The Lower Nature

My work with the Pathwork concept of the lower nature continues to yield insights.

As a child, when I had a negative feeling, say, anger or a desire to hurt my brother, my parents handled those lower nature qualities in two ways: punishment and suppression. Punishment carried the unspoken message that I was bad (why else would I be punished?), and I was bad not because I had done something bad, but because I had the desire to. The message was that if I had any negative desires, I was a bad person.

Suppression came about in commanding me not to display my feelings. "Go to your room until you can be more thoughtful." "If you can't say anything nice, don't say anything at all." "How dare you raise your voice to me?" The message here was if I did feel those things, I better not show them.

This put me in a world where I first had to hide the "evil" feelings from others, and then where I had to suffer alone from the secret knowledge that I was "bad". The edict to not display my negative feelings demanded that I be totally alone with the horrible realizations of who I was.

Today, I am undoing that tangled web. When I discover negative desires or beliefs, I strive to become fully aware of them, to tell them to safe people who won't judge me, to accept them fully as natural and normal, and then to ask if they are what I really want to do or believe, and look for the desire for good to come from within. I am finding myself with less anger, less shame, and less energy spent on holding shut the lid on the box of secrets.