the normal state is a
feeling of a split between the head and the heart, the feelings and the
intellect.
Let us say you have a son who wants to go out and ride his bicycle.
Wisdom is caring to please the child, but it is not wise to put the child
on the freeway! That’s the intellect part of wisdom coming in.
So you say, “You can ride the bicycle, honey, but not on the freeway.”
One unfortunate danger in deep feeling therapy is that people get
so in touch with their inner child that they disparage the intellect.
The intellect has been so negative all the time that they just want to
fire it. They don’t want to listen to it anymore; they just want
to listen to their feelings, their “heart.” But then, ignoring the
intellect, they take their “child” (their heart) into situations that wind
up being harmful. And once again this reinforces the familiar voice
of fear that says, “See, it’s not safe in the world.” And yet you
wouldn’t take your “child” to a lawyer’s office or to get a bank loan.
It’s just not a child’s responsibility.
You need to develop that wise, good elder archetype—if you want to
use Jungian terminology—the wise one, the intelligence. We’re not
just our feelings even if for a while in our life, in therapy, we emphasize
that. We’ve got to heal our thoughts, too, and our minds. With
that we develop a wise parent because you cannot have wisdom just being
a kid. The child in us has a lot, but the kid doesn’t know about
computers; the kid doesn’t know about freeways, unless it takes us out
there riding tricycles and gets us hit. And that’s what’s already
happened to us, because we didn’t have parents who had a lot of wisdom.
So the answer lies both in getting in touch with your heart, which is your
feelings, but also your head which is, What have you been thinking?
What voice have you been listening to? Can you learn to take care
of yourself wisely and lovingly?
When I think how wonderful Primal is, I think about how people can
go deep enough inside themselves so that they can try to get a different
printout. They can get deep enough so they can start changing the
computer base. I’m illiterate as far as computers are concerned,
but I think they are a metaphor for what we have within us. We’ve
been very badly programmed. All we knew as kids was that we were
scared.
I believe we have choices: Now we do, then we didn’t.
But it’s a process, not an event. And I think most of us who read
Janov’s book thought, “Hey, I’m going to have One Big Primal! That’s
it! I’m going to cure it.” Wrong. It’s a process.
I think it’s a never ending one. I hope I’m in process for the rest
of my life. Which means: change.
One of the things we try to do with this negatively programmed mind
is to get our act together and take it on the road. We just do it
over and over again, because sameness is dependable and this fearful part
of our mind always likes to have control. Things are always going
to be the same, and I’m going to be the same . . . and control everything.
But we’re fighting a losing battle. Because everything changes.
Even the stars change. Because we’re in flux, we’re growing.
We’re growing all the time. If we don’t change, we stagnate.
We are growing all the time, or we have the opportunity for growing all
the time. And sometimes when people come to me at the ranch and they’re
in a crisis, I think maybe it is an opportunity for growth and transformation.
I believe crises are wake-up calls. My divorce, for example,
and everything that happened subsequently was: “Wake up, Barbara!”
I believe that crises are opportunities. In fact the Chinese
character for crisis incorporates the symbol for opportunity . .
. that is, if we choose to take it, if we make that choice.
So, trust your deepest wisdom. And wisdom is, as I said, a
marriage of the head and the heart.
Surrender To Your Impulses and Deeds
The next one is to surrender to your impulses and deeds.
Well now that’s a very dangerous statement. On the one side it’s
like “Hey, go shoot somebody.” “I’ll do what I want to that person
with my deepest impulse!” “My little kid inside is really mad, and
I want to sock you in the nose!” That might actually be what I’m
aware of as my deepest impulse. So you really can’t surrender to
your deepest impulse until you’ve gone a long way down the path of deepest
feeling, until you get to the point where you know you can trust your deepest
impulses because they come from wisdom and compassion. That’s your
true self. That doesn’t mean your true self does everything perfectly;
it’s more a feeling that your innate nature is good. You can trust
it. You don’t get to that place until you’ve cleared a whole lot
of the shit away.
An important part of surrendering to my innate nature is that I’m
going to keep my agreements because it makes me feel better about me.
It also lowers the fear level in me to do so.
In your healing process, these are things that are all very important:
trusting your inner guide, getting clear, learning to live in the moment.
Hallelujah, if we could live in the present moment, clearly, with our inner
guidance, trusting our deepest wisdom, surrendering to our natural impulses
. . . we would be totally transformed! And if the world could do
that, even if enough people could do that, our society would be transformed.
So it’s very important. So if you choose, you can make a difference
in the world. In fact, if you heal yourself, you have made a difference
in the world because you’re part of it. So you’ve made a big difference
in the world just by healing yourself.
Vulnerability and Innocence
Another thing I want to talk about is vulnerability and innocence, because
I think they’ve gotten a bad rap. What we’ve been taught in this
society is to not be vulnerable and that innocence is stupid or naive.
Yet innocence is the natural state of the radiant child. I think
the circle we’re making in growing ourselves up is to take the wisdom also
back to the innocent child so we can have both of them: innocence and vulnerability
with wisdom.
In the process of healing, guided imagery can be very useful.
There is great power in imagination. Actually many of our worries
are the result of negative imagining based on our past experiences.
With the technique of guided imagery, it is wise to use simple language,
not complicated intellectual descriptions.
I’ll tell you one of my favorite stories about that. There
was a physician who had cancer really badly. He had surgery; but
after surgery his pain continued, and he could find no way to abate his
discomfort except massive doses of codeine. He began going to the
Pain Clinic at UCLA. That didn’t help much either. He went
in one day to the attending doctor and said, “I’ve decided to kill myself,
I just can’t go on like this, life isn’t worth it to me. I have massive
doses of medicine every day. I can’t practice, I can’t do anything,
I’m in constant pain; it’s not worth it to me to be alive.”
The attending doctor said, “Just a minute.” He went through
his records and said, “Let’s use some guided imagery about this.
What does that pain feel like?”
The physician replied, “It feels like a dog is grabbing my ass.”
The attending doctor suggested he go home and talk to that dog.
So the physician went home. About three months later he came
back to the clinic. The attending doctor walked up to him and said,
“Wait a minute. What’s happened? I see you’re still here.
Did you talk to the dog?”
And the physician kind of mischievously said, “Yes. I got home, and
I talked to the dog.”
“What did the dog say?”
The dog said he wanted me to take him for a walk every day.
So the doctor said, “Are you doing it?”
“Yes, and my pain’s gone.”
Now, obviously this physician would not take a leash and drag it
around and say to the neighbors, “See my dog?” But he listened to
his internal guidance, and the pain went away.
There are many, many, many stories like this. I’m sure many
of you have them—people who finally get in touch with something at the
unconscious level, at the child level, and it makes a difference in their
lives. You do it with guided imagery or feeling work. However
you do it, it’s learning to listen to that unconscious child part of us
and thereby rediscovering our natural innocence.
Most of us spent a long time—I spent years—trying to “figure it out.”
But that’s the part of our mind that’s been programmed to maintain our
defenses, which eventually becomes our conditioned mind. It’s like
going up to the jailer and saying, “Give me the key,” when his job is to
keep the key. We need to learn to listen and trust the innocence
in us which is basically good, and to be vulnerable when appropriate.
Trusting is ultimately living with less fear, and it will serve your healing.
So you can begin to trust your own vulnerability.
Waking Up and Using All of Your Self
I want to relate another story, an ancient Hindu story. It’s about
a soul who wants to have an adventure, and so it decides to come down here
and be an Earth person. The first thing it needs is a carriage to
go on its adventure. This of course is analogous to the body.
So it goes out and finds a great big carriage. The carriage is comfortable;
it has red leather on it, and other things just the way he wants it.
This soul climbs into the carriage and just sits there. It
gets very boring. He thinks, “It’s not going any place.” Yet
he’d come for this great adventure. So he figures, “I guess I’d better
go out and find myself a wonderful team of horses.”
The little soul then goes out and finds himself this wonderful team
of beautiful horses. And he attaches them to the carriage, climbs
in, and says, “Giddyap!” The horses take off . . . and it is a terrible,
bumpy ride. My gosh, they almost tip the carriage over! The
horses are running amok, all over the place, into the field, stumbling
and falling.
Finally the little soul gets out and somehow or other manages to
stop the horses. Maybe they just run until they are tired.
He gets out and says, “This will not work. I’ve got to have a driver.”
So the little soul goes into town and finds a driver. I always
think of this driver as someone with a high top hat and a coat and a little
whip he knows how to crack just right. The soul hires the driver.
The driver climbs up outside the carriage onto the seat. The driver
is the intellect of course. And the horses represent one’s feelings,
one’s energy.
So here’s this little soul. And he’s now got the driver which
is the intellect, and the horses, which are feelings; he’s got this carriage,
which is his body. And just as he’s about to drive off he says to
the driver, “You better go get the map. I’m going into the carriage.”
So the driver steps off the carriage. And the first people
he meets are the mother and father of his passenger. The driver says,
“Do you have the maps for this territory?”
And the parents reply, “Yeah. Here are the maps.”
Meanwhile the little kid is asleep in the carriage. All of
a sudden he wakes up, twenty years later, looks around, and he says, “I
didn’t want to go to Houston, Texas!” The driver—which is your intellect,
badly programmed by these old maps, these old scripts—says, “I’ve been
running this for twenty years. Shut up and go back to sleep.”
Later the kid looks up again, and my gosh they’re off in some desolate
place in the middle of the desert! The kid hollers, “This is not
where I wanted to go!”
“Shut up! I’ve been doing this; I’ve been doing a good job.
I’ve gotten us this far. Go back to sleep!”
So the little kid who hired the carriage, hired the intellect, and
found the horses is not where he wants to be. Obviously what the
soul needs to do is to wake up and tear up those old maps and take charge
of his journey.
And that’s essentially what happens when we start to wake up; your
kid starts waking up and hollering and screaming. And even if, at
this point, you can’t hear a peep coming from inside your carriage; still
your body’s beginning to feel it, and your mind is upset. And you
might break out crying some times. Inside, your soul is saying, “Hey,
I did not want to go to Houston! I wanted to go to Hawaii!
Wake up!”
I believe we are all in the process of waking up. We’re either
getting rid of the driver, hiring another one, getting new maps; and we’re
saying, “Where did I want to go on this trip?” Or we’re getting into
the driver’s seat, taking charge. To continue the metaphor, you need
the intellect to read the map because the little child can’t even read.
It’s a team approach.
Most of the time when someone starts to wake up and the emotional
self, the child, expresses the feelings, the conditioned mind, the driver,
tries to regain control over the emotions by attacking and punishing the
child-self. Society, unfortunately, is often on the side of the driver.
Your friends say, “What are you doing? Don’t you know that’s dangerous?”
And then they start their litany of shouldn’t, ought to, stop, too dangerous,
and so on. So also the driver’s main weapons are guilt and fear.
Sometimes the negative mind triumphs. Other times the wounded
feeling-self gains control and for a while causes havoc. The goal
is to become congruent—a whole self, mind, emotions, body working in harmony
supporting the soul’s purpose for the journey.
As a therapist, I believe it is a sign of healing when a client
confronts me. Clients can confront people and situations, including
their therapists: I feel we both win when that occurs; I must have
done something right. We are a team working toward the client’s inner
wisdom. I know I do not have their answers. I wasn’t back there,
I didn’t give them their road map. Someplace there’s a little spirit,
a little song in them that knows. And my job is just to clear away
the obstacles so they can listen to their internal guidance, so they can
trust their natural impulses, so that they can live in a spontaneous way
in present time. That’s what my job is. It is not to give them
my road map but to enable each person to find their own unique road map,
uncontaminated by psychological theories or the fear of others’ disapproval.
The STAR program at Pocket Ranch is a process that empowers and supports
individuals to find and share the truth and Pain of their past so they
can discover the Self. STAR stands for Self-analysis Towards
Awareness Rebirth. It is a process through which people go back to
their childhood and their birth. One of the things we do is to say,
“Let’s get rid of the psychological jargon and let’s find out how this
happened to us, how we wound up in Houston. I mean, we wanted to
go to Hawaii. Something happened to us, how did we get here?”
A lot of us forget about destinations: We’re so busy riding
and holding on to the sides of the carriage that we don’t think about where
we’re going. Sometimes the problem is that the place we ended up
we didn’t really want to go, but it’s nice enough. It’s hard to leave
the comfort of the old patterns. Though it doesn’t feel that way,
it is a blessing if a two-by-four from the Universe wakes you up!
Eventually we learn to listen. In my case, I started to listen
because I got tired of the blood and pain. As you become more
whole and trusting it becomes easier. But none of this is supported
in our culture, which is not about awakening, but remaining unconscious,
drugged. The essential Self is not affirmed; the wisdom of the soul
is rejected, and we stay asleep. We miss the journey.
“Normal” in our society is terminal. We become normalized to
behaving, to not having feelings, to living in a controlled way without
serendipity, without trusting, without being in the moment. That’s
what “normal” is in our society. Being spontaneous is natural to
a healed Self; it welcomes serendipity. The controlled fearful mind
welcomes neither. With therapy, experiential feeling therapy, the
past can be left where it belongs, in the past. One begins to learn
an expectancy of good, which is serendipity—“fortunate occurrences.”
Personality
But most of us don’t expect good. Back in our STAR program we
call it P1—the original self. People also call it the higher
self, they call it the soul, they call it the psyche
. . . a lot of different words. I know it’s there because I’ve experienced
it, not just with myself, but I’ve had the privilege of being with other
people when they’ve contacted it. So it’s as real to me as the floor
on which I stand.
We develop a shadow side to contain the Pain; it acts out our Pain
in a multitude of ways. We call this shadow self our second personality
(P2). And I was saying to somebody yesterday, to me the shadow
is always a child, or an infant or a fetus, who’s wounded. It’s the
wounded part of us, the anger that we could never express, the grief we
could never cry, the fear we could never get comfort for . . . all acted
out in a big body with a sophisticated intellect and a variety of ways—horrible,
violent, subtle, manipulative. It is important that what we do in
Primal gets us in touch with our shadow side.
Somebody once asked Jung if we were going to be able to avoid a nuclear
holocaust. What he said was, “Yes. If people get in touch with their
shadow we can avoid nuclear holocaust.” And that’s a lot of what
we do in therapy and a lot of what we do in Primal: We get in touch
with that anger, we begin to look squarely at the ways we have acted it
out, and if you’re in recovery, and if it’s possible, you make amends to
people, you correct it, and you try to stop doing it. Then when you’ve
released the Pain, you can stop repeating the pattern because the generator
for the energy has been changed. You can use that energy toward,
not the fearful voice in you, but the other voice in you--the loving voice
in you which we all have.
And then we have P3. The P3 personality is all
the masks we’ve layered on top of the shadow. Both the P3 and the
P2 hide the soul, our original and innate self. P3 is like I’m going
to be the nice little Palo Alto housewife, you know; or you’re going to
be the macho football player; or you’re going to be the family victim.
We chose our masks to attempt to get a little love, or attention or safety.
We became addicted to those ways of being in the world, and when we begin
to look within, our anxiety increases. A common belief is that there
is nothing else: our shadow and our masks—that is our identity. The
void and emptiness within is the place of discovery of the soul.
It has not abandoned us, we have hidden it within the darkness of our fear.
And then we discover by working with people that there’s still another
level. We call it P4. P4 is a religious persona
or a self-righteous persona. But it doesn’t have to be in a church.
You can find it in the new-age communities as well. You know, where
you find the “Oh my God, you smoke! Now I’ve never smoked
in my life.” But what is that? It adds up to, I don’t talk
to her, I don’t find out about her, I have an immediate judgment that she’s
a bad, unconscious, untransformed person, right? By contrast, judgment
is not a quality of the soul.
These P4s come from a self-righteous place: “You’ve got to
be born again to the way of the Lord. It’s the only way.” Or,
“You’ve got to be a vegetarian. That is the only way.” These
people narrow everything. They think of themselves as flat, one-dimensional.
They don’t say, “Isn’t that interesting, you’re chanting Buddhist chants.
What’s that like for you?” They say, “Chanting Buddhist chants!
That’s stupid!” Religious “spiritual” personas create separation
and alienation.
But they do it in all kinds of ways. Like Jim Bakker is probably
an example of that. Jim Jones in California, who led all those people
down to South America and killed them all, is a good example of P4.
But what you’ve got to know is Jim Jones said a lot of good things.
He also took care of a lot of homeless people. These things hooked
people’s innocent child in to the point where he became their parent, the
Father-God, to be obeyed, and so on. Since they had no access to
their “adult”—with their own inner wisdom—they were the children and he
was to be obeyed even to the extreme of poisoning themselves and their
families. However, true spiritual power is not power over, it is
power with. True spiritual power seeks win-win scenarios not I-win-when-you-lose
ones.
That’s why it’s so important for us to get our own inner wise sage
or parent, because then our child-self isn’t going to get hooked into something
like that. You have to be very wise in all this. You must wake
up the child in the carriage, which is the child who leads you to your
soul—the part of you who knows your life purpose. The Bible
says it this way: “Except ye be as a little child, you cannot enter
the Kingdom”—which is within. To do this does not require being mindless.
To the contrary it requires healing your mind and being mindful and not
chronically listening to the voice of fear and guilt, which is not the
voice that leads you home to Love.
Universal Human Resources For Creative Action
I want also to share with you, because it’s pertinent, universal human
resources that are necessary for creative action. People, in Primal,
have done a lot of creative action. I know that at the beginning
you [the International Primal Association] had to fight just to use the
name primal. IPA is creative action—a gathering of people
who believe in trusting their feelings and beginning to learn to express
them. You can just tell coming to this group of people the level
of honesty and reality as soon as you walk in here. Here there is
a whole different level of being able to be, which I’m sure I will not
find next Wednesday in Chicago with the Infant Psychiatric Community.
So I have to have more of my adult there; here I can let my kid out.
In some organizations and places it’s not wise for me to show up
with too much “kid.” Like this morning I was talking to some of you
about how I dress when I go to speak to certain organizations. If
I’m going to speak to the local lady Republicans’ club—like giving aid
to children or something or other—I have to dress like a lady Republican.
I wear heels and hose and a linen dress and I look a certain way for them
to be able to hear me with some degree of openness. But I don’t give
a damn what the appearance is, what I am attempting is to communicate.
And if it means I dress like that, fine. If I go talk to a hippie
commune up in Mendocino some place, it’s another thing again.
These are four things I want to stress about universal human resources
for creative action: one is power, one is love, one is wisdom, and one
is vision. When you started this organization, you must have had
vision; you knew what you wanted to create. There must have been
some wise people around to help you chart through the waters. And
there must have been some sense of power to do it.
In Native American terms, power is the way of the Warrior.
I often think that we need to develop that part of us in order to confront
what we have to confront and to be able to make changes in our lives.
We need to develop that sense of power in us and to be present. Walt
Whitman said, “We convince by our presence.” And that’s not just
our body showing up. That’s all of you showing up--your body, your
feelings, your intellect, your spirit. And we need to communicate
it one way or the other. To have power you need to say, “We want
to create an organization.” Or in my case, “I want to create a sanctuary
for people . . I don’t know how I’m going to get there.” You didn’t
know how you were going to get here. But you had and used the power
and the willingness to communicate.
Another thing that out of our fear we are sometimes not willing to
do is to take a stand, to stand up. Just to stand up is powerful.
It’s a position of power, the position of the Warrior. It’s the willingness
to communicate it . . . the willingness to say whatever I need to say to
this psychiatric organization, for example, in a way that I hope they can
get it, without compromising my integrity.
The next thing, which is love, is the way of the Healer. First,
we need to recognize our own wounds. We need to work on healing ourselves.
I don’t think we’re ever through healing ourselves. Everybody who
is here on this planet has the opportunity to work on healing themselves,
to grow, to change, always. Even death itself can be an opportunity
for growth.
There are so many young men dying of AIDS in San Francisco.
I have one friend who’s lost sixty friends. He’s in his thirties.
The opportunities are there to revolutionize the way we deal with death.
They are learning to look at the experience of dying. To sit with
someone who is dying, with consciousness, can be a healing experience.
That is the power of love, the way of the Healer. The greatest
pain within us was that we had all this love and it was not accepted.
You know how hard it is to want to love somebody. You say, “It’s
too scary for me. I will not let down my guard; I will not let down
my defenses; I will not be vulnerable.” Some of us had parents who
were in that position. You were coming from the heart of love with
all this love to give. It was too scary for them. The grief
of having your love not accepted is very, very painful; just as not receiving
love is painful.
The third thing is wisdom, which is the way of the Teacher.
Remember earlier I said wisdom isn’t just heart. It’s the marriage
of the head and the heart that heals the mind and the heart; that’s wisdom.
That is what serendipity is about. That’s what trusting the moment
is about. That’s what it’s all about: trusting, listening, being
in the moment, being vulnerable—wisely, not stupidly. I can see how
vulnerable you are with each other. It’s amazing to be here with
you and see how open you are . . . and how vulnerable you are to each other
and how much you share with each other. This willingness to go to
your limits is beautiful. It’s a real privilege to be here.
I know now why Karen (Buck) says, “This is like my family” . . . how much
love she feels, how much support she feels coming to the IPA, because it
is here.
The fourth thing is vision, the way of the Visionary. It’s
trusting your intuition, using your intellect; saying, “We want to develop
an organization, an IPA.” OK? That’s the vision. Then,
“All right, let’s use our heads. What legal things do we have to
do? What are the ways of the world?” Like at the Ranch, we
walk a very fine line between the ways of the world and the ways of the
heart. I wanted the Institute to be legal. I want it to fit
in somehow to the laws of the state of California. I wanted people
to be able to use insurance to go there, but none of this at the expense
of the feeling heart. I don’t want us to be so concerned about legal
and medical and finances that we neglect the work of the heart.
In fact I think about my friend, John Perry, who’s written some wonderful
books (e.g., The Far Side of Madness) and who is a Jungian analyst
in San Francisco . . . a beautiful man, a wonderful man. He said
to me, “Barbara, try not to get involved with the medical world.
They will stop you from doing what you want to do.” And yet we want
to be viable in the world, that’s the way of the head. We also want
to be heart; we want to create a sanctuary for people. Get your vision
out there and then start using your intuition, using your perception, using
your insights, listening to other people, developing a community for healing
the children at any age.
Of these four things I’ve mentioned—power, love, wisdom, and vision—each
has a shadow side. I want to quickly go over the shadow side of each
of those four things. In any organization, and each one of us individually
for that matter, to develop the power, to develop the love, to have the
wisdom, to have the vision, it is very helpful to be clear on your purpose.
Purpose mobilizes your energy and your direction.
The shadow side of power is addiction to intensity in relationships,
the addiction to drama, to sensationalizing everything, exaggerating everything.
The shadow side of power is also domination, manipulation, control over,
not control with.
The addiction to perfection is the shadow side of love. “I
must be perfect. Everything around me must be perfect. My house
must be perfect.” This is different from excellence. There’s
a meanness to perfection, a denial of your own feelings in perfection.
There’s a false sense of, “If I’m perfect enough, I’m going to get love.
But I need to do it just right.” Give it up!
The shadow side of wisdom is the addiction to the need to know before
you step out. “I’ve got to know everything before I make a choice.
I’ve got to read every book.” And then I spend my whole life time
reading books! “I can quote Freud, four chapters. I can quote
the Saints . . . yet I’ve experienced nothing.” It’s the addiction
to the need to know. It’s also a need to control, which comes from
fear and lack of trust.
And the fourth one, the shadow side of vision is an addiction to
what doesn’t work. Have you ever known anybody who’s addicted to
what doesn’t work? There’s always a “but.” I heard somebody
say once: “Get your ‘but’ out of the way!” Some people are
addicted to what doesn’t work. If they open themselves up to their
feelings and Pain, into what happened to them in the past, and into why
they are addicted, then they can change.
Higher Consciousness, God, and a Coming Shift
in Consciousness
The final thing I want to share about is higher consciousness, is about
God. I don’t know if there is a God. I don’t know what God
is. Most of us, I think, are so confused about what the higher power
is, or if there is a higher power, that we try to box it in, just like
we try to box in everything else. And most of us were probably taught
in Sunday school, or wherever we went, that somehow if we just learned
all the rules right, we’d be in heaven, or whatever your frame was.
But I do absolutely believe and experience that there is a Creative
Intelligence that you can tap into. It might be my idea of Mind.
That’s my source for a sense of power, of wisdom, of purpose, of love,
of being able to live in the moment. It is the inner voice I try
to listen to. When I’m in harmony with that, then my feeling-self
and my head-self and my body are not a battleground but are in alignment!
I have more energy to use.
I don’t, I can’t completely understand the Pacific Ocean. When
I stand on the California coast, and I experience and see the magnificence
of that ocean or I take a little handful of it, I can’t fathom the totality
of that ocean. I really can’t. I suppose even people who are
oceanographers really can’t either. It’s like psychology: When you
read your first book you thought you knew it all; and the further along
you go, the more open you are to knowing you don’t know that much and you
learn as you go. So, the ocean is a mystery.
But what I can do is plunge into the ocean. I can swim
in the ocean. I can step out of the ocean. I can be dripping
of the ocean and smelling of it and tasting the salt water. I think
this higher intelligence, God, is like that. We can take a plunge
in it, and we can drip from it and smell it and swim in it. I think
if you have the trust to get just a little bit into it, you can get your
own experience of what that is: I do believe it’s a reality. I’ve
witnessed too many miracles in my life and others to not believe it.
I believe that each one of us has that higher consciousness in that
essential little spirit that hires the carriage. If we can start
clearing away the barriers to the present, of listening to that small still
voice, I think that we will heal, we heal ourselves. We can always
work on it. We get a better chance of being here in the world, of
trusting ourselves, of listening to our inner voice, trusting spontaneously,
of looking for and expecting good—serendipity.
To have some of this way of being makes life so much easier and so
much more fun that sometimes my heart aches for all the people in Pain.
We have something to empower us, to teach us, to heal us, which is within
ourselves. I don’t think it’s out there in a book or out there in
therapy; I think it’s right here inside. All we do in therapy is
clear away the barriers that keep us from experiencing that natural sense
of Self, so we can trust our impulses and live in a different way in the
world and with each other.
Lastly, we’re not alone. We’re not alone from the history of
the species; we’re not alone from each other; we’re not alone in this Universe.
And you can’t separate yourself from the myths and our history and things
like that. For we’re a part of this whole human life, this whole
experiment that’s been going on, on this planet. We’re a part of
it, and I don’t see how anybody can be alive right now without knowing
something’s happening. I don’t see how people cannot be aware that
there are changes in the air. Fear separates us. Love unifies
and heals us.
We can begin to listen to those changes and to align ourselves to
those that move us toward creating a place of peace, within ourselves and
in our communities. We can choose to be part of the solution rather
than part of the problem. There are many predictions and omens surrounding
the end of this twentieth century. No other century has had such
a wealth of apocalyptic prophecies. Yet as we go through these visions
to the end of this dark, warring age, we need to pay attention to the prophecies
of healing, “the dawning of the Age of Aquarius,” of community, and of
the reappearance of a particular thread of light. Prophecies abound
of a particular thread of light, the appearance of a totally new way of
being which heralds a new age of consciousness.
In fact I often think of somebody who is coming. But I think
this somebody: it is you . . . it is me. Buddha said twenty-five-hundred
years ago that at this time--right where we are now--there’s going to be
a shift in human consciousness like no other we’ve ever seen. And
each one of us is part of it or we would not be doing this kind of work.
We can find the warrior, the healer, the teacher, the visionary within
to use our power, our love, our wisdom and clarity to clear away the past
and make of our own life a healing journey opened to spontaneity
and serendipity.
Biographical Note
BARBARA REID FINDEISEN, MFCC, was born
and raised in California. After graduating from Stanford University,
she married, gave birth to three children, and later returned to graduate
school to complete her degree in clinical psychology. Her involvement
in pre- and perinatal psychology includes the recovery and transformation
of problems stemming from uterine and birth traumas. She has presented
her work extensively in Canada, Austria, Sweden, and England and has appeared
to discuss her work on such TV shows as "Oprah" and "The Joan Rivers Show."
She is an internationally recognized leader in the field of pre- and perinatal
psychology and is currently the President of the Association for Pre- and
Perinatal Psychology and Health (APPPAH) [http://www.birthpsychology.com/].
Barbara was also president of the now-closed Pocket Ranch Institute—which
was a 2600-acre psychotherapeutic retreat center located north of San Francisco,
California. She continues the STAR program, which was started there,
at workshops she gives around the world. Her workshops provide an
opportunity to work on early traumas as well as present-day crises.
For information on the STAR Program, access the STAR Foundation website:
http://www.starfound.org/
Copyright © 1995 by Barbara R. Findeisen
1. Editor's Note:
This article was originally presented at the 20th Annual Convention of
the International Primal Association on “Spontaneity and Serendipity,”
which was held at Appel Farm in Elmer, New Jersey, from September 1st through
7th, 1992. It was delivered on 5 September 1992. [return
to text]
2. Editor's
Note: This article was originally published in Primal Renaissance:
The Journal of Primal Psychology, Vol. 1, No. 2, Autumn 1995, pp. 2-21.
Reprinted with permission. [return to text]
3. Editor's Note:
The capitalized word, Pain, is used throughout this journal, Primal
Renaissance, in keeping with Janov’s (1970) precedent, to mean primal
pain, which is a distinct, often emotional, category of pain that has been
discovered to exist in people as a result of early traumas--both emotional
and physical. It is capitalized not, as some have unfairly criticized,
to make an icon out of Pain but to indicate a special usage of the word.
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