Being yourself: Reconnecting with Essence and freeing yourself from the inner critic

It must be understood that man consists of 2 parts: Essence and personality. Essence in man is what is his own, personality in man is what is not his own. „Not his own“ means what has come from outside, what he has learned, or reflects, all traces of exterior impressions left in the memory and in the sensations, all words and movements that have been learned, all feelings created by imitation – all this is „not his own“, all this is personality…….

G.I. Gurdjieff

When we were born, Essence was present in us, but later we lost contact with Essence, because our environment did not see Essence in us and mirror it back to us. Instead of that we received rules, beliefs about how we should and should not be, what we should and should not do. We needed the parents. And we started to develop our personality, our ego, in the interaction with the parents. And we started to believe that this is who we are. This set of rules and beliefs which came from outside, mostly the parents first, we internalised and carry with us. This we call the superego, the inner critic. Its function is survival, and it operates based on the messages which came from parents, and people before. Rules and beliefs about the world have replaced contact with essence. This loss of essence is felt as an inner emptiness, like inner holes, and shapes our perception deeply. We try to fill these holes with all kinds of things from the outside: attention from partners, success in work, holidays, entertainment, sex, money, food etc. But these substitutes cannot fill this inner emptiness, which we feel as loneliness, pain, impotency or as a meaningless struggle for survival, separated from the whole.

Essence is our true, natural being. Like a rainbow, or like a diamond, essence has many different aspects, colors and facets. Some of the major ones are strength, love, trust, peace, compassion, joy, objective presence and clarity. We all were born with these essential qualities, and they are still there deep down in us, even though we usually don´t notice or feel them anymore, or even reject them.

A lot of energy goes into the inner struggle with the inner critic. This group shows you, how your superego, your inner critic, poisons your life and attacks you, when you dare to move into a direction, which it perceives as dangerous for your old survival patterns. You get to see the inner critic clearly, and learn, how to deal with its attacks. This opens up the space, where freedom, trust and guidance become your way of living.

By deeply understanding our conditioning and our personality structures we will rediscover certain dimensions of being, with which we had lost contact in our early childhood. We approach psychological issues not as problems, but as doorways to our essence, for which we long so much. We rediscover the major essential aspects: strength, love, trust, peace, compassion, joy, objective presence and clarity. Special exercises for self-exploration, Meditations, and a deep understanding help you, to rediscover these lost qualities and accept them as yours.