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.

The original Pathwork way

The teachings from the Pathwork Guide were received over the course of 22 years between 1957 and 1979. The Guide encouraged people to study and apply the material, have individual sessions with a trained Pathwork Helper, and participate in group work. For both individual and group sessions are necessary for developing ourselves fully, according to the Pathwork Guide.

As people began to follow the Pathwork teachings, communities began growing and flourishing, and many Pathwork Helpers were trained. Pathwork groups began forming in many regions of the United States. And then Pathwork spread to other areas of the world.

But then, around the year 2000, Pathwork communities in the US began to decline. It seems the Spirit World began to withdraw its support. The issue was not with the teachings themselves but with the way they were being held and worked with. So the various communities began to shake, shrink and eventually fold. Today, there are very few Pathwork communities in the US, although Pathwork communities are still growing in other regions such as Brazil.

Today, what the Santo Daime can offer is essentially individual sessions with divine beings. But the remaining gap in the Santo Daime, if you will, is that a person is left to sort out the teachings they receive by themselves.

The messages must make their way cleanly and clearly through the maze of a person’s inner obstacles. And the person must unwind their own hidden untruths that are pinning those inner obstacles into place. This is difficult, if not impossible, for anyone to do by themselves.

Yet without this step—without uncovering our buried untruth and imprinting the truth on our soul substance—we will continue to behave in ways that create conflict and disharmony in our lives.

Creating harmonious communities

In our journey towards becoming the leaders of Casa da Calma, we traveled widely and visited many other churches. This allowed us to experience many other Santo Daime communities. and it gave us the opportunity to gain insights from many other church leaders.

One powerful message we heard is that learning to lead a work is not the hardest part of being a Santo Daime church protector. The hardest part involves sustaining harmony among the members of the church.

Within any group or community, including a Santo Daime church community, the faults and unresolved wounds of the individual members—many of which we are blind to—will rub against those of other people. The result will be friction. These frictions will create conflicts and disharmonies that make it difficult to hold ourselves in a harmonious union.

But remember, this is exactly why we have come here as humans, and why we have been drawn to any particular spiritual community: To do our healing work.

Keep in mind, at the level of our Higher Selves, there is no conflict. At that level, our highest good blends and merges with whatever serves the highest good of others. It’s only at the level of our egos—where our inner darkness keep us separated from our own inner divinity—that frictions arise within a community.

What we need, then, is an effective way to help people work with their disharmonies on both the individual and community levels. This is the way to create and sustain strong, harmonious spiritual communities.

Weaving in Pathwork teachings

When we read Pathwork teachings and work with them deeply, the truth they hold becomes our own truth. Because at the core of our being, all truth is already present. But until we clear away our inner obstacles, we can’t access it. Once we do our work, we can reconnect with our own inner truth. Life can then become more joyful and communities more harmonious.

So our approach at Casa da Calma is to suggest that people in our community also be working with teachings from the Pathwork Guide. Our aim is to provide a place for people to grow individually and to also learn to function smoothly as a community.

If you are not certain where to start, we can provide guidance during our interview based on your current challenges in life. If you feel called to join us, please contact us to arrange an interview.