A successful and creative woman who designed and patented many products for manufacturing companies faced a series of challenges such as losing her job, her best friend, her home, and becoming homeless. She moved in with friends and undertook the task of rebuilding her career and her life. In combating her struggles, she began using mental imagery techniques such as working with laws of attraction and repeating affirmations. But she discovered these techniques were not working for her, and she experienced increased amounts of anxiety, depression, and feelings of low self-worth.

 

The difficulty of working with affirmations and laws of attraction techniques is that our subconscious is vast and dark, meaning that we are unconscious to our subconscious. So to work with laws of attraction, such as drawing to us our most heartfelt career, may be in exact opposition to a deep aspect of our psyche that believes we are worthless and therefore undeserving of having what we want in a career. These two energies—the object we are trying to attract to us and our subconscious belief that we are worthless—are in direct opposition to each other. Typically, the larger of these two energies will win out, and that may be the aspect that resides deep in our psyches.

 

Another reason why working with laws of attraction is not effective is that if we have what our ego believes we need in order to make us happy, that will rob us of an important understanding about some aspect of life. For example, what if we are to have an in-depth of knowledge about self-worth? If we are provided with all our desires in a material form, and therefore, become seduced into believing our worth is tied to our material, outer worth, then we might lose the opportunity to gain understanding and wisdom about self-worth that is based on an intrinsic, independent view of self.

 

To begin to do real transformative work is to enter into the world of our suffering and to discover the courage to sit with that vulnerable aspect residing deep within our psyche, without ego defense and without ego seduction . . . to be present with this vulnerability from the state of a compassionate and open heart. Heart-centered meditations are the only state of awareness in which this type of vulnerable work can take place, as heart centering places the ego in the observer state of awareness so that it can be without defense.

 

Here are some comments taken from the email of the woman whose story I told in the opening paragraph. They relate what happened after she began doing  heart-centered meditations.

 

But when I first went to your site and read about Integrative Consciousness (white pages), it finally all started making sense to me. You give such a clear picture of wounded aspects of the self with “real time” examples that made it easier for me to understand and definitely relate to. Especially the ego tricks. I finally get why all those positive affirmations I was doing for years didn’t work for me. I loved the “Brad” story . . . I so related to the “he’s an asshole” statement. I had some serious wounding when I was young that I thought I was so over . . . HA! Your fabulous writings and meditations made me realize how deep the wounds are and how to finally access the core problems to work on them. It was like I saw that I was covering up all the “crap” in my life like a cat does in a litter box . . .  but the litter box was never emptied!

 

Anyway, I know I have a way to go, and I thank God (and Raven) for being shown to your incredible work. I have been doing your “wounding” meditations, and I think I am making progress. I do get super-emotional at the part where you see your wounded aspect outside the ball of light—the first time I did it, that aspect looked like a twisted up little troll (pretty scary)—but it is getting better, and I am not falling for the ego tricks anymore. If those statements I am so used to saying to myself come up, I just say to myself, “Hmmm, looks like a wounded part is defending itself again” . . . and I try to see what is really going on. Geez! It is just awesome! I really want to thank you for the tools to help me find myself again – Maggie.