Inclusion and diversity are powerful words that I have been coming across lately, both in my Core Energetics community and my Essential Experience (EE) community. For me, these words carry a lovely vibration. "Inclusion" feels warm and inviting. As I say it, I can feel the vibration in my heart and diaphragm and it feels grounding. "Diversity" is brimming with excitement and charge, very alive. But why do we even need these words? We need them because we have been consciously or unconsciously creating "exclusion" and have somehow kept things pretty "homegeneous". While the words, inclusion and diversity, are positive and expansive, I must admit there is some fear just under the surface. I think this fear is what needs exploration. Fear is negative and it needs to be clearly defined in order to be brought to light. Very often fear is born out of misconceptions. Sometimes fear is about expansion and letting go of previously accepted boundaries. Every time I expand my previously defined boundaries, I experience fear. It becomes problematic if I allow the fear to take me to contraction. For example, if I fear the expenses and maintenance of moving into a larger space, I can allow the fear to be there, pray for courage, and rise to meet the new expectations, anyway. Or I can allow the fear to rule me and chose to stay in the tight space. The pain in this is not so much about the tight space but about the unwillingness to risk. There is pain when we hold ourselves back. We may be conscious of it and find ways to justify it. More often, we will keep ourselves numb to it; protect ourselves from even knowing about it. Whatever we do to numb ourselves is simultaneously deadening our life force energy.
The work of Core Energetics is in part about examining our hidden (unconscious) negativity, releasing that energy and transforming it, on a very personal level. We look at the ways we block love and intimacy. We look at the ways we disempower or sabotage ourselves. In the looking, we often discover our woundedness and bring light and healing. We find our personal power and our will to love and be loved is strengthened. The process is enlivening and it takes courage.
The following quote comes from the Q&A section following the Pathwork Guide Lecture #25. The question asked about the spiritual significance of different races:
You may wonder why certain races do not suffer from being different from others. Then you might ask, "What can they learn from that?" Indeed, they, too, have something to learn. Perhaps they need to learn the responsibility that arises from being spared sufferings that other peoples may have. Besides, this angle is not the only one to be considered. A spirit can be born into a race or nation because spiritually, emotionally, character-wise and psychologically it belongs to this group and therefore has the best opportunity to unfold there. Differences will exist as long as disunity exists on earth and humanity has not learned to overcome it. As any difficulty or apparent disadvantage can be a cure, which it must be if the person is on the right path, advantage can be a cure, too. Through differences of race, religion, nationality, or various other categories, humanity can become stronger and advance faster in spiritual development precisely because frictions exist. Without friction, development can never proceed. It is only a question of how the difficulty is met, always; how is it met individually and collectively.
I am making a commitment to use the Core Energetics process to examine my fear around this issue of inclusion. I want to continue to expand toward unification within myself and with those in the world. At this time, I don’t feel I have a lot of answers but I am willing to be with the questions. What am I afraid of? What I am protecting? What don’t I want to see in myself? What don't I want to see in the other?
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