Positively You!  Tools to End Self-Sabotage, by Kathleen Joy

Ancient truths, guided meditations and common sense combine to bring gentle, daily, guided action to fine-tune spiritual/mental issues through the examination of our beliefs.  Paradoxical tools are offered for creating a life of joy, peace and fullness.

 

Use this sourcebook by reading from beginning to end, or randomly select one of the 64 meditations for the day.  Each mediation is correlated to the ancient I Ching, and Aura Soma healing color therapeutics.  Aura Soma is intertwined as well with the Tarot and the ancient Kabbalah.

 

Excerpts from Positively You!

“We are what we think.  All that we are arises with our thoughts.  With our thoughts we make the world.” 

The Buddha           

 

Introduction

 

The mind and the body are not separate.  They are one.  When our mind works in harmony with our physical body and our spirit, we blossom into our full experience of being. 

 

Many of us have been taught to experience and believe that the mind has functions independent from the body.  So too, in matters of spirit, many of us have been taught that we are separate from those around us, from our environment.  In fact, our mind/body and spirit are one dynamic system that exists within the whole larger dynamic system.  We are an integral aspect of the great All.  Our beliefs create our experience of separateness. 

 

The concept for this book is the result of the applications of the paradigms that I have used in my psychotherapeutic work.  It is intended to be a tool to assist the reader to fine-tune his/her spiritual/mental issues through the examination of beliefs.  The perceptions that are assembled in this book are presented to open the mind through paradox to dispel our dualistic nature and facilitate our movement towards wholeness.

 

My work as a psychotherapist made a major paradigm shift in the early 1980’s as I began to explore the concepts of individuation and interdependence.  I was driven by my own desire to make sense out of my life and my world and to more fully express my unique being.  I was strongly drawn to the beautiful experiences I had with clients when we related to each other from our places of wholeness.  The synergy of working together – the sum of the parts being greater than the whole, became a driving force in my work.  I realized that as individuals come into greater wholeness, so can organizations, cultures and nations.

 

I have learned that psychotherapy is a useful tool for integration of past traumatic experiences, for releasing old, counter-productive belief systems, for revolutionizing our thoughts from negative to positive and more. Not only is our body necessary in the healing and the individuation process, spirit is the integrating force in actualizing our individual expression of our being in the totality in which we exist.  Work with the mind, body and spirit facilitates a synergistic and powerful integrative process.

 

Through the integrative process of living and being fully, we not only find personal happiness, we become enabled to contribute fully to our family and local and world community.

 

The Psychodynamic System of the Self

 

Self-actualization and individuation are psychological constructs that provide a helpful paradigm to explain and facilitate the mind/body integration process.  

          

The individual can be viewed from the dynamic paradigm described by Carl Jung.[1][2]  He viewed the psyche as a dynamic system that is driven toward wholeness and individuation.  He speaks of the persona, the shadow and the self/nonself.  When viewed as two intersecting orbs, the persona is that aspect of the self that is our construct of whom we present our self to be.  The persona contains our belief systems, images and desires.  We display the projected image for others, but most importantly, for our self.  It is the expression of what we think we want and should be. 

 

 

The shadow, is that area that is the opposite, hidden, dualistic counterpart of our projected persona.  Being dualistic by nature, as we project images of who we want to be, we submerge fears of our opposing natures, that which we fear we might be or become. The area where these two orbs intersect is the self.  The self is that which has integrated our dualistic aspects into an acceptance and knowing of our true nature.

                                                                       

The psyche is a dynamic force in which the self pushes to become more fully realized.  Likewise, the persona and shadow also “push” against our self-actualization to maintain their prevailing illusions.  When life events trigger and challenge our illusions, a transformative function results that requires the system to either integrate an increasingly realistic and fuller sense of self, or go into overdrive to maintain our illusions through various defense mechanisms and diseases.  Physical and mental crises can be viewed as the transformative function in action to force us into the reality of realizing our self.