How we integrate Pathwork

All of us human beings—unless we are saints—have faults and distortions in our consciousness. It’s part of being human. In fact, we incarnated just to heal them. And the Santo Daime is a powerful tool to help us with this process of healing ourselves by helping us clean up our faults and distortions.

This inner cleansing must happen so we can then learn to surrender our ego and connect with our inner, divine nature, which the Pathwork Guide calls our Higher Self. Our Higher Self is the part of us deep inside that is intimately connected with God and God’s divine worlds.

But during Santo Daime works, the messages coming from our Higher Self must filter “up” through the same distortions we are trying to heal. When the messages finally rise to the level of our ego awareness, it often isn’t easy to discern the truth. For our egos are not designed for identifying what is truth and what is not truth.

We must get to know our faults

One important aspect of personal healing involves working on our faults. We often know—at least on a surface level—what some of our faults are. But typically, much more is hidden below our conscious awareness. In fact, our emotional defenses are often hard at work trying to hide our faults.

We actually use our self-will to put up inner defensive walls that are supposed to keep us safe. Due to our fear, we then hide behind these walls. And because of our pride, we use these walls to try to hide the parts of ourselves we don’t want anyone to see, including ourselves. But all of this is built on a foundation of untruth.

Further, when we are defended inside like this, divine messages simply can’t get through. For as the Pathwork Guide explains, our pride is like a concrete wall that divine truth is not able to penetrate.

So if we want to reach our divine core and live from our inner light, we must dismantle our inner walls. We do this by getting to know the main features of our inner wall—including the faults of self-will, fear and pride—and then start taking steps to unravel them. This is one aspect of our personal healing work, and there are many others.

This is where the integration of two paths comes in. The Pathwork Guide can guide us with truthful teachings that reach us from the top down—from our ego minds down into the depths of our soul. Using the powerful teachings from the Pathwork Guide to help navigate our inner healing work, we can open inner channels that will allow our own truth to flow “up” from the depths of our Higher Self.

Creating harmonious communities

Let’s talk about why we feel the Pathwork teachings are so important for our community. It’s because they give us a roadmap for walking through conflicts. And conflicts inevitably arise whenever humans interact.

The essential teaching is that we are all on the same team here. All humans, yes, but even more so, all of us who are doing the difficult work of personal self-development. We are all trying to get home to God, and the way home is by unwinding our own inner darkness. There is no other way.

When a conflict arises, we can be sure that some truth has gotten twisted somewhere. Some Lower Self pieces have gotten activated. We can also be sure that there is something for everyone, on all sides, to look at. Because all humans have faults, which stem from our untruths buried in our unconscious. Meaning, if we look, we can always find something the other did wrong.

It’s much harder to look within and see where we may have contributed to the struggle, either consciously or unconsciously. But to unwind any struggle, both sides have to be willing to do this.

Whenever a conflict arises and we have an “emotional reaction,” we need to see what inside us has gotten triggered. Why are we so bothered? Once we have unwound and resolved our old unhealed pain, we need to reach out directly to whoever we are in conflict with and work to resolve the misunderstanding.

We must give the other the benefit of the doubt, and not align with our own Lower Self, which thrives on the energy of conflict and separation. If we are not willing to seek resolution—to tell someone what they have done that affected us and to try to unravel our misunderstandings—then we are lost in the illusion that this is a me-versus-you world, not a me-and-you world, and therefore “I am going to win.”

In reality, at the level of our Higher Self—our deep inner divine self—we are all connected, and therefore all on the same team. Conflict, then, is always an out-picturing of connection at the level of the Lower Self. When we heal our conflicts—with others, within ourselves, and therefore with God—we heal our fractured Lower Self and restore ourselves to wholeness. Then we can live in peace.

The truth is that every conflict can be healed, if we are willing to work toward this. That is what re-connection looks like. And re-connection with God, according to the Pathwork Guide, is what “religion” is all about.