Healing Your Inner Saboteurs

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Healing Your Inner Saboteurs, Loving Yourself, and Resetting

your True Motivation

For many years, I had a successful spiritual counseling/coaching practice in Florida. If I could distill all the techniques down to the ones that made the greatest positive difference and amazing life changes in the least amount of time, it would be healing the inner Sub-Personalities. So I want to share that with you here.

But if I shared with you all the phenomenal tales of success and almost unbelievable stories of the transformations of my clients, this article would be a very big book. And also, if I detailed out all the meditations and visualizations that I created and used for my clients, then this would be a very long book as well!

So please, forgive me if I suggest things to do but don’t take you by the hand through them all. What I feel is the very most important technique, I do delineate in more detail. That has to do with finding and living according to your true motivation. This is the foundation of Destiny, of Enlightenment, of being your Greater Self.

So here is what I’ve learned in a “nutshell” (even if it’s a long article) while working/researching with metaphysical manifestation, experiencing deep emotional releases and healing, creating a wondrously loving and fulfilling relationship, and coaching others through their unique processes.

A Powerful Path Home

The greatest blockages to happiness do not come from others outside of us, but from within us. How we see ourselves, and how we value, and love ourselves determines how much fun, joy, love, fulfillment, and happiness we’ll create and accept into our lives. When we are self-aware, we can consciously and deliberately create more fun and fulfillment for ourselves.

I used the following tips and techniques to personally step into the New World (Divine Beingness and Home on earth), and I extend that invitation to you. The key to this New World is, as always, your empowered capacity to step into your Greater Self and live your mundane life at a consistently higher frequency than that of the mainstream or consensus reality that you live in.

Some of you call this Ascension, others Transcendence, and still others Emotional Freedom. To sustain your higher consciousness level and get into the Divine Flow, you need to have Self-Awareness of yourself and how you are creating your reality, both in positive or negative ways. Only then can you take responsibility and empower yourself to change, heal, and craft the life you want. This article will focus on Self-Awareness of your inner dynamics.

When you have Self-Awareness, you can see that what you perceive, feel, think, believe, and do has an impact on your reality and your personal Universe as a whole. You make the difference in your own life, and you impact those around you with your attitudes, life strategies, and outlook on life. To truly use Self-Awareness as a conscious being, you need to know about the parts and pieces of your Self, your Self-Image, and your personality. Plus, you also need to know what can sabotage and destroy you as well as those parts that uplift and heal you.

Your Sub-Personalities or Inner Selves

These parts are your sub-personalities, “you’s” that do not dominate the spotlight of your Self-Image. They need to be healed. That’s because they are from your past, where you held lesser frequencies of you. Your old identities were made up of lower vibes that the one you have today. Sub-personalities are also energetic “structures” of belief and thought you have used to maintain consistency and predictability in your life. And they are filters, i.e. ways to interpret input from the world. Even though these structures or filters are not really “you,” I personify them so that it is easier to interact with them and heal them.

Like everyone else, you grew up in a culture, a collective where you were given these identities as ideas of you to work with until you grew up and figured out your own. Your parents and authority figures provided models to mimic so that you would apply these identities into your life. You built up identities and self-images (ideas of yourself), beliefs, and perspectives during childhood and adolescence, all the way to adulthood. They enabled you to learn, discover, grow, function, set goals, and take appropriate actions for yourself. They have worked beautifully for you, and they are necessary to have. You have survived childhood and adolescence to get into adulthood, which is their major purpose.

However, in adulthood, you have the opportunity to reassess these identities, orientations to life with their strategies, and belief structures. Many of them are very limiting, as they come from a time when you didn’t know as much as you do now, when you didn’t have a clue about your spiritual self, and were subjected to the intense focus of gender training (that I call the Man Code Training and the Good Girl Training).

As an adult, you can choose whatever you’ve learned that is in alignment with you and your future, as well as learn new approaches to life. That means assessing your Visions and Dreams and also assessing where you are now, plus where you want to go from here. This assessment is more critical to do especially at this time on the planet, because now is the time you have incarnated for, in which you are poised to take a huge spiritual consciousness leap!

In these amazing years, you’ll have the opportunity to move beyond the limitations of the collective, consensus or mainstream reality. You can now transcend the gender training from your youthful days that has kept you imprisoned energetically, limited, small, and with your future possibilities stunted.

Your sub-personalities and identities exist within the collective or tribal orientation of your collective, so when you leap in consciousness and open to your Divine Plan, you can expand to become that Greater Self of your Destiny. But simultaneously with your leap of consciousness, your inner identities, your sub-personalities, are threatened. They will feel abandoned, lost, and can pull you back into your Lesser. Now they think that they are safe. But you have fallen back into an old rut!

You see, you have grown beyond these old “you’s.” If you cannot sustain your higher resonance consistently, naturally, and normally, they become limitations that are a drag on your progress. When you have a “test” (see article on this at greaterselfprocess.com), they can snap you back into an old, limited identity, which then attracts a smaller and lesser reality. This is not what you want. Your reaction to this snapback is often to doubt yourself, get angry, or otherwise continue the old identity’s limited behavior until it sabotages your growth path, your manifestations, and your Divine Flow. After a while, you’ll pull yourself back up and start over, expanding yourself again. But you can lose a lot of time and experience too much stress in this arrangement!

However, you can heal your sub-personalities by loving them and healing your relationship with them. Then they will give you your freedom while at the same time give you the gifts of their most positive potential. This freedom and positive potential resonate at the level of your Greater Self and thus support your spiritual path as well as all of your positive manifestations.

As you heal them, you experience a grander sense of wholeness and integration within you that is very satisfying and self-loving. With your internal conflicts resolved, you exist in a space of harmony, freedom, and peace. Then you enjoy the Divine Flow, finding your Reality supportive and kind. Perhaps best of all, you can express the Divine within you in your own unique and creative way – your Personal Mission on earth.

Saboteurs or Portals to Happiness?

In my practice, I found six most common sub-personalities that could sabotage my clients’ success in all life areas. These six could keep them small (held back, limited, , held unreasonably to their past traumas and issues, and stunted in their capacity to dream a better future for themselves. The key, as I’ve mentioned before many times during the Siriun Year, is Self-Image. When my clients held onto an outdated and limited self-image, they simply could not heal and move on. We would process and process, shifting all the emotions, and that was really helpful. But everything limiting seemed to be held in place by their sub-personalities. So when we shifted the Self-Image by healing the sub-personalities, my clients would make profound and moving leaps of consciousness! They’d receive the gifts of their positive sides that would majorly “happify” them. It was like magic!

I call these important parts and pieces the Inner Selves. When I had my emotional and spiritual counseling practice, I found that healing the Inner Selves was the quickest way to achieve outstandingly positive life changes to anyone who was willing to do the work with me or on their own. Not that working with the Inner Selves was a lot of work. It was intriguing, loving, and fun most of the time. We could accomplish in one session a resolution to years of suffering! And those who continued to work and play with their Inner Selves onward found that they loved, valued, and empowered themselves much more. This self-valuing is basic for a happy and successful life.

I want to share with you those six major Inner Selves or sub-personalities I worked with. While humans have many, many identities that could be considered Inner Selves or sub-personalities, these six are the most pivotal I’ve found to becoming a powerful, mature, free adult being. An adult is someone who is loving and loved, walking on his or her true spiritual path of Destiny, and responsible, accountable, and empowered. Radiant, successful, celebratory, a true Adult Self is magical and incorporates these “Power Six” in their most exalted form.

I have found and worked with inner selves from the womb all the way through my childhood, adolescence, and adulthood to the self I was just last week! Anything I do with these past selves has helped me heal every issue I have had. In the process, I discovered how a limitation hinged on one of these Inner Selves, keeping me from accomplishing things, being creative, following through on projects, and more. I have freed myself from their sabotage. And now when an issue arises, I can immediately identify the one that is snagging me the most and heal it.

The changes I’ve experienced by healing them have given me a joyous approach to life, love, and success that I never thought possible before. So I give this article to you in the hopes that you too can experience the freedom and power that I have. What you will learn in this article is distilled from my many years as life coach, counselor, psychologist, astrologer, and hypnotherapist. It may appear to be too much to grasp at first, since as is usual with me, it’s a long, in-depth article! However, if you have a healing practice, or just want to heal yourself and be helpful to others, you will find a phenomenal pathway laid out here and pretty much ready to go for you!

Blessings!

The Inner Child

You have probably heard about the inner child self, the personality of you between birth and puberty. You may have even attended a workshop or read a book about it. You also probably know that small, innocent part of you that still exists inside you today. It is still alive within you. It has not disappeared or vanished into the dust of time. The Inner Child is familiar, well-known, and part of the language of emotions and psychology. For that reason, this section is probably the briefest of the six.

Being small and innocent, naïve, and psychically open, your Inner Child self can feel insecure, and it still wants attention, love, and security. It wants to have fun and toys too. So where is it going to get these things? It cannot manifest in the now, only YOU can. So your Inner Child is hanging out with you waiting for you to give it what it wants and needs. If you find yourself wanting a shiny new car, craving hugs, wanting to be nurtured, or feeling overwhelmed with stresses, this is your inner child talking to you. He or she is asking, no, demanding that you fulfill its needs so that you can survive and feel safe and secure. When you give your inner child what it wants and needs emotionally and mentally, this self will heal, and the darkness deep within you as well as that insatiable neediness will begin to fade.

So how do you give love and goodies to your Child Self? Do a meditation, a visualization, and be creative about it. Perfect and happy loving parents? Check. Loving siblings? Check. Loyal and fun playmates? Check. Those toys and comic books? Check. Of course, always give it lots of security and love. Then your inner child will offer you his or her gifts, that are of course, also yours. You will becomes more playful, creative, and magical, and the adult you then experiences a positive shift in your perspective.

This changes your self-image and opens the way to love and value yourself. If you have children, you know the feeling of love for them. Have that same love for your own little one, and you will be happier as an adult. You’ll be able to see the potentials and possibilities of life more. Adding in the responsibility capacity you have as the adult you are, you are able to choose and live with more fun, laughter, and joy.

The Inner Parent

Part of healing the inner child self’s fears and insecurities involve another inner personality, that of the inner parental self. They function as a pair. The inner parent is an internal representation of your parents, but it encompasses all authority figures of your childhood, such as religious and community leaders. Although your parents were very different from you, you internalized them, their belief systems, and their control of your behavior.

By the age of 10, you had internalized your parents into what you would call your Conscience. You knew what you could do, what you were supposed to do, and what you would be punished for. In this conscience was also a self-judgment of being “bad” or “good.” Some people consider this morality training, but it’s mainly (at least at first) an inner and learned self-control, although I can testify that it doesn’t always work!

For many people, the prohibitions given by the parents become permanent principles of life. Many rebel against them, but all utilize these original “instructions” in life as an archetypal reference point or yardstick against which every success or growth can be measured. That is, unless and until people consciously and deliberately heal the internalized parent self and select their own principles and moral guidelines.

Your Conscience was “installed” in you by you (with help from your parental teachings of course) in order for you to have some behavior rules until you were old enough to choose them for yourself. It’s nature’s way of protecting you until you are mature. But once your Conscience was installed, your internalized parent archetype would control your behavior through your own inner mind talk. You know, that chatter that goes on in your head all day?

You (or rather your internalized parent) could control your behavior, even if no parents were actually physically present. In time, you began to think that this voice in your head was your own inner authority, and you sought it out whenever you wanted to do something new. Whenever you considered doing something of your own inclination, your internal parent would tell you whether it was okay to do that or not. Since you feared getting in trouble, you listened to your internal parent to lay the rules down.

When considering an adventurous action, the internal parent would say something like “if you do this, you could be punished,” or, “you’re not allowed to do this” or even worse, “You are a bad person if you do this. Shame on you!” This parental self was so real to you that you could feel anxiety over the prospect that you were going to be in big trouble if you did this thing!

It’s not wholly a bad or difficult thing, this internal parent. In fact, when you nurture yourself and take good care of yourself, you are tapping into the loving and nurturing inner parent, the one who roots for you, who’s your cheerleader, and who reminds you to do what you need for your health and well-being. But generally, most people seem to be engaged in an inner drama between their inner child, who they identify with, and that inner (or even outer) authority that is limiting them.

In relationships, notice how easy it is to take either the parental or child side in an argument! The child, pouting, indignant, feeling mistreated, and the parent, exasperated with the immature thinking and acting of the other one, and trying to convince the other to grow up! As in all arguments, both want to be right!

So your limiting, critical, controlling internalized parent can stay with you throughout your life until you fire it. Yes, you fire it just like an employee! It’s functioning as an assistant to you and helps trigger your growth. You don’t give it everything like you give your Inner Child everything it wants. It has a function to do, but it’s not a real version of you.

I’ve already talked about how everything you come into contact with, every challenge, is actually an opportunity to grow, to expand your light, and to learn who you are. The internal parent is no different from any other challenge. It behooves you to identify its rules, fire the limiting parent, and bring the gifts of the nurturing/loving parent more into your life to experience more self- love and value.

So how can you identify this sub-personality today? Listen to your mind talk tell you that “you should,” “you need to,” “you ought to,” “you have to,” or “you got to” do certain things. If you don’t follow these admonitions, you can feel uneasy and even afraid of getting into trouble somehow, even if you’re 60 years old?

Or maybe, when you hear this kind of mind talk, you get rebellious and resistant against the inner parental commands. This can drive your behavior and motivation in instinctual, unconscious ways. You are at the mercy, so to speak, of the whole collective, the patriarchy, as the internal parent carries all the social and cultural traditions automatically within it. So people can deliberately and angrily act like children, like brats, and do whatever they feel like! Identifying with the child, people say they are free thinkers and rebels, no matter their age.

In other words, you could rebel against yourself all by yourself! You could do this by separating out two sub-personalities, the child and the parent, and having them relate to each other as you and your parents related, or relating to each other in an argument. Then you can oversee the conflict and resolve it in meditation, so that your inner child and your inner parents can heal their relationship completely. If dad was an alcoholic, you can heal that in your meditation and the two of you can then be at peace and love together. When this happens on the inner, it will affect all your relationships with authority or moody, difficult people on the outer!

At some point, you will have to grow up and stop being a rebel, the sooner the better. You will need to reinforce your own inner authority and power. Most psychological counseling focuses on child-parental dynamics, because you need to be free of this conflict in order to live a good life, no matter how nice and wonderful your parents were to you growing up. This “split” of self between child and parent is very important when it comes to your motivation, as you shall soon see.

The Inner Adolescent

Like the child and parent, the adolescent self who comes later also speaks inside your head. It’s also vying for your attention. Remember your teenage years – those years that started just before puberty (hormones) hit and ended as you went to college or got out into the world – the Middle School and High School years? Who doesn’t? Like virtually everyone else, you most likely got emotionally wounded at this critical time of change.

Adolescence is a time when you were terribly concerned with what other people thought about you or you were busy rebelling against or defending yourself mentally against what you thought other people were thinking about you! While you had mixed feelings about the role of your parents, you rationalized that your parent’s acceptance of you was critical for your support, but mainly, you wanted to be accepted by your peers. You wanted to be seen as sophisticated, cool (or whatever the lingo was at that time), and accepted. The three issues of validation, approval, and acceptance enable a teenager to feel BELONGING. These three issues need to be resolved for your Inner Adolescent to be happy, and for you to be free of societal pressures on you today.

Your Inner Adolescent can be a rebel on one hand and a conformist on the other, and both at the same time! They can consider themselves “free thinkers,” yet never think beyond the conformist belief and attitude box of their clique. No matter what polarity the adolescent is on, whatever side they take, politically (in the High School sense), they are so passionate about it that it’s black or white, almost life or death! This is because the inner adolescent is hit with a huge surge of hormones and thus feels great intensity and passion about everything.

The teen searches for the best clique to identify with and belong to, and identifies with one group against another. This “my group” vs the “other group” creates lots of separation, division, competition, and encourages duality-extremism, i.e. thoughts of good vs. bad/evil, right vs. wrong, you’re with me or you’re against me. What is hard is if you are exiled from your peer group clique and become an outcast. Then you have to justify yourself by holding a noble rebel self-image. You’ve probably seen a lot of adolescent behavior in reality TV, and also in politics. Yes, it’s in the teen years that you really get to experience politics first hand amongst your peers, in school, and in the world.

Adolescence is a time of extreme social, behavioral, and gender extremism. Boys try to be manly and girls try to be grown up. Your perception of your gender, sex, and social belonging can bring intense emotional pain if you feel like an outcast. You yearn for physical intimacy in a relationship or just hot sex.

Gender programs are at their peak in adolescence and create the greatest suffering and dilemma in people. In the typical traditional girl cultural program (I call it the Good Girl Training), girls desire to be beautiful, fashionable, and belong to a great top clique. They can pine for their ideal man (lover or husband to be), perhaps a celebrity, who will whisk them away to an ideal kingdom (big house on the hill, private yacht, cabin in the woods, etc.) and make tender love to them. They may dream of a big wedding, the fantastic dress, and of being the princess, the admired and loved one.

In real life, however, they are trained to defer to the needs of others, to be kind, nice, and good, never angry or insulting. Of course, it is hard for a girl to shrink herself down into the strict boundaries of gender correctness, so you don’t necessarily see this “good” side until the girl gets into a marriage or significant relationship. That’s where the dysfunction often shows up between what a girl thinks she must be and who she actually is.

The standard traditional boy program (the Man Code Training) keeps boys fantasizing all day about sex, being heroes, and climbing the hierarchy of other males to be respected and admired. Or it can be the polar opposite - being the noble rebel, the successful one that challenges the established order to be free, wild, and adventurous (and of course, wealthy beyond their dreams). They fantasize also simply about being respected and admired as they impress others with their smarts, money, looks, and gorgeous dates.

In real life, they take on the attitude of entitlement, and simply feel themselves to be superior to girls. This actually came in in late childhood, but it shows itself in adolescence as well. But then, with wounding, even the most arrogant and aggressive male will get reserved and try his best to get along with the more admired males amongst his peer group.

Those who do not fit the traditional gender pattern or hold the same interests can feel like outcasts, even if their clique doesn’t reject them. I remember being interested in Native Americans and Classical Orchestral music. Nobody else in my high school in a small Tennessee town was into that – nobody. I was the oddball. Nowadays you’d call me a nerdy girl. I had fussy/frizzy bad hair, glasses, and braces all at the same time! This is often typical of adolescence. Did you ever see pictures of yourself from this life area? Women often call them their “ugly pictures.”

Those who didn’t fit the gender programs, who knew that they were gay, queer, or trans, had it much tougher. They feared that they were wrong or bad and would be attacked, shamed, and more. Many if not most had to hide. One young man I knew back in Tennessee never dated, always was interested in deep conversations about history, and lived a solitary life. In my heavily fundamentalist Christian community, he could not come out of the closet or let anyone get to know him closely. How many lives have been shut down by social disapproval?

I hope that it is easier today, if one is living in a liberal enclave, but even then, adolescence is a tough time for everyone who is trying to figure out who they are when the options given them by society are still limited. Only once people grow into their twenties, can they begin truly discovering who they are, and what they can do.

However, despite all the dreadful teen angst, adolescence has its upside too. This period sees an amazing capacity for learning skills, discovering your interests, creativity, and having a thirst and curiosity for learning about a lot of things (not necessarily your schoolwork!). The gift of a healed adolescent self is to find joy in doing your own thing, getting engaged and involved with your interests, creative projects, and learning about something so passionately and deeply that you become an authority in it.

As with anything, you have both polarities here, both positive and negative. Adolescents who act out, shoot other kids, run away to join a gang, or get addicted to drugs are falling into their negative side. Adolescents who are creative and outspoken can become champions!

This negative, painful side is what needs healing, and the positive side needs encouragement, similar to the inner child and the internal parent. It’s easy to heal the adolescent. Let your inner teenager be irresponsible, wild, and free. Imagine everything that your teen self wants, all the glory, fun, adventure, craziness, self-expression, creativity, travel, money, fame, fabulous sex, and big time love. And remember those three biggies - validation, approval, and acceptance? See your inner teen experiencing that as well in your meditation.

Do it until your adolescent self is totally saturated, totally satisfied, like after great sex. Yes, let your inner adolescent get laid big time! After a while, your teen self will stop pressuring you to conform to your peers, show off, or seek security with someone who accepts you. You will begin to feel free to explore your own interests whether others are excited about them or not.

The Ego-Self

Everyone needs an ego while living on the physical plane with its illusion of separation from the Divine. Your ego is with you from birth because you need it to hold that boundary that distinguishes who you are from everyone and everything else. I’ve known people whose ego is virtually nonexistent or lacking in boundaries, and these people cannot know who they are. They cannot distinguish themselves from their family member, mates, friends, or even co-workers. It’s a tough place to be, disorienting and lost. You don’t want to give up your ego, only give up the negative, destructive side. Instead you want to understand it and allow it to be a positive and helpful self of yours.

Think of the ego like your cell’s membrane or cell wall that gives and receives messages from the outer world. On your cell wall, you have receptor sites that communicate with the chemicals around it and admit and accept those that fit the needs of the cell. Other, errant chemicals are blocked. Like that cell wall, your ego admits in some types of information and energies and rejects others.

But the similarity ends there. The ego filters your reality for you. It takes your beliefs, your feelings, and your attitudes, along with the decisions you’ve made, and it brings to you what reflects that. It can bring to you what you request and want. In that sense, it operates like your assistant who brings you your lunch or sets up your appointments as part of his or her job. How you, as the boss, treats your assistant determines how well the assistant complies with your commands.

If you didn’t grow up emotionally (and how can you when your culture doesn’t reward maturity?) or you had difficulty knowing yourself and making good decisions for yourself, you were unable to be a good “boss.” Your ego acted just as immature, weak, ignorant, and naïve, just as you did. And when things didn’t go your way, you didn’t want to be responsible for anything, so you had a tantrum. Unknowingly, you started to blame your ego for not bringing you what you wanted. You had stopped being a good boss. You had inadvertently given the keys to your kingdom over to the ego to bring everything to you.

Perhaps you were feeling entitled to have everything you wanted just the way you wanted it, or maybe you were afraid of getting shamed and criticized, so you didn’t want to be visible and risk that. As you hid, the ego was forced to step in and be your boss, your avatar, your self’s representative, your face to the world. It became your façade that you hoped would hide your weaknesses, your incompetence, or your shame. It would keep you from being rejected, shamed, humiliated, embarrassed, and excommunicated from your peers. You thought no one would see you or attack you once this façade was solidly in place.

Well, all of this was way more than your ego had signed on for. It still followed your beliefs, feelings, and choices to get you stuff, but now you had stuffed a lot of emotion and beliefs down deep and out of sight that held a distorted view of yourself and of life. You held the painful beliefs that you were unworthy and that the world was a scary place that would hurt you. You expected your ego now to do the growing and build a better, positive reality for you. However, your ego is incapable of growing. That’s not its job. It’s just the “go-fer.” So your ego brought you realities congruent with your limitations and pain. Then you hated yourself more and were angry at others who were doing better than you or criticized you.

Your ego got mad over all this overwork. You would too, if you were forced to do everything for someone else who was lazy, indolent, and kept blaming you and shaming you. So your ego began to plot revenge in order to punish you, turning negative and malicious. When you wanted something, your ego would bring you something else. Any disappointment and suffering you did was fine with your ego. In fact, your ego found this anger and rage tasty, and thrived on it. It was negative passion, and so your negative ego ate it up, and encouraged you to be angrier and produce more juice for it to feed upon.

Unaware of this development, you naively began to think that the ego was your only friend in a cold, cruel or scary world of other teens. So you expected your ego to show the world a strong, invincible, cool, savvy, smart, powerful, or rich person’s image. That way, you figured, you’d get some love and belonging. You wanted to be heard and taken seriously. You wanted to be loved.

This facade, you figured, would protect you. Well, that’s what the ego told you as it encouraged you to hide. If others saw the “real” (insecure) you, they would laugh at you and hurt you. The ego would rationalize everything in order to make you feel okay with yourself. But whatever the ego told you in your mind talk, it was making stuff up, either to get you to depend on it so you’d believe it and befriend it, or to punish you and hurt you and embarrass you.

So your filter of perception of the world got twisted. One day, your ego would tell you that you were slime and that all those other people were judging you. On another day (or hour), it would tell you that everyone else was wrong and screwy and you were the Great One. The ego would explain your invisibility, the lack of applause for you, and the missed opportunities that went to other people by telling you that you were better than they. Maybe you were just too high a vibration and others just couldn’t see that. That’s the “spiritual” ego. And this “spiritual” better-than kept you from loving your life or being able to do your Personal and Global Missions.

This went on for so long, that you accepted this situation as normal. Your ego became your cell wall, owning it and maintaining it to your disadvantage. While an ego is necessary, it should be a positive ego, just as you should be clearly self-loving and self-valuing to set the context and foundation for manifesting a wonderful life.

In summary, you and your ego fabricated a great façade so that you would appear valuable, loveable, and worthy of belonging. So you hid behind the cool outer façade, which was now the cell wall of your life owned and maintained by your ego. This malicious, undermining part of you had turned negative, and it, not you, was in control.

The Negative Ego

Fast forward to today. Everybody knows what a big negative ego looks and sounds like – bragging, puffed up, and acting better than and righter than everyone else. But that’s just one side of the ego. It can sneakily pretend to be very humble and obsequious, bragging on how it’s the lamest, most terrible, or most screwed up. The ego will do whatever it needs to, to get peoples’ attention. Whatever makes the ego stand out as unique, owning his or her own niche in which he or she is the best at it, even if it’s the worst. Make sure you can identify the ego in both of these extremes.

Now the ego can be a terrible saboteur, because you have been with it so long that it’s hard to separate out the ego from who you really are. The ego was “installed” in its adolescent program to protect the adolescent from the trauma of rejection by peers. But the negative ego in all of us took over. It became the filter through which we viewed the world and formed our opinions and beliefs about things. When you are in your negative ego, you will take everything very personally. Whatever anyone else says, you will look closely at it to determine what they think about you!

So to heal the ego, you must dismantle it, diminish it, and return it to its original purpose – to bring you your manifestations as per your will. But to do this is more complex than the firing technique of the Internal Parent. You must stop it, love it, understand it, and shrink it down to size (let’s say about an inch high, in meditation). Take back your position as the master. You are the boss now.

But then, here is the more complicated part. You must redo the contexts so that the ego, the positive one now, in its “go-fer” position, will follow through on the true you, the greater you, the loving you rather than the insecure, angry, worrywart, and jealous you. And how do you do that? First, you must own your own value with no comparisons with others. You must know that you are intrinsically worthy, no matter what others may say or imply. Then you must take your power back from your ego. It’s YOUR power, not the ego’s.

Second, you must learn to choose positive beliefs, emotions, and thoughts instead of falling for the paranoia, fear, and anger the negative ego feeds you. And this positive stuff isn’t just affirmations or attempts to override the dark despair lurking deep down in your emotional and spiritual wounds. You must become authentic, letting go of the façade and becoming more real. And especially, learning to value and love yourself, forgive yourself, and re-embrace your authentic you. You can do this with the work you do with your Inner Child and Inner Adolescent.

In short, healing your Negative Ego is in essence, a major spiritual journey. In the East, they suggest to get rid of the ego, of that boundary of separation between you and the Divine. What they are referring to is the Negative Ego, since your consciousness and capacity to do your Missions in the physical world absolutely rely upon a strong and Positive Ego. They want you to have an experience of transcending ego and experience the Divine Oneness. Indeed, you have to go beyond the illusion of separation in order to do this, so you do need to be on top of your negative ego and let it go free when you embrace the Oneness.

Once the ego is under your control, and is loved, forgiven (after all YOU chose to load it up with work it could not do), and no longer shamed, it can then return to doing what it is supposed to. This is where you get to experience the gifts that your Positive Ego provides. You will see that you can get into the Divine Flow in your daily life more easily, your life becomes magical, and you can feel the amazing safety and love your world, your reality can bring you!

The Young Adult

This is a you that is older, starting around 18 years of age through your first Saturn Return, that is around 29 or 30. Unfortunately, many people identify with the Young Adult indefinitely. I’ve found people in their 70’s who are still Young Adults emotionally. Now, I’m all for youthfulness, and the Young Adult period is exciting. But if you remain in Young Adult mode, you will live your life in a fantasy that will not pan out well for you.

This period is marked by exploring what it means to take on adulthood in your culture. Your identity is no longer determined by your family or school, or even local community, but simply to you. Who you are or who you can be is up to you as a young adult. This is exciting and adventurous!

You are still ignorant of how the world works, but you have a great imagination at this time in your life and also you are very opinionated. Hey, if you were President of the United States, you would quickly say that you could do a better job than the jerk who’s in office there now! You are full of yourself, thinking you know everything. That’s not only ego, although the Young Adult can have plenty of that, since the ego has been forming successfully for years before moving on into adulthood. Being a know-it-all is just typical of the Young Adult.

During your Young Adult years, you decide your Life Dream and the Life Track (your mundane life path) that will take you there. Often, this is about finding a mate and starting a family, or becoming a multi-millionaire so that you never have to work for anyone else and you can do whatever you want to do. Big dreams are common for the Young Adult, and Young Adults are really great at dreaming up huge fantasies, and in business, putting together Big Deals.

When you are young and don’t really know how the world works, you think that if you have the mate and the money for a luxurious lifestyle, you will be happy. Note that this happiness is dependent on external circumstances, not your inner state of mind. Society has shown you that this is the time to succeed and look at other young people who are excelling. There is a strong competitive spirit when you are a young adult. Fortunately, you simply figure that life will straighten itself out and eventually you’ll have your Dreams.

And since you don’t know enough to see that you have set your life standards to unattainable levels, you hope that your Dreams will open up to you just around the corner. After all, up to this point in life, everything came to you to experience. You don’t know as a Young Adult that YOU have to create stuff now, or the same-old adolescent stuff will show up over and over. Even if you have no discipline, you can still feel that somehow you will break through the limitations, like the Olympic champions who showed you that anyone can do it with enough hard work and dedication. Except you will be able to do it without all that work. You hope it will be easy for you.

The Young Adult period is marked by a push-pull. On one hand, there’s the “work hard and earn more” philosophy of the Calvinist work ethic. You assume that if you work hard enough and smart enough, you too can get rich. On the other hand, you don’t want to do so much work. It’s got to be fun and easy. So you “Think and Grow Rich” (the title of a popular book by Napoleon Hill) and you think that magical thinking will work easily for you to get what you want. But you soon learn that getting there isn’t so easy. As a student or entrant into the labor market, you start at the bottom and scrape by – unless of course your daddy is rich, rich, rich, or you are given time to do nothing because you’re still living at home and your parents are footing all your bills.

But most of you have to make a bunch of decisions about money. Generally, you choose money for survival now, and I’ll get my dreams later. You keep asking yourself; “How do you make a huge amount of money in a short time?” This is the question on so many Young Adult minds. And of course there’s “How do I meet the man (or woman) of my dreams?”

The key is that Young Adults just don’t want to do all that work. After adolescence with its relative freedom (unless you had a Tiger Mom!), you are not happy spending your whole life working for someone else who may or may not be nice to you. But the epitome of success in the mainstream is the workaholic. And wages are so low, you have to work your butt off. You work and work, and eventually this is your life. You get time for you on your days off, but sometimes you’re just too tired, so you end up sleeping. Or you do obligations, or going on errands. Sometimes, you have enough energy for partying. The Dreams get put on a back shelf.

Some Young Adults are successful right off the bat, and make good money, or find that fabulous mate. But they too, after a while, will wonder what happened to the real Dream. What’s next? They’ve reached the top of the work ladder, but where do they go from here? Even the Young Adult is successful, they will feel confident that they can now go do whatever they want and make money at it. But they can get hit with frustration.

Whether the Young Adult is poor or rich, or on the way up the social ladder, disillusionment can set in. Are they doing enough? Achieving enough? Have they tried hard enough? Are they productive enough? Is there enough love, money, and success for them? Are they smart enough? Happy enough? Talented enough? Know enough of the right people? The critical concern for Young Adults, whether or not they consciously understand what it is, is that they don’t know if, on their own as themselves, they ARE “enough.”

To summarize, the dark downside to the Young Adult is that they think they know everything even if they are new to engaging with the world “out there.” And secondly, they don’t know what is enough or if they are enough. It seems the demands on them keep expanding, the more they try to fulfill them all. They are forced to motivate themselves by money or guilt trip themselves to do their obligations.

Instead of the Great Dreams, they settle for more modest Dreams. The Grandeur they imagined in their lives has faced into the distance and they no longer see any track to get there. Life has become limited to duties and obligations, and to the acquisition of those things (toys, circumstances, people) they think will make them happy. Inside themselves, they can feel empty (after all, they are not enough) and they live “on hold,” waiting for their lives and their Dreams to open up and fulfill them.

What you want to do to heal the Young Adult is essentially the same thing you do for the adolescent. In meditation, give the Young Adult everything he or she wants, and especially, a money machine. Every time he or she presses a button, a high denomination bill comes out. This machine never runs out, so the Young Adult can simply hold his or her finger on the button, and out come flying big money, piling up.

You can also give the Young Adult a perfect mate. It may be based on a boyfriend or girlfriend you had as a Young Adult, but of course, upgraded to perfection. Then give your Young Adult self all the Big Dreams possible, with the fabulous accompanying lifestyle, adventures, and even world recognition. Whatever you wanted then, you give to your Young Adult. Your Young Adult does not have to be responsible or a serious adult. Let your Young Adult play and fully express him or herself!

When your inner Young Adult is satisfied, then you can begin to breathe easier. You can then tap into the gifts of the Young Adult; an amazing imagination and creativity, the capacity to Dream and Envision the Future, and the dynamic motivation to do something worthy for yourself, for your joy, for your life and the world.

Don’t let yourself identify with the Young Adult. You can’t stay here. Your inner Young Adult won’t get you where you want to go, although its gifts will help you get started. For your follow through, you’ll need to make sure that the Young Adult’s partner is taken care of (The Slave Driver, next), and that your Dreams are true to who you are becoming, rather than being the resurrected dreams of your past.

Everyone loves the imagination, the fantasies of the Young Adult, but you cannot live in them or you’ll sadly get lost in one-dimensional fantasy and escapism, accomplishing nothing. You want to temper those youthful energies with wisdom, and motivate yourself from your Spirit and Soul power. Wisdom will come to you, a gift of the True Adult, the Magical Adult. I’ll discuss this self in a later article.

The Inner Slave Driver

I have worked with and loved my adolescent self, my young adult self, my ego self, and my internal parental authority self (my conscience, my self-nurturer or punisher). But there is one more of the Big Six to heal, and it’s a doozy! This next sub-personality is not really you, but it acts like it owns the whole show – your inner Slave Driver!

The first three are relatively easy to identify, the ego is quite a bit trickier, and the Young Adult is pretty much unknown as its distinct personality. But it’s the Slave Driver that keeps you from becoming yourself, even when you work with the other five. So I’m giving the Slave Driver more space in this article because it’s so sneaky, harder to pinpoint, and people fall for it hook, line, and sinker!

Your Slave Driver came into being to help you handle your motivation when you were a Young Adult. While you are free to move into society and dream big about where you want to go in life, you are also experimenting, exploring, and discovering what life is about as an adult. Since everything fell into your lap as a child and a teen, you assume that life will just keep giving you stuff that you must learn about. But as I said before, your twenties are about finding what YOU want and going after it proactively, not waiting for stuff to show up.

Survival is a basic human need, so you look into surviving on your lower wage job or pinching pennies to make ends meet. While you are able to dream great possibilities, you may not see these in your day to day life. Soon, you get stuck trying to earn money. You take on obligations. It seems that first, you must build up financial resources. There’s so much to do before you can get to the juicy Dreams. Thus your motivation is forced to focus on money and other goals.

While these shorter term goals of money and relationship are important, they are what you feel you must choose because everyone in the culture sees those goals are good, useful, and vital. But you didn’t take the time to figure out for yourself what you really wanted and what goals really meant a lot to your Soul and Spirit, to who you truly are.

So you can get stuck doing stuff you are not really motivated to do. This is true even if you still live at home. And it’s hard to keep motivating yourself for something you don’t really feel excited about that you have to do first before you can do what you really want to do. You know that when you do something you really want to do and you are enthusiastic, passionate, and excited, you are filled with energy! But if you have to do something that you deem as drudgery, your energy has to be forced, your body has to be coerced. Where does your energy go?

In order for you to do what you have to so that you can continue along the track to your Dreams (or the track that will take you to where you need to be to discover your Dreams), you have installed an artificial motivator within you that I call the Inner Slave Driver. This motivator identity is a higher and more sophisticated octave above your Internal Parent. The Slave Driver is the authoritative voice of the Collective, of the myths, and the duties and obligations you must have if you are to be considered a good person and deserving of your Dreams.

Guilt, Fear, and Anger; the Push-Drive Method of the Slave Driver

How does the Slave Driver get you moving? By talking to you in your head about how guilty you’ll feel if you don’t push and drive yourself to succeed. You’ll let others down. You’ll let yourself down. You’ll be a loser. You won’t be seen as a good kind person if you don’t sacrifice yourself for others (and you’ll feel Shame!). It goes on and on like this.

But sometimes guilt isn’t the key to getting you to do your duty or what you think you must do. Instead, the Slave Driver will use fear. If you don’t do this unpleasant thing you don’t want to do, then bad things will happen. You must work hard, or you’ll be homeless and on the street and people will spit at you. You’ll be at the mercy of other people, and on and on. You have your own terrible tale of potential woe – whatever you are afraid of the most will happen if you don’t apply yourself now.

Guilt is normally a twisted form of anger, so sometimes anger is also used as a motivator. Get really angry at someone who’s criticizing you and this may motivate you to attack that person verbally or take some kind of revenge on the person. Normally, most people have some self-restraint and don’t go shoot other people in rage, although a few do. But even being angry for a while without releasing it safely and kindly within yourself can add fuel to any fire that comes along inside you. The ego feeds on anger buildup and will fan the flames, but it’s the Slave Driver that will insist that you absolutely MUST do something and push you to do it - now!

What if you didn’t have to do anything at all, i.e. if you had total permission to do only that which you want to do, the adolescent you might take over, hanging out reading, socializing, sleeping, travelling, having sex, and buying lots of stuff. So when you get down to figuring out if you really want to follow through on that commitment, you may find that escapism and lounging around doing nothing is very appealing.

But your Slave Driver will come in and remind you that you are just being a lazy, good for nothing jerk. You MUST follow through on your commitments, duties, and obligations. Others are counting on you. Your whole country is counting on you doing the right thing. If you don’t make your family and your spouse happy, and support them at all times, then you will be rejected, abandoned, and ignored, and that hurts.

So, ridden with potential shame and “losership,” you mobilize your body and go for it. That is, until your pent up anger and rage reaches its tipping point, and then you tell the boss, “take this job and shove it!” Or you break up with your mate so you don’t have to share meager resources with another person – or whatever successful rationalization supports your decision to get out of your commitments.

Here the negative ego and the Slave Driver work together to sabotage you. You see, it’s totally fine to re-negotiate your commitments with whomever you made the commitment with. And there is no judgement about staying or leaving. But you can sabotage yourself when your inner mind talk is filled with the crapola from your Internal Parent (do your homework first, then you can play and watch TV), negative ego (these other people are taking advantage of your good nature and manipulating you and winning over you – it’s all about you) and your Slave Driver (you have great Dreams you must get to work on now, you’ve been slacking! Get back on track!).

You made a choice as a young adult to do whatever it took to get to that dream of success. Do you actually remember it? Most people don’t. It just seemed to come naturally. And to insure that you got there, you installed the Slave Driver to continue to push and drive you in the right direction.

When you get older and your Dreams are still not completely met, the Slave Driver gets tougher, like a drill sergeant. You feel you haven’t worked hard enough, focused on your goals good enough. If you could just get this last thing done and push through to success, then all would be okay.

This pressure and push continues to your death unless you take charge of your life. You will never feel okay with taking a few days off just for you unless you’ve just accomplished some huge goal. If you haven’t reached those goals yet, you can’t take off. No rest for the weary. Keep going, don’t stop! On and on you go, because as soon as you consider doing nothing or relaxing and drifting on the couch, you start to get anxious. Relaxing doesn’t seem okay. There’s so many obligations to do. And the guilt, fear, and the angst over the unfilled dreams gets you back up doing something you absolutely must do for necessity’s sake.

If you actually take time off, you will probably get a manifestation from the Slave Driver. Someone will call, message, or text you with an urgent request or need, personally, politically, or for some other urgency. Or there will be a problem at work and you have to give up your day off to go in there and fix the issue. Or (and this is the most common one) a family member or very close friend will want you to listen to them and pay attention to them.

If you’re not careful, your down time disappears as you’re doing more and more. You’re picking up the pace, hurrying more, going faster, and working harder and harder. You’re going for it—going for the dream! But eventually, it dawns on you that you’re not catching up. You’re not bringing it all in yet. You are even more behind than before! Maybe you’ve been too slow. How are you going to go faster, or do it better? You don’t have enough hours in the day!

And as if that’s not enough, there’s even more. When you get onto your Spiritual Path, your Slave Driver will simply expand its demands into to your spiritual life. You can say, “I’m going to manifest great realities. I’m going to do my programming. I’m going to meditate and achieve high spiritual states. I’m going to do my Law of Attraction stuff. I’m going to make this happen. It’s not too late! I can still be on track. I can still get everything that I have wanted, and I can still be spiritual.”

Now, all of your achievement and being enough, doing enough fast enough, catching up, getting ahead, gets oriented to your spiritual path as well as your mundane one. The Slave Driver pressures you to meditate more. Do more yoga! Eat right! Exercise more! Love more! Never get angry! Stop controlling! You aren’t giving enough, loving enough, and you aren’t changing the world enough. C’mon, you got to work harder!

After years of chasing the golden carrot, you don’t see that the Slave Driver has stolen your natural motivation and substituted a false motivation in you. You don’t see how it’s stolen your energy, your imagination, your possibilities and your potential. You may be in your 50’s or even 70’s and your Slave Driver is still pressuring you to fulfill the Dreams of your Young Adult!

Even if you have chosen new Dreams, your Slave Driver doesn’t know that. It just puts the pressure on you to fulfill your new Dreams as well as your Young Adult dreams. It can be overwhelming to your psyche.

Your conscious mind doesn’t know what to do with this, but your Inner Child offers an answer; passive resistance. Your adolescent offers you escapism and self-indulgence. And your food offers you a substitute for your motivation; coffee!

You’re tired of doing your “to-do” list that just seems to get longer and longer year by year. You want to kick back and relax, but you feel too guilty to do much of that. So maybe you get tired and sick with chronic fatigue. Now you have an excuse not to do those obligations and carry those burdens. Or you get another chronic ailment that functions like the excuse your mother used to give the school when you had to stay home in bed.

Please note; I’m not blaming anyone who suffers from chronic fatigue or other debilitating illnesses. What I’ve found in my practice over the years is that stuffed anger and shame, and too much inner and outer conflict can create terrible stress for the body. I myself spent years in chronic fatigue resisting everything until I released my shame and rage and let go of my negative ambition. i.e. the Slave Driver. So I know that even if you are allergic to almost everything, emotional healing can generally take care of most if not all of that. Contact me if you want more detail on that.

So maybe you try out the avenue of escapism. You smoke too much pot, you watch too much TV, you have an affair, you read too many trashy novels, you gamble, you put money on crazy Ponzi schemes, and on and on. You get impatient, unwilling to put your time and attention into anything that takes discipline or goes on too long. You overreact to other peoples’ requests of your time. You can even pull away from your friends and family.

Maybe you tried giving up to ease the pressure. Hey, you failed, you’re a loser. The best thing you can do now is settle for a smaller life, for lesser goals that may be more manageable. But that will not take the insane internal pressure off you. And furthermore, this choice does not come from your true motivation either. As long as you are in resistance to the Slave Driver or give in to the Slave Driver and compromise yourself, you get small and give away your true motivation.

But here’s the way most people handle having to do tasks they don’t want to do, or tasks that are routine, or even tasks that are interesting but simply have to be done. Drink coffee (the highly caffeinated kind, not the de-caffinated), take uppers, and eat a lot of chocolate. Crank up your nervous system so you can move at a faster pace. Suddenly, all those tasks seem doable because you have created artificial energy. Energy is what normally keys your body to let it know that you are highly motivated and “let’s do this thing!” So it’s a fake motivation.

I’ve talked with many people who claim they have no problem, no guilt, no fear, nothing. They’re motivated, gung ho, and fine with working so hard. No problem! But they are usually hooked onto coffee. What would happen to our economy if there was no coffee? If you need your coffee or strong tea to get going in the morning, but you want to let go of your Slave Driver, you have to avoid stimulants. Then the Slave Driver will appear and motivate you by guilt and fear alone.

You see, if you were in total alignment with your Divine Self, you would continually update your preferences, your desires, and your dreams. And much of those desires would be for intangible things, like love, freedom, beauty, empowered choices, flexibility, and creativity, not the tangible rewards of money and possessions. These, the Slave Driver doesn’t push you on. But nobody told you how to do this. Maybe you were brilliant and figured it out on your own.

But it’s too easy for most people to stay in the momentum of fulfilling duty and obligations, and of reacting to necessity rather than looking at and going for preferences.

Steps to Firing the Inner Slave Driver and Resetting Your Motivation

So, in order to create the Future you want to have, from THIS place and time, you will have to stop motivating yourself from a not-true place for you. You will have to discover, after all this time achieving or trying to achieve your total fulfillment, what you truly wish to do, and how to give yourself the grace to find that. You start by identifying the Slave Driver’s voice in your head and the Slave Driver motivational promptings in your emotions.

Yes, you fell for the Slave Driver’s tricks. Don’t kick and shame yourself. Forgive yourself. There’s nothing really missing in your life. Only the Slave Driver will try to convince you that you have to get that missing piece or whatever it is that’s going to make you whole and then you’ll be successful in the world. Can you see that? And only your Negative Ego will exhort you to gain success so that you’ll be able to show the rest of the world how to be spiritual and materially successful at the same time. Do you really and truly need to be the Grand Teacher for the world?

Even when you achieve something great, a part of your Dream, the Slave Driver remains relentlessly pushing you, because you still haven’t done enough. The Slave Driver is your ever-present Drill Sergeant. The Slave Driver never stops. It never retires on its own because it is responsible for forcing you to achieve enough. And you will never ever achieve enough. So it won’t get off your back no matter what level of accomplishment you have or however many dollars you acquire.

If you’re an older person, notice how the Slave Driver has continued. It fills you with fear, because the clock is ticking away! You have less and less time to achieve all these dreams before you get decrepit and pathetic. And you’re always behind. If you’re spiritual, the Slave Driver suggests that you might die before you complete your Mission! This last one got to me big time!

Can you FEEL the negative energy of what I just shared? Can you FEEL the tightness in your solar plexus/stomach area? Can you feel how small and powerless you’ve let the Slave Driver make you? You created the Slave Driver, and now it’s time to un-create it and get back in touch with your true motivation.

So to free yourself from the Slave Driver, you must take back your power from it, fire it, and start living a life free of all that stress and pressure. The main energetic reason that so many older adults develop high blood pressure is because of the pressure put them internally and continuously by the inner Slave Driver!

Choice Time

If you feel guilty or fearful, you will lose your power to the Slave Driver. So you have to make a choice. Do you want to continue all this insane self-driving with guilt, fear of shame, anger, or fear? Or do you want to live your life true to you? Can you love yourself enough to take time off and nurture yourself when you are NOT sick?

The thing is that in that quiet time of rest, you can tune into who you are and you allow the Divine to come into your life. You allow magic to come in. You allow freedom, love, and joy. You can receive good things in your life. You can have ease and effortless elegance. Life can just unfold in beautiful, beautiful ways. If you allow yourself to be without the guilt, the fear, the judgment of yourself, there will be no Slave Driver saying that you’re not doing it okay or that you’re behind. Imagine that!

I know that sounds all great. But in choosing to ditch the Slave Driver, know this. When you fire your Slave Driver, there’s going to be a tremendous disorientation in your life. It’ll be huge! This disorientation goes deep and completely through you. You will feel that your identity is lost. And your success track, the linear progression you are on towards your goals, will vanish.

You will enter the “Void,” a space of emptiness that can be scary. You’ve followed the Slave Driver for many years to avoid this space, but it is the very space from which you can build a new life. It’s a womb of the Divine, of your Divine nature. You may feel you are wandering around at first and this can be very uncomfortable. You’ll want to know what to do, but Doing is not the way here. Being is.

You will feel that your Dreams are gone, or at least removed to farther away. You will have a tendency to worry about survival. What if you don’t have enough motivation to continue your work and make your money? Or support your child or aging parent who needs you? Everything seems to come into question.

You need to have courage to fire your Slave Driver!

But there are major benefits to firing the Slave Driver. When you fire the Slave Driver with your conscious awareness, with choice, you become free of so much stress! You can allow yourself to be, even to not achieve a thing. You see, your Personal Spiritual Mission is not about doing stuff and achieving in the world. It’s about being true to you, knowing who you are, and loving and valuing yourself because you ARE, not valuing yourself only because you achieved anything. It’s about knowing the Divinity within you.

Your Destiny (and the Destiny of all Souls) is to have fun being yourself, creating your most wonderful life possible. That may not require big money at all, but a lifestyle that honors you and your interests and those you love. So once the Slave Driver is gone, you’ll have the freedom to discover what it is you really truly wish to be, to do, and to experience.

So before the firing, let’s look at a few secrets of the Slave Driver. The more you know, the more capable you will be to free yourself from its grip when it shows up in your psyche, and the more easily you will be able to shift into your beautiful New Life!

Getting into the Slave Driver’s Nitty Gritty

The Slave Driver is a specific installation to your motivational program. Your creativity and motivation comes from your second chakra and, as you probably know already, the second chakra is the sexual chakra. It has to do with creativity. It has also to do with your self-image as a man or woman. Throughout the world sexuality, self-image, and creativity (the second chakra), are probably the most abused and damaged aspects of you.

And what others think of you can stash in the second chakra and debilitate your self-esteem, reducing your self-image down to a pile of garbage. When you are shamed, when you feel like a failure, when you’re criticized, judged, humiliated, ridiculed, and embarrassed, it all goes to second chakra. It hides there. And you can get unknowingly stuck in the mess.

With a twisted and distorted and wounded second chakra, the Slave Driver comes in to whip that second chakra into shape for achievement. Then you feel that if only you could be successful at something, then you can redeem yourself for all your weaknesses or failures (and of course, the biggie, shame). You can reverse the shame somehow if only you could sustain your motivation well enough. As soon as you get to this position, the Slave Driver has seduced you into being its slave.

Retirement doesn’t end the Slave Driver, so don’t count on that! If and when you retire, the Slave Driver will push you all the harder. It’s well known that men who retire and don’t feel that they are important or matter anymore are at a very high risk of dying in the first two years of retirement. They no longer are capable of great achievement, of becoming the movers and shakers they wanted to be. Without the Slave Driver, there is nothing there. They feel that they’ve failed.

And with failure comes the punishment for failure – insignificance and shame. Life can become too empty and meaningless (remember, the Slave Driver gives meaning and validity to struggling and working hard). If these men (and some women) don’t find something exciting to do, and reset their motivation and thus their self-value, these men lose their whole sense of self. This is a direct result of keeping the Slave Driver on its Drill Sergeant-like task.

Women can suffer from this too, especially if there is no one around to take care of any longer, the children are gone, and she has nothing to replace all that service with. What will she do? Being alone actually works more easily for many women than men, but it also can explain why there are a lot of single older women with cats!

Identify the Inner Slave Driver in your Mind Talk

To fire the Inner Slave Driver, you must first be able to identify it in your mind talk. Everything I’ve said above this paragraph in this section of the article is intended for you to get the basic energetic or vibration of the Slave Driver – that push, that motivation by anxiety, guilt, and fear.

So make a note to yourself to “red flag” the next time you have the opportunity to do nothing and just relax – even if it’s just for a couple of hours. If you don’t continue to do your tasks, but just pause, what do you feel? What are you going to do during this time period?

Listen to your mind and your feelings. Do you think you have to do something productive? Is there something you haven’t done that you should do right now? The way I felt it was as if there were people out there waiting for me to do something for them, but I simply couldn’t remember who they were and what they were needing. That feeling. When I got to an empty space in my schedule, I would start to figure out what was the most important and necessary thing to do. I didn’t value doing nothing. So if I didn’t know right away what I wanted to do, I would start to feel a bit anxious. Will I make the best choice for this time slot? Is it okay to do nothing?

You’ll have your own version of this, but the key here is to FEEL how this mind talk is affecting you emotionally. Sense your stomach/solar plexus area. Is it tense? Tight? Slightly nauseous? Suddenly very hungry? (Eating always pushes the uncomfortable emotions registering in the stomach down to lower, manageable levels.)

Feel the guilt. Bad you. You are not being the good person you should be and be doing something socially productive. If guilt is part of your formula, feel it as deeply as you can for half a minute. Focus on guilt. Don’t go into self pity or let your mind rationalize stuff. Stay with the feeling and think as little as possible. Stay with guilt until it simply dissolves. It will, if you focus fully on it. There is a quiet that follows, but shift your attention now to fear.

Focus on your fear. What are you afraid will happen if you are not productive? What could happen if you don’t get that thing done that your friend, family member, or co-worker is waiting on you to do. Will others be upset with you? Criticize you? What if you don’t work so hard? Will your boss fire you? Or will someone else usurp your position? If you don’t keep at your work, will you fail to meet the mortgage payment? Get sued? I would also get this bizarre fear that if I don’t apply myself, that something terrible would happen, and then I would feel that my lackfulness was to blame for whatever it would be. No real connection between the fear and the result, but my mind talk made this connection anyway.

So feel the fear. Focus on it. Keep your attention on it for half a minute at least. See scary scenarios if you need to keep it fresh and intense. Don’t let yourself go into self-pity, excuses, or make rationales. No thinking, just feeling. Face your fear. In a little while, it too will dissolve.

If anger is a big motivator for you, then feel that and focus on that the same way as the others. But most often, just feeling guilt and fear thoroughly will put you into a very quiet, empty space. Before your mind chatter reasserts itself, feel the emptiness. This is the Void, the Womb of your New Life. Out of this void emerges creative, imaginative ideas. But before you look for or listen for your creativity, just be with this space.

When I did this the first time, it was actually scary to experience the void. At first, I wanted to run away, anxious and unsettled, squirmy and suddenly very uncomfortable. But I stayed and felt it. Then a magical thing happened. I felt lifted into a very light and free place, a very exciting and joyous inner space filled with possibilities and potentials.

This could be your experience too, or something like it. Now plan to do this technique again whenever you are trying to motivate yourself to do something you don’t want to do. If you do this a few times, you will start moving into a new kind of gentle and happy inner reality. And remember. The inner reality happens before the outer reality responds and shows up differently. There’s a time gap between the inner and the outer that’s part of living in 3D under time and space (4D).

Now, actively imagine your version of your Inner Slave Driver. Personify it. Mine was a patriarchal guy in a suit. This fit me well, because I recognized that the Calvinist work ethic Slave Driver was definitely a part of the Masculine Hierarchy of Value and Power (formulated from the military and adopted by corporations everywhere).

But maybe your Slave Driver looks like a pirate, or even your mother or father. Often, one of your parents acted like a Slave Driver to you and drove you, so this might be appropriate for you. Whatever you come up with, it will work. There is no right or wrong personification. You just want this image to hold a sense of meaning to it, that this image represents all that negative, pressure-filled, guilt-ridden, and fear-mongering motivation you’ve had to endure for years.

Now remember. YOU gave your power away to your Slave Driver, just like you did to your Negative Ego. So take it back. Say “power, return to me!” Go grab it from the Slave Driver and pull to yourself something that symbolizes your power. It can have what looks like strength, even beauty. It could be a big crystal or rock. It could be a piece of paper that a contract is written upon. However you see it, take back this symbol of your power and imagine and feel that you now have the power back in you!

Stand tall. Like Donald Trump in his show “The Apprentice,” you may want to say “you’re fired!” Or, “this is it. Your services are no longer needed.” I suggest that you thank your Slave Driver because it did what you wanted it to do, and did it well. And then, give your Slave Driver a much-needed retirement. I sent mine to a private Caribbean Island in a big mansion with servants and a luxurious relaxing lifestyle. Send yours somewhere that is an ideal retirement place. Don’t punish your Slave Driver. As I said, it was doing the job you assigned it.

You may need to fire the Slave Driver multiple times and send it packing to its retirement place. Don’t see the need to do this as a failure in any way. You will have to shift your motivational self now, and that’s a big task. If you fall back into old motivational patterns, your Slave Driver will show up, “you called?”

Resetting Your Motivation

You need this disorientation period that starts now, so that you can find who you are. You need to reorient yourself and begin again. From the person that you are now, you can re-dream. I would suggest that you look at all your Adolescent and Young Adult fantasies and dreams, even if some of them appear to still have meaning and purpose for you. Look at Child Dreams too – the ones for the perfect family and living situation. You may still be motivating yourself from your inner parents, or as a rebel. To find your true motivation, you need to step into your true Adult self. You need to release the motivations you had back in your youth. Let them go. Mourn your dreams. Let them die. The vibration of them do not reflect who you are now. (Note; Some dreams will actually be current and useful still, even those that started years ago. So in order to determine which dreams you wish to keep, I suggest doing this motivational rese first. You’ll see that the more current form of the dreams will be much more meaningful after the reset. )

Let yourself be dreamless for a short while. Give yourself a few days off, and I mean REALLY off. If you can’t do that, then take at least one day. Everyone should be able to manage one day. During this day or ideally three days in a row, pay attention to your motivation. Don’t get up until your body gets up. If you lie there awake, at some point, your body will get up, almost as if the body and your mind are not communicating! This is your body’s motivation working for you. I always find this amazing.

Now if you have to get up only to pee, then get up and go pee and then get back in bed. Don’t get up if you are thinking of all the duties and productive activities you need to so in the day. Notice how you are motivating yourself, how you are forcing yourself, how your are bullying yourself to do those things.

If your body doesn’t get you up, stay in bed and remember; don’t think of what you have to do during the day. Hopefully, you’ve pre-prepared your meals or run all the errands you needed to do yesterday, so you can get up whenever you want to.

Start thinking about stuff you have wanted to do in the past, or those things that you have told yourself, “someday, I’ll have the time to do this.” Do you still find them alluring, calling you? Let your mind drift until it finds something you actually want to do now. As soon as you think of something you REALLY want to do, your body will energize. You’ll suddenly feel infused with energy to get up and do it. This is your truer motivation! That’s when your body will simply roll over and get up with no urging from you.

And the first thing you need to do after perhaps a trip to the bathroom and dressing yourself, is to do that thing that motivated you to get up. Don’t get distracted by your cell phone or computer or TV or some routine you always have to do. Go for the motivation. Prioritize it! If you don’t, if your mind says “do this other task first,” then the Slave Driver is back on your case. You will feel a strong pull to do what your Slave Driver has set out for you. But please, resist!

During your day, your motivation may seem absent. But your body has some motivation for you. It’ll tell you that it wants to pee, eat, take a walk, lie down, draw, dance, stretch, or anything else. Don’t object or dominate your body with your mind. Let go and follow your body. (Now this doesn’t apply to pigging out on junk food or another emotional addiction.) Remember, you can NOT motivate yourself by guilt, fear, necessity, or another other urgent demand on your reset day(s).

You see, at first, if you start motivating just for yourself, you’re like a baby. You haven’t motivated yourself before, or at least in a long time. You’ll be motivated for five minutes and then you will lose your motivation. If you are drawing a picture, for example, the Slave Driver will come in and say, “Five minutes is not enough to put into your work. Don’t be lazy. You know you’re never going to get anything done if you just do five minutes. Come on. You need to follow through, and make the picture look good. You need to finish it. Don’t stop in the middle.” You feel guilty. “I really should. I guess I should really follow through. I shouldn’t be a quitter. It won’t take long. I’ll go just a little while longer.” The Slave Driver has got you!

Then if a space of time comes along and you don’t have any motivation, your mind will tell you what you should be doing, or something you chose to do for someone else that you could do today rather than wait until tomorrow. Or you will think to fill up this time, you’re going to go turn on the TV and flip. Any escapist activity is resistance to the Slave Driver, and it’s not a good thing to do. You don’t gain your own true motivation by escaping. Anything you do for the sake of this reset must be something you actually WANT to do and that your body feels that little burst of energetic enthusiasm for.

So when you have nothing at all you want to do, and your mind talk tries to get you to fill the time period with the usual stuff, tasks, or little escapist activities (mine was playing FreeCells on my computer), you need to stop it all. Shut up the Slave Driver and mind talk, “Didn’t I fire you? Go back to your retirement haven!” Then find a comfortable place to sit and relax. Don’t lie down. You may fall asleep and that doesn’t work for this reset. You need to do this consciously.

Now just sit there, conscious, aware of your body, receiving input to your senses. Don’t get involved with your pets either. Calm them but don’t play with them yet, unless you know FOR SURE that this is not escapist and your body is all excited and energized. Sit quietly. If you’re by a window, look out the window. If not, just look around at your space. This is your space, your support place, your retreat. Be grateful for it. And then do nothing.

Clear your mind. Decrease the tension in your body. Do nothing. Nothing. Feel the void, the emptiness. Any mind talk that comes up, just let it go on by. Don’t be attached to the thoughts. Don’t think of what you’ll do tomorrow or what happened yesterday. Don’t process unfinished business with others. Stay quiet. Feel. If you start feeling anxious, then say “no” to your Slave Driver and send it on its way. Be. Don’t try to concentrate on a meditative activity or do visualizations. Just Be.

At some point, and it varies for everyone, this pseudo-meditation will begin to bring you inspiration, creativity, and yes, motivation bubbling up from your inner depths. If it doesn’t, don’t feel you did anything wrong. Sometimes it takes a few times before your subconscious and unconscious minds see that you are serious in becoming whole and accessing them. And remember to stay present. Don’t drift off. You want to be aware of your body when or if it gets motivated for something.

When do you get up and do something from this non-state? When you feel some motivation, an infusion of energy just like you do in getting up out of bed. Eventually, you’ll feel some. It may be as simple as fixing some food. But it could also be some stretching. Or you may have some great ideas that have come to you and you want to scribble them down on a pad.

Basically do this all day. Your motivation of this kind is new, and you you’ll need to nurture your baby motivation. It will say, “I would like to sit at the computer and write an email (or I’d like to send my friend a text.)” Okay. You’re half way through the letter when you think, “I don’t feel like writing this email, or I don’t feel like getting involved in a texting conversation – it’s escapist for me.”

Give yourself permission to stop right there. Save it. Maybe sometime later you’ll get to it. You’re going to have to be very, very gentle on yourself. Because if you don’t, if you think that, “Oh, just doing this, this makes me a dabbler. This is not okay.” You’re judging yourself. You’re inviting the Slave Driver in.

Now your true motivation does not have a loud voice like the Slave Driver’s. It’s not backed up by the collective/consensus reality and all that cultural force of authority. It’s a tiny little voice, and you have to learn how to hear it and prioritize it. Once you do, it will become louder and more real to you. In time, you’ll recognize it also by how your stomach area feels. Most people have discounted this small voice within them for years or decades in order to fit in/belong, to please others, to build a stronger ego façade, or to make someone else feel okay.

Now once your reset day(s) end, the question comes up. “How do I do all those necessities, like fixing food, buying supplies, doing errands, paying the rent/mortgage, marketing myself, and balancing the checkbook, which is all motivated by necessity?” When you listen to your small inner voice, you are loving yourself, and you are showing by putting your attention on it and responding to it that you value yourself. When you love and value you, you can then make a conscious empowered choice to do all the necessities with gratitude, knowing that they support you.

In other words, you can reframe your attitude about your necessities of life rather than fretting and being frustrated and annoyed over having to do those things. That bad attitude comes from entitled egos belonging to those who feel that they never get to follow their true motivation and want to escape their Slave Drivers. That’s your inner adolescent, not your adult self.

This reset process needs to be done enough so that you can actually tell what your motivation is about; whether you are in sync with your positive motivation or not. And throughout this process, your self-image will lift its resonance and you will be able to choose a life that is right for you. You will be living YOUR life, not a life that others and the collective have chosen for you.

Going along with this motivational reset, I urge you to re-Dream your Future. What are you Dreams and Visions now? Where are you going? If you let your inner authority figures tell you what you should or could do, thank them, but pay attention to what your heart says, what your Soul is saying, and where your passionate motivation lies. That small voice is a voice of your Soul, and is possibly the most important voice for you to hear! Don’t go for the money, achievements, and fame. Go for the love and passion of being yourself, doing that which is fun and authentic for you to do. Remember that modern day adage? Do what you love and the money will follow. It does!

Now I’m not telling you that this can all be accomplished in a few days or so. You have to learn how to stay on top of your motivational self, listening to your inner small voice. This takes practice. And it takes awareness of your inner mind talk and the six selves who are continually sending you messages from their points of view.

In your day to day life, you will get plenty of opportunities to identify those times that you react and take action based on the Slave Driver’s push and at least knowing that it is false to your truth. Little by little, you will learn how to lovingly respond to your true self and enhance it. Then your Slave Driver will come back in a new incarnation; your Positive Ambition, your True Motivation. The small voice of your truth will become your new motivator from Soul and Spirit!

The reason I put so much into sharing this motivational reset with you is because, in order to step into your greatness, into your Destiny at this powerful opportunistic time, you cannot motivate yourself from a less authentic you any longer. You cannot become your Greater Self unless you come from your place of Truth. You cannot step into your New Life in the New World until you know this Divine part of yourself.

I think that firing my inner Slave Driver has been one of the single most important personal development strategies I have ever taken. When I and my husband Daniel both shifted into our true motivation, we no longer argued and fought. Our relationship become soft, loving, and sublime. We stopped struggling with scarcity issues. I was able to begin a journey of healing my body, damaged by internalizing conflicts and taking on more emotional loads (of others) than I could handle.

In short, we both became happy and free. I can’t begin to tell you how marvelous and amazing it is to be totally at peace and free within. All I can do is suggest that you fire your Inner Slave Driver, listen to your Six Selves and stay in your enlightened, spiritual adult self. It’s your Destiny!

Blessings,
Ginger

This article written by
Ginger Metraux, Ph.D.
"The Mystic Professor"