Negotiating The Inner Peace Treaty

INTRODUCTION You are about to undertake a wondrous journey. It is a journey of self-discovery that will change your life. It does not require a passport or an airline ticket. It only requires the courage and willingness to look inward and to engage yourself in all your amazing complexity. It is a fascinating, inspiring and occasionally surprising journey, for we are many faceted creatures. For some of you, this may be the first time that you have dared to explore your inner world. Others of you are seasoned travelers. All of you will find some new tools for navigating the psyche, and a means of “charting” your discoveries. You will discover new possibilities and unearth buried treasure. Finally, you will make peace with ALL of who you are. The book includes some theory, some stories, and lots of ways of exploring the mystery that is you. I have found the method to be complementary with a wide variety of therapy methods and spiritual perspectives. Chapter One will introduce you to the central metaphor of the book, the Inner Theatre of Our Lives. It will outline some basic ideas and describe the four-step process of working with your Inner Cast of Characters: Naming, Knowing, Negotiating and Integrating. Part One will introduce you to Patricia and Dominic and show how they used the process to resolve some difficult struggles. You will learn a technique for gathering Inner Characters who are in conflict around an Inner Round Table to negotiate creative solutions for life’s perplexing problems. Part Two talks about the places where our inner Negotiations get stuck. It will cover the unconscious Scripts we live, and introduce you to two important Inner Characters that have more influence on how we live than we generally realize, the Innocent and the Orphan. Part Two will also help you to identify and deal with your Not So Supporting Cast. These include the Inner Critic and the Voices of Pressure and Warning that undermine your peace and interfere with your capacity to move forward. Part Three is about Integrating what you need to become whole. In this section you will learn to use Shadow Work and Dream Work as tools for illumination, healing and transformation. You will learn how to access the deep resources of your Soul Print and develop potentials you never knew existed. The entire journey is ultimately about Individuation, a Jungian term that means living increasingly from your most essential Self, that which I call the Soul Print. When you make peace with ALL of who you are, and open yourself to the purposeful creativity that is ever seeking to express itself through you, your life will change in amazing ways. The most important outcome of this work is the development of a deepening sense of peace and trust in the unfolding process of life, the establishment of a quiet center that will hold. From this Calm Core, you can live confidently and consciously, even as you weather the storms of living. Making peace is no easy task, but it becomes more crucial to our world every day. It begins with each of us doing our own inner work. This book will give you some good tools for doing that. Here is a list of outcomes that others have experienced as they have Negotiated their own Inner Peace Treaties. Understand yourself better Make peace with yourself and your past Transcend your self-limiting scripts and develop new potentials Heal old emotional wounds and reduce your reactivity Improve your relationships Make better life choices and become more confident Become more discerning and less judgmental Develop your creativity Experience a greater sense of personal empowerment Learn to use Dream Work as a tool for personal transformation Transform your relationship with your dark side through Shadow Work Discover the meaning and purpose of your life It is my hope that as you engage this process you can increasingly claim these outcomes. As you clear the path to your core essence, your Soul Print, you can bring your gifts to the world. Chapter 1 THE THEATRE OF OUR LIVES “All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players. They have their exits and their entrances and one man, in his time, plays many parts” Shakespeare Human beings are not simple creatures. Shakespeare said that we play many parts during our time on earth. Underneath the surface of our lives, forces compel us to play particular roles. We live out underlying scripts, but sometimes we mystify ourselves by behaving in ways that are “out of character”. Inner Peace Treaty work is about exploring these hidden forces, and learning to direct them in creative ways so that we can fulfill our greatest potential. I have found the metaphors of the theatre useful in describing the workings of people’s inner lives. If we view our impulses, thoughts, moods, reactions and behavior patterns, as if they were coming from an Inner Cast of Characters, this framework opens up a whole set of possibilities. If we name our Inner Characters, we can dialogue with them, and begin to recognize when they are active on the stage of our lives. How do they operate, to influence us for good or ill? We can learn their histories, who wrote their scripts, and what their needs and agendas are. Our Inner Characters play out the different roles and chapters of our lives. They enter and exit the stage and interact with each other. Each Inner Character generates a recognizable set of perspectives, energies and body sensations that influence us to act in particular ways. We are often unaware of these underlying dynamics, even though they drive us constantly and cause us to be at war with ourselves. With awareness, we can transform our internal conflict into an alliance for living an integrated, purpose filled life. A life that springs from our deepest essence is an adventure to be lived with passion and curiosity rather than a series of problems to be solved. The process outlined in this book is for healthy people who want to become more integrated and anchored in a centered awareness, directing the potential of the sub-personalities within them. Our feelings do not always agree with our thoughts. Our practical and spiritual lives often seem at odds with each other. Our impulses sometimes do not agree with our values. These inner arguments go on under the surface of our awareness, creating much unrest, which manifests itself as a low-grade anxiety or irritation. We find it difficult to settle into a sense of peaceful well-being. How we manage these internal tensions really determines our success and our happiness. Negotiating the Inner Peace Treaty is about learning to live with clarity and a core sense of peace amidst the diverse agendas and dynamic tensions of your Inner Self System. In gathering your differing aspects of self at an Inner Round Table, you will learn to resolve inner conflicts, negotiate dynamic alliances, and discover new possibilities for creative and purposeful living. In the following pages, we will explore the premise that we are multidimensional people. We are beings of tremendous complexity. Although we each have characteristics that we think of as “who we are”, there is a lot more going on under the surface. That is why we surprise ourselves and sometimes act in ways that we do not understand. This unexpected behavior can cause us regret and embarrassment. Sometimes we demonstrate acts of profound courage that seem to spring from some unknown place. The fact that we can act in ways beyond our current self-definition shows us that we can move beyond the limits of past history and live into new possibilities. As we begin to observe our inner dynamics, things that were once a mystery begin to make sense. When we begin to understand our Inner Cast of Characters, we can direct their energies. We can discover their scripts and even rewrite them, introducing new story lines an