The power of inner journeys
The limits of positive thinking and self-care, investigating your unconscious blueprint, plus a musical meditation
Einstein famously said,
“No problem can be solved from the same level of consciousness that created it.”
I can attest to that. Talk therapy never helped me much to overcome my eating disorder and depression. It was only when I journeyed inward that things shifted.
It was only when I changed my consciousness that my awareness changed. And it was only when my awareness changed that my thoughts and behaviors changed.
Two years in, I have a crystal clear understanding of what was going on. Everything made perfect sense. Happiness and health were the natural byproducts of healing the root causes.
This week, we’re exploring why inner journeys have the power to help you solve problems that you haven’t been able to solve in your regular waking consciousness.
Sometimes, Happiness Isn’t Simply a Matter of Choice
You’re constantly confronted with messaging that implies your well-being is a function of willingness.
You journal daily gratitudes. Eckhart Tolle tells you to “live in the now”. Positive psychologists tell you to cultivate states such as joy and contentment.
You do the work. You meditate, manifest, journal, pray, volunteer.
You temporarily feel better, but it doesn’t solve the undercurrent of despair. Whether it’s excessive worry, depression, codependency, or addiction.
It’s supposedly a matter of choice, but you can’t seem to choose happiness, so you feel shame and doubt.
“I’m supposed to feel better but I don’t. Something is inherently wrong with me.”
When my mental health was at its worst, I was at a point in my life where I should have been the happiest: in business school, living my dream life in New York, traveling and making new friends, no obligations whatsoever. But I was miserable and in the depths of my eating disorder and depression. No amount of therapy, yoga, or gratitude journaling seemed to help.
By negating the parts within you that don’t feel grateful or happy, you’re doing more harm.
You now have two problems: you’re unwell, and you feel bad about it.
It’s important to realize that we always choose based on our awareness of what’s best for us. If you’re making choices that are harmful, there are parts within that believe those choices are the right ones.
Every Symptom, Thought, and Behavior Is There for a Reason
If there’s a part within you that’s depressed, anxious, or addicted to something — there’s a reason.
Often that reason is that it wants to protect you from something.
In “Internal Family Systems” therapy (IFS), your personality is the sum of multiple parts. Each part acts with logical intentions. There are no bad parts.
The tricky piece is that some of these parts are exiled. They live in your subconscious.
For example, I wasn’t aware that my eating part was frantically eating because it believed that feeling wasn’t safe. It also wanted to protect me from male attention. None of it was in my conscious awareness until I brought it up.
As one of my guides says, “Unfortunately, you can’t choose to become aware of what you’re not. But you can do things that will get you ready for that awareness.”
This is where inner journeys come in.
Change Your Consciousness to Change Your Awareness
If you want to heal your patterns, you need to go into the unconscious.
As depth psychologist Carl Jung said:
“The unconscious holds the blueprint of who we are and the task of unfolding that pattern requires a relationship to inner forces within us.”
If you struggle with destructive thought or behavior patterns, there’s something in your blueprint that depends on them.
These parts are often deeply buried within you and inaccessible. They’re protected by other parts that make sure you’re not getting too close. Thus, it can be virtually impossible to retrieve the insight required to heal through practices of regular consciousness, such as talk therapy or journaling.
Stan Grof, LSD-psychiatrist and father of transpersonal psychology, describes this in “The Way of the Psychonaut”:
“Ego psychology cannot conceive of and utilize the powerful mechanisms of healing and personality transformation that are available through experiental access to transindividual realms of the psyche.”
In inner journeys, you temporarily disable your protectors. You get a chance to meet what’s hiding underneath. You encounter your most vulnerable parts. Often, this involves inner child work. Those are the parts that have been driving much of our behavior subconsciously.
When We Liberate Repressed Parts and Emotions, Happiness Is a Natural Byproduct
There are different ways to journey inward and access subconscious material. You can try specific types of meditation and therapy, or even hypnosis. You can take psychedelics, or practice specific breathwork techniques, such as holotropic breathwork.
Whichever technique, what’s critical is that you venture to those places that your ego keeps hidden from you. Often they’re buried below layers of shame. The experience of unconditional love that often accompanies psychedelic journeys makes these tools especially effective for this purpose.
Once you do the work, happiness naturally follows. Positive emotions will become abundant without you necessarily seeking them.
In the words of one of my guides:
“The joy, the gratitude, the forgiveness — they’re all consequences of healing, which always starts by meeting ourselves where we are.”
Your Journey
Some prompts for you to reflect on this week:
Which part about where you’re currently at do you struggle to accept?
What would it feel like to assume that there’s a perfect reason for the way you feel or act? Would you want to find out? If not, what are you afraid of?
Are there parts within you that you feel you’re currently repressing?
If you’re up for it, hit reply and share your thoughts with me. This will help me curate resources and information that’s more relevant for you. Plus, I’m keen to get to know you.
Dig deeper
If you wish to go on a brief inner journey, right here, right now, I invite you to listen to this 8-minute musical Ram Dass meditation, "Sit around the fire".
For further reading, I recommend “No Bad Parts” and “Carl Jung: Knowledge in a Nutshell”.
Thanks for reading this week. Please always do share any reflections or feedback, I’d love to hear from you. Don’t forget to share this if you know someone who might find it helpful.
Love,
Julia
Can't get there from here! What a GREAT reminder!!!