The transformation of your life is the end of the remedial existence, the end of the rule of your childhood ego. The infant gets out of the driving seat of your car; the demon child no longer rules the roost. The very platform on which your life rests changes for good.

Standing alone we need no other to describe or define who we are. The past is now the past with no attachments – merely the road that has brought us to here. All our curses have turned into blessings. We experience a single-minded sense of purpose and guidance is transparent to us in the very next step.

No longer running or trying to escape from ourselves in any of our facets, abhorrent behavior, faulted sub-personalities, or adverse traits, our journey to wholeness has allowed us to embrace everything we are attached to, either positively or negatively. In order to arrive at the Threshold we must re-own our projected parts, as in the following two examples.

Sheila: Repressing Vibrant Life

Sheila was a 36-year old woman, a mother of three young children. Her husband Ben had a small company and she worked in personnel and administration in a supportive capacity to him. Among the employees were at least two young women who attracted Sheila's censure. They were floosies, dressing and dying their hair, fawning and flirting around the men in the company and of course her husband who she felt fiercely protective of... and possessive and jealous. Sheila exhibited a repressed sexuality. In her conservative somewhat old-fashioned dress sense, her body language and posture, and her cultivated plainness. Sometimes, even often, I began to see a vibrant, alive, very attractive, sexual woman beneath the fusty facade. Slowly the history of her relationship and encounters with the male world emerged. The unwanted attention of several older men in puberty and adolescence, the awkwardness of her father in reaction to her budding pubescent body, a lascivious older man who was her boss, and in her early twenties a near rape which she just managed to talk her way out of. She had married Ben, a safe and mild hardworking man. He felt secure, unthreatening, and undemanding sexually, relationally and intimately. She had found certainty and protection in a compromise of sheltered repression. Her heavily concealed wildness and sensuality banished to the unconscious it could only emerge in the way it did in animosity and aversion toward women who were overtly sexy – the polar opposite of the image she had constructed for her personal protection. Her therapy work involved taking back her projections onto the young women at work and of course others too and living into and owning the sensual, sexually attractive, vibrant woman she really was.

Phillip: Unfulfilled Life

A 52-year old man called Phillip had worked in menial jobs all his life. In therapy session he brought an extraordinary dream. A golden winged man flew into his home and presented him with a silver ball. Phillip, feeling uncertain, dropped the ball and it smashed into pieces. The golden winged man simply smiled and presented Phillip with another identical ball. The smashed ball represented the shame and humiliation which had shattered his dreams of an academic life. In school years Phillip had a series of seminal damaging encounters with insensitive sadistic teachers who had severely criticized his work and poor academic performance. Shying away from such treatment and the hurt and pain it brought him, he had chosen the safer route of unskilled physical work which carried no high expectations or savage censure. Since he had reached his fifties however he had a nagging feeling, an insistent sense of the lack of fulfillment in his life, perhaps something could yet be accomplished, some inner thirst satiated.

Sheila had projected her innate sexuality; Phillip had disowned his intellectual side. Each had to re-own these parts of themselves in order to attain inner wholeness and integration. Clients will always have a disowned or projected aspect of themselves which they see in others and interact with in their relationships. Re-owning these parts over time results in inner integration, the condition of psychological wholeness.

Richard Harvey is a psycho-spiritual psychotherapist, spiritual teacher, and author. He is the founder of The Center for Human Awakening and has developed a form of depth-psychotherapy called Sacred Attention Therapy (SAT) that proposes a 3-stage model of human awakening. Richard can be reached at [email protected].

Blog entry #175